Showing posts with label World. Show all posts

AIDS Poem

AIDS. AIDS. AIDS.

Who am I?

I'm the god and king of the earth.

People fear me though they don't see me physically

And talk about me in every gathering

I break apart families and cause injustices in communities

Leaving orphans and other vulnerable people

Because I am the boss.

I make the fat become slim

I fear no person, even rich, poor, strong, weak

Educated, uneducated, and people of high integrity obey me

Regardless of their position and religion

Even the devil fears me too because my weapon is strong.

I make people suffer in all sorts of lives.

I am tough but nobody can see me

and I make you more beautiful and handsome to spread me.

I feed on blood that fights against other diseases in the body.

Hahaaa! I only obey God.

If you keep far from me, I will keep a distance

But if you come in contact with me, I will deal with you and make you die.

Take care.

AIDS is real.

Well, on Thanksgiving Day, I thought I'd bring my gratitude to the whole wide world.  These are some issues around the world I want to thank God for today:

1. That it looks like American troops will finally be leaving Iraq...at least is appears that way.
2. For the lessons of reconciliation learned from Rwanda and South Africa.
3. For expressions of celebration in some of the poorest parts of the world.
4. The work on the United Methodist Church and others against malaria.
5. For the example of partnership shown by Bono and George W. Bush in Africa.
6. For the great big world of music out there.
7. The Arab Spring uprisings and what it might mean for freedom in those parts of the world.
8. For immigrants to the US and the culture they bring with them.
9. For my blogging friends from Canada and the work they are doing throughout their country.
10. For the amazing beauty of the earth which I get to see more and more of through the wonder of the internet.

May God bless you with a restless discomfort about easy answers, half-truths and superficial relationships, so that you may seek truth boldly and love deep within your heart.

May God bless you with holy anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that you may tirelessly work for justice, freedom, and peace among all people.

May God bless you with the gift of tears to shed with those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, or the loss of all that they cherish, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and transform their pain into joy.

May God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you really can make a difference in this world, so that you are able, with God's grace, to do what others claim cannot be done.

Via

Click on the Picture for the full image.  The image is from All that Is Interesting.

This Moves Me To Prayer!

It's all about changing -- transformation.

photo © 2009 Michael Accardi | more info (via: Wylio)


A relationship with God in Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit will change us. A church grounded in God will be transformed, and it will likely transform its surrounding culture. If living in Christ makes no difference, we of all people are most to be pitied.

Mark Galli -- Are We Transformed Yet

photo © 2008 woodley wonderworks | more info (via: Wylio)

"Dear Sir: Regarding your article 'What's Wrong with the World?' I am. Yours truly,"
— G.K. Chesterton

(HT to my friend, Rev. Tim Powers)

We're close to this many people in the world today.  7 BILLION.  National Geographic puts this number in perspective for us in this video. 



Amazing to then ponder what the church's responsibility is as the population grows and as more and more persons flock to cities around the world.  What does this mean for responsible use of resources?  What does it mean for adoption?  What does it mean for evangelism?

Image by Ushlambad via FlickrI sit here right now in a hospital room, worn out from a poor night of sleep as my son had a sleep study for some of his own problems.  I have Christmas bulletins in process.  There are calls to be made to make sure our various musicians know the hymns.  Later today I'll help deliver food baskets and presents to persons in our community who have some financial needs at this time of year.  I have sermons sketched out but not complete.  There are still gifts to buy and we worry that we don't have "enough" to fill the stockings of our kids with all the stuff they expect and all the stuff we want to give them.  And I'm sure, when I get up in front of the three different congregations in just a couple of nights, there will be a calm that will come over me and I'll proclaim, with joy, that Christ has come and our God is here and I'll pray that this will be a time of peace and love and joy in the lives of my hearers.  And I'll be right.

But, maybe there's more to this.  Maybe I'll run the risk of making this time just too "quaint" for what it really is.  Remember, if you will, that that lovely night that Christ was born was not lovely at all.  There was blood.  There was dirt and animals and screaming.  There was sweat.  There was a young couple with no place to stay and forced to have their baby among the livestock.  And this...THIS...is how our God comes to us.  Ironic, isn't it?  The King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, born in this way.

