Saturday, September 19, 2009

Drawn From Water

I saw this on a friend's blog and was moved to post this here and help spread the word. It is true that once you have seen you cannot turn aside without action. This is why we are where we are in the world, and it is why you are where you are in the world. There is so much need, but why else are we in this fleeting little life of ours than to trade it for all the riches of the heaven we can live right now. It is impossible to imagine the poverty of this life when seen through heaven's eyes, and equally impossible to imagine the richness of this life when lived through heaven's heart.

Drawn from Water from Drawn From Water on Vimeo.


Thursday, September 17, 2009

How Do You Rest??


This has been an ongoing thing for me, the lesson of rest, especially guilt-free rest. It probably has a cultural root in me, but some roots grow weeds and I don't want weeds. These weeds come from a heritage of hard core work ethic that grew up in fertile soil of personal insecurities. Really rich stuff, and like any other rich, dark soil it had plenty of shit in it too. The work ethic was fine, because the word says that if a man doesn't pull his share of the load then he shouldn't eat either. The school I am volunteering at right now teaches the students the value of work in the setting of a healthy community, so the whole work thing is not the issue. The issue is being ok with being at rest.
God actually had to command us to be at rest, because He knew that many of us would have a tendency to ignore the off switch. God then cursed people by saying that, because of their rebellion, they would never enter His rest. It is apparent to me that God takes this whole thing quite seriously. It is apparent to me that I struggle with the concept quite a bit. Even in this season my family and I are in right now, there is still work to be done each day, and tasks that we need to complete, but the overall emphasis is rest. I am discovering in this season how deep the roots of these weeds go and that they choke out so much of the joy of my relationship with my Father. They then spread from there to my wife and kids, as I externalize this struggle with them. It becomes increasingly evident that this is an area where I need to do some weeding, and that my Father's command is no light thing.
Until I actually begin work at the school this will be a struggle with the physical reality of rest, and after I begin work it will become a spiritual necessity. I am so glad that in all of this my Father is always good!

Sunday, September 13, 2009

Some LOL While You......You Know

I love all the cultural oddities that you come across when you leave your own cultural for a decidedly different one, it makes everyday life a lot less ordinary. You never know when you are going to run into a little tidbit that will make you smile, so it is like a bizarre kind of Easter egg hunt you don't even know your on. I guess it could be easy to use these times to criticize or point out all the differences, but I prefer to just sit back and enjoy it all. Actually this time I was standing and enjoying it, because I was in the public washrooms at the bottom of our hill. Back home these are usually fairly fetid little rooms with questionable sanitation sequestered in some corner of the park where the smell won't scare people off. Here on Cheung Chau, though, it is actually a relatively pleasant affair in a clean facility (which a lot of people back home may find hard to believe, of course after using a public toity in downtown Shanghai I would be thinking the same thing) The picture below may give some indication of why the place is looked after so well. (Just click the pic to enlarge it)