My Prayer Tonight

Thank you Jesus, for becoming my sin, giving up all You are, all You have, to save me from eternal damnation, separated from You, burning in eternal flames.  May I live my life as a living sacrifice to You, Lord.  May I be so used by You, that I would be called Your hands and feet.  May I love others, as You have loved me.  May I be the vessel You use to reach the lost, love the unloved, Mother to the orphans, giver to the needy, and friend to the friendless.  May I never forget to be humble.  May I remember that to die to myself, is to LIVE in You!  Thank you Jesus, though these mere words aren't enough, they are all I have to say, Thank you Jesus.

Proverbs 24:12

12 Don’t excuse yourself by saying, “Look, we didn’t know.” 
For God understands all hearts, and he sees you. 
He who guards your soul knows you knew. 
He will repay all people as their actions deserve

What will you do?  I read recently a cute little quip about the Bible, I giggled and then realized over and over again how true it was.  There is always truth to humor, have you ever noticed?  Anyway, the quote was on facebook and was posted by a dear home educating friend of mine.  You can find her blog here, although she doesn't have much time to blog any more.  She is quite busy being Jesus' hands and feet.  The quote...There's a reason the book after the four Gospels is called "Acts" not "Talks".  Let someone "see" your faith this week not just "hear" it...pretty heavy hitting words that made me think of James 2 vs 14-20

14 What good is it, dear brothers and sisters, if you say you have faith but don’t show it by your actions? Can that kind of faith save anyone? 15 Suppose you see a brother or sister who has no food or clothing, 16 and you say, “Good-bye and have a good day; stay warm and eat well”—but then you don’t give that person any food or clothing. What good does that do?

17 So you see, faith by itself isn’t enough. Unless it produces good deeds, it is dead and useless.

18 Now someone may argue, “Some people have faith; others have good deeds.” But I say, “How can you show me your faith if you don’t have good deeds? I will show you my faith by my good deeds.”

19 You say you have faith, for you believe that there is one God. Good for you! Even the demons believe this, and they tremble in terror. 20 How foolish! Can’t you see that faith without good deeds is useless?

Thank you Lord for reminding me yet again what Your word has to say about what we should do...

The Least of These...Liliana

Oh dear friends.  There is a time in life when you become broken for another.  Today, I am broken.  I cry out!  Lord, Lord help us!  Help us help her!  Oh how Your heart must be shattered, I cannot love like you and my heart is shattered!  I ask you, please to pray for this little girl, to do what you can for her.  Spread the word, give $10.  I am thanking God Liliana has a promised family, a family who is committed to bringing this sweet girl home.  What a gift she will be to their family!  Oh Lord, please bring the funds to her new parents, the parents You have chosen to care for sweet Liliana.  A wonderful blogger, Adeye, at No Greater Joy Mom is having a fundraiser so that the parents of Liliana may bring her home without the concern of financial issues.  Money gets in the way so often, Father, I pray You will bring the funds for her parents!

These pictures aren't for the faint of heart, but they are reality...

This was taken 2 years ago, when Liliana was only 9 years old.  As difficult as this is, it gets worse as it so often happens in an orphanage when a sweet one has down syndrome...

Liliana at 11 years old...weighing only 10 pounds...

Her wrist is three inches around.  Her upper arm is 3 inches around.  Her foot is only 4 inches long.  Her leg is 13 inches long from hip to heel. 

Her head is 16 inches in circumference....

She is literally starving to death.  They have left her in a bed, without love, without hugs, without kisses, without birthday parties, without Christmas.  Thank you Jesus for being with her, for holding her, for loving her, for breaking our hearts for her, for raising up a family committed to rescuing her!

Think of your 11 year old child, 11 year old American child who is loved, and imagine had they been born somewhere else.  What would have happened to them?  What would you want someone to do to rescue them?

Head on over to No Greater Joy Mom's blog and check out the giveaway that she is putting together.  What can you do for her?  What will you do to help?

Re-focused

Sometimes in life, you start to think about how this affects me, or how that wasn't what I wanted.  You start to think about all the "bad" things that has happened in the last few days or months.  You start to focus on how much of life is hard at this time.  How overwhelming the work is.  How alone you feel.  How much money you don't have.  How tired you are.  How much time you have "lost" due to this or that. And you lose focus on Jesus.  See, our eyes are amazingly single sighted.  We can only focus on one thing at a time.  If we choose to focus on Jesus, we forget ourselves, yet if we focus on ourselves, we lose sight of Jesus. 