The only people that "got it," according to our Scriptures were the shepherds themselves.  Then, of course, the Magi who came from a long way away.  All the local religious folk didn't get it.  Makes me wonder about all of our good religious folk.  Why do we think we have a corner on the market of a Christmas understanding?  We're the first ones touting all that that sweet little baby in the manger means for the world and I wonder if we're not the very people that meaning, at least in Scripture, was hidden from.

So, what if we looked for something different?   What if, instead of a "nice" Christmas or a "Merry" one, we prayed for one that would turn our world upside down and turn our lives upside down.  Childbirth is not a "silent night" event.  What if the Christ that is born anew in our hearts comes not with silence but with an upheaval of the power structures, of the priorities of the day?  What if we were a different people on December 26th?  What if our world was a different world the day after?  Perhaps that is what it means when the God of the Universe moves into our neighborhood (John 1, Peterson's The Message).

This reflection...this prayer...this morning...has been fed by Mike Cooper's blog post over at The Gospel Coalition.  It's entiteld, "Christmas: The Hinge of History."  Here's a good chunk of it.  Please go read the full post for more:

Christmas is violent. It’s earth-shattering. The very order of things, the way the world worked, was being rewritten. In 1811, an earthquake in Missouri caused church bells to ring in Philadelphia and made the Mississipi River run backwards. When the Christ-child gasped his first breath, the hinge of history swung in a new direction, and hell shuddered. The assault on its gates had begun.

We celebrate Christmas right at the Winter Solstice—a bit of metaphorical genius, if you ask me (at least for those of us in the northern hemisphere). Right as the year reaches its coldest, just as the nights get their longest and darkest, we open our Bibles and read,

    The people walking in darkness
    have seen a great light;
    on those living in the land of deep darkness
    a light has dawned. (Isaiah 9:2)

Historically, the church observed Advent in the month before Christmas, a month of fasting and anticipation. I grew up in churches that skipped the fasts and dove straight into the fa-la-la’s. Discovering Advent was like discovering Good Friday. A deep well of meaning gave Christmas wider and broader dimensions. For all of Christmas’s cause for celebration, there’s an accompanying need to awaken our minds to the surrounding desperation. The world was, and remains in many ways, in darkness. Christmas is part of that glorious already/not-yet tension, where the finished song of redemption awaits the “Amen!” of restoration. We celebrate Christmas in a broken and fallen world, in broken and fallen churches full of broken and fallen people.

Whatever we do in these coming days, let’s not miss the truly epic story of irony and violence that is the “true meaning” of Christmas.

Image via Wikipedia“God is in the manger, wealth in poverty, light in darkness, succor in abandonment. No evil can befall us; whatever men may do to us, they cannot but serve the God who is secretly revealed as love and rules the world and our lives.”

photo © 2010 Luke Jones | more info (via: Wylio)
The Barna Group is out with some more research on Christianity and it's gonna be interesting.  Their work is usually a wake-up call to the church (whether or not the church wants to wake up) and this is no different.  Here are the six megathemes based on their work over the last 11 months.  I've followed each point with some commentary.

Image via Wikipedia"It's a small world...but I wouldn't want to paint it."

That's a quote from Steven Wright, the comedian who also gave us, "I spilled spot remover on my dog. Now he's gone."

But, he's right. It is a small world...and it's getting smaller and smaller and smaller as our electronic devices get us more information from all around the world, as, every day, we can find out how many persons died in Iraq and Afghanistan or what the stock market did, or which high school basketball player had the best play of the day. It's not that our lives are instantly made better by this information, but it does make the world smaller. We can look into the joys and burdens around the world in record time, celebrating as persons rise up against oppressive governments (Iran) and responding with money after disaster (Haiti).

Yet, every so often the world surprises us on a very persona level. That's what happened to me yesterday.

But it started a couple of days ago...Monday.

