Mick 6/9

Lessons in faith even before I go…

This week at our SEA team meeting we watched a 10-minute video of a previous trip to SEA that members of our team took in 2005.

I was mesmerized.

I can't wait to see these people. Not in some pedantic "I'm American and you're not" kind of way, but truly to meet members of my family that I have never met.

There was footage of kids in the refugee camps singing songs and playing games and sharing in a joy that I take for granted here. It's easy to have joy in the states…we have little to no conflict. It's easy to go and play games or to sing songs about God, our churches aren't going anywhere any time soon.

But it's also easier to take these things for granted. If I were a Christian in Burma, for example, I may be singing praises and learning lessons one day and the next day, my church could be gone, or my pastor/leader could be arrested and taken away, or my parents could be killed in wartime violence.

How much I take for granted the life I live and the privileges I enjoy. Sure I've heard this message before and it has usually provoked guilt in me. But this time, it's real. It's no the guilt-manipulation of some far off deity telling me to clean my plate because there are children starving in China. I feel a sense of the preciousness of life in Christ: an appreciation for the mystery that God himself would make a way for me to partake in real moments with him and how tenuous that can become in a culture of affluence.

By our standards, I am not rich. I am lower middle-class at best. By SEA standards I own the cattle on a thousand hills. Yet, I am often dissatisfied. I lack. I want. I lust. I see my spiritual life like a consumer, looking for the next Costco-sized box of God that I can experience.

Oh, that God would change my heart and give me the courage to ask Him for the things I lack in my own spiritual poverty. So that I would not consume my faith or look for the next big thing in God, but that I would hunger and thirst for righteousness and therefore be satisfied.