I have been struggling a bit this weekend.  I have started to focus too much on the process, and haven't been focusing on Jesus.  I have been caught up in hearing what others have to say about our choice to follow Jesus.  See, not everyone who thinks they have a say in your life actually gets the memo from Jesus, that yes He is the one who said "GO!".  I have been hearing words that aren't the Word, ya know what I mean?  So I have sat here this weekend feeling down.  In need of a re-focus.  Then I opened my email and found a blog update from one of my favorite bloggers.  I was amused when I saw the title "When I Needed Perspective".  God always makes me giggle when He gets my attention in such an obvious way.  No Greater Joy Mom, Adeye, shared a very poignant letter from Richard Stearns, the president of World Vision.  I will share here also, so that you may giggle by His obvious wake up call :).  While your at it, why don't you click on the links above to see Adeye's original post, and check out who Richard Stearns really is, then head on over to the World vision link and donate to the people in Africa who are starving to death from this drought and famine. 


"For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink ..." --Matthew 25:35-36

Jesus' words are a powerful and inspiring reminder as I sit in my office browsing on news websites the stories and images of the staggering tragedy unfolding in the Horn of Africa.

Nearly 10 million people are "critically short of food," according to the United Nations, due to what UN officials say is the region's worst drought since I was born 60 years ago. Those 10 million people live in Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Djibouti and war-ravaged Somalia.

For some, the stories and images will be reminders of the Ethiopian famine. Twenty-five years ago, the images of bloated, dying children, images unlike any others seen before by millions of Americans, prompted a massive outpouring of donations and offers to help. That outpouring culminated in the "Live Aid," concerts in Philadelphia and London, the latter of which brought a group I had never heard of before to the world's attention -- U2.

For others, the name "Somalia" brings back the events of 1991-1994 when hundreds of thousands of Somalis were starving, prompting a U.S.-led peacekeeping force to intervene. That effort led to a military operation against Somali warlords and, regrettably, the deaths of 42 American soldiers.

I am reminded of two things.

First, the faces, the voices and the stories of people I've met in Kenya, Ethiopia and Uganda. Kenya was the first nation I visited after joining World Vision in 1998, and where I learned one of the most important lessons of my life: Poverty is not an image, or a statistic; poverty has a face, a name and a story.

Second, I am reminded of the powerful and provocative quote from Josef Stalin: "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic."

I fear that for many Americans -- Christians and people of other faiths or no faith -- will devote little time or attention, let alone resources, to the people suffering in the Horn of Africa. Rather they are preoccupied with "First World problems":

~~  How fluctuations in the stock market are affecting my 401(k) investments;
~~  Where to go on my next vacation;
~~  Whether to buy "name brand" or "store brand" items in the supermarket;
~~  Which diet and workout regimen will enable me to lose 10 pounds in a month; or
~~  The struggle over my next computer -- a notebook, a laptop, or the new iPad2?

Or worse, they are obsessed with finding out where Casey Anthony might be living, now that she's been released from jail after being acquitted of charges that she murdered her daughter, Caylee. Thousands of Americans followed Ms. Anthony's trial closely, and expressed outrage when she was found not guilty. They wanted justice for Caylee's death. Where's their outrage or sense of justice for the millions of children at-risk of dying in the Horn of Africa? Their lack of attention proves the late Soviet premier's admonition.

Many "First World" Americans have never met a person with "Third World problems":

~~  Whose income is $2 a day and who has never heard of a 401 (K);
~~  Whose only travel plans are traipsing by foot from Somalia into Kenya to a refugee camp;
~~  Whose primary source of drinking water is infested with animal feces, and has never been inside a supermarket;
~~  Who lost 10 pounds in the last week because of too little or even no food, and who has no use for a health club membership; or
~~  Who has no access to electricity, and does not need -- and maybe has not ever seen -- a computer.

I have the privilege of knowing people facing both First World and Third World problems. It is a privilege because, I believe, Jesus would consider it a privilege. He met with, ate meals alongside and learned from those His society considered its lowest and its outcasts -- prostitutes, tax-collectors, the poor and victims of injustice.