Monday, October 4th was my childhood friend's birthday. I had not been in touch with Dave _____ for 27 years. He was a good friend of mine growing up in New York. We played baseball in his backyard with balls hit over his house being homeruns and balls that broke windows being immediate outs. We were at each others' birthday parties and slept over at each others' homes. I remember parties held in his basement and dreams of forming a rock band together. We were very good friends.

But then I moved. My dad was transferred to Indiana. And, in the days before facebook...and even before e-mail...I just lost contact with the guy.

However, every October 4th I'd remember that it was his birthday and recall some of the great memories I had of our time growing up together.

But, this year, I didn't just remember him...I was determined to see how he was doing and talk to him. So, I contacted some other friends on Facebook and one of them found an address and a phone number for his parents and I called his parent and left a message and the next day Dave called me and left a message and then yesterday we talked on the phone and followed up with each other by asking the questions, "So what have you done with your life?" and "What's happened over the last 25 years or so?"

And it was great to follow-up.

But, that's not what makes this a post about the small-ness of our world. Though conversation, I found out that Dave went to college. His college roommate married a woman by the name of Joanna ________. Joanna was my "girlfriend" when I was five years old. We lived across from each other and our parents are still in contact. So, how did that connection get made? It's a small world.

But, there's more. Dave's father just recently retired from a job at a college in New York. I have friends up here in Alaska who just left that college and came up here on their Alaskan adventure. Did they know Dave's father? Yes they did. In fact Dave's father had been a mentor for one of their friends. T

That's an interesting connection. It's a small world.

Now, these are just the latest of "small world" incidents that have come to me. In my family, we famously talk of a childhood trip to a National Park out west where, we sat down for lunch one day and realized that the person at the next table was our pediatrician from back in New York. And, I also love telling the story of riding up an elevator to a control tower display at an aviation museum in Virginia and seeing, on the elevator, a kid who had come to some of my Girdwood, Alaska youth group events -- 5000 miles away.

So, what is God trying to tell us through these "small world" events? Perhaps he's just trying to remind us that it is a small world and that the connections that run between us are many and varied and, when something good or bad happens around the world we aren't as distant from it as we might first be lead to believe. This world-wide community we have is much more of a community than we might first be lead to believe.
It's a small world.

Image via Wikipedia
If we could reduce the world's population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all existing human ratios remaining the same, the demographics would look something like this:

• The village would have 60 Asians, 14 Africans, 12 Europeans, 8 Latin Americans, 5 from the USA and Canada, and 1 from the South Pacific
• 51 would be male, 49 would be female
• 82 would be non-white; 18 white
• 67 would be non-Christian; 33 would be Christian
• 80 would live in substandard housing
• 67 would be unable to read
• 50 would be malnourished and 1 dying of starvation
• 33 would be without access to a safe water supply
• 39 would lack access to improved sanitation
• 24 would not have any electricity (And of the 76 that do have electricity, most would only use it for light at night.)
• 7 people would have access to the Internet
• 1 would have a college education
• 1 would have HIV
• 2 would be near birth; 1 near death
• 5 would control 32% of the entire world's wealth; all 5 would be US citizens
• 33 would be receiving --and attempting to live on-- only 3% of the income of "the village"

Stunning/haunting lyrics below from the Derek Webb Website.

people love you the most for the things you hate
and hate you for loving the things that you cannot keep straight
people judge you on a curve
and tell you you’re getting what you deserve
this too shall be made right

children cannot learn when children cannot eat
stack them like lumber when children cannot sleep
children dream of wishing wells
whose waters quench all the fires of Hell
this too shall be made right

the earth and the sky and the sea are all holding their breath
wars and abuses have nature groaning with death
we say we’re just trying to stay alive
but it looks so much more like a way to die
this too shall be made right

there’s a time for peace and there is a time for war
a time to forgive and a time to settle the score
a time for babies to lose their lives
a time for hunger and genocide
this too shall be made right

I don’t know the suffering of people outside my front door
I join the oppressors of those who i choose to ignore
I’m trading comfort for human life
and that’s not just murder it’s suicide
this too shall be made right