He would have been honored to meet and serve people like Hawo, a woman believed to be about 75-years-old who lives in Kalabeyr, a remote town in northern Somalia. Thanks to my World Vision colleagues working in the region, I know more about Hawo, than I ever will know -- or even want to know -- about Casey Anthony.

After the drought killed the more than 500 goats and sheep Hawo and her eight children lived on, they were forced to abandon their pastoral way of life and move to Kalabeyr. The nine of them live in a makeshift tukul, a small room within the compound of one of the town residents.

It is Hawo whom Mark Bowden, United Nations Humanitarian Coordinator for Somalia, might have been thinking of when he said recently: "Resources are woefully inadequate. We have an appeal that is at the moment only 40 per cent met. ... (W)e find ourselves as the humanitarian community in a position that we want and are able to do more, but just don't have the resources with which to do it."

Jesus' words about hunger and thirst, as quoted in Matthew, led me a few years ago to create an NIT version (New Irreverent Translation), one that Americans obsessed with "First World problems" might relate to:

"For I was hungry, while you had all you needed. I was thirsty, but you drank bottled water."

We did not create the desperate conditions of drought and famine threatening the lives of 10 million people in the Horn of Africa. But, as Christians, it is our responsibility to do something about it. It is our moral duty to help our neighbors in need -- here in the U.S. and elsewhere, and God commands us to help those we have the means to help. We cannot look at their situation -- on television, in newspapers or magazines, or on the Internet -- shrug our shoulders, and say, "Not my problem."   

Written by Richard Stearns.

~~~~~~~~~~

Thank you Richard Stearns, for writing this letter, for opening our eyes yet again.

Thank you, Adeye, for sharing this with us, for being so transparent in your walk with Christ.

Thank You, Jesus, for everything...

Back and Forth

My darling husband, Roland and I were talking today.  We were discussing countries.  This seems to be a common discussion for us lately.  Roland absolutely has not wanted to choose a country.  He feels that God has placed our children in another country and that we should not limit God by choosing, and what if we made the wrong choice.  Well, recently we were talking about this and included the children in the discussion.  There were two countries that just kept glaring at us.  The Democratic Republic of Congo and Samoa. 

As we were discussing the differences between the countries the kids got caught up in the beauty of Samoa.  So when we decided it was time to vote, and truly narrow down the country we feel led to, the kids all voted for Samoa.  This made me question if God was truly sending us out to Samoa and it was just my heart that was in the Congo.  I wanted time to pray about it, and allow God to close my heart to DR Congo.  He never did. 

Today, in discussing with Roland, we went back to the beginning.  We started discussing why we are adopting in the first place.  God tells us in Matthew 25:40 "And the King will say, I tell you the truth, when you did it to one of the least of these, my brothers and sisters, you were doing it to me".  This is why we chose to follow God's leading!  To reach out to the least of these and offer to them a life they would never know without us, without Jesus.  We chose to adopt because it is God's heart to care for the orphans, the least of these. 

Now in light of this, we had to ask ourselves, Congo or Samoa.  Why did the kids vote for Samoa that day, why did we even consider it when we felt so strongly to go to Congo?  We even said on vote day that we will go to Congo, it just may be second.  Second... Why did Congo become second?  Well we had to look at everything we had discussed.  The weather in Samoa, the beauty, the safety of travel, seeing New Zealand, basically going to pick up our baby would be more like an exquisite vacation.  We have discussed whether we would even consider taking the children to Congo for gotcha day, but they don't feel safe going there.  Well one would go, the other 2 are a bit worried about it.  Just as a by the way, never let your child watch River Monsters when you are doing a foreign adoption ;)  So I think the children were voting selfishly.  I think we all got caught up in the beauty of where we would be going and forgot the original call.

The level of care that orphans receive in Samoa is far superior to what the orphans in Congo receive.  If we are going to follow God's lead, we need to remove our own selfish desires.  Even if our selfish desires are born out of fear, we need to remove them.  My heart has always been in the Congo and after much discussion, the rest of the family has remembered. 

Now I have to ask God to forgive us, forgive us for second guessing, for forgetting, for becoming selfish. 

For those of you who question

Home At Last from dan owens on Vimeo.

The founders of Sixty Feet and their adoption video.  How beautiful...

Teri Lynn

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