author intrusion

does it really get there?

Great Article! Check it out!

Link: - In Touch.

I love Christmas shopping. Especially since I came across a charitable gift catalog, and while casually thumbing through it, found that $25 would open the door for a girl in China to attend school. I could donate this gift in the name of my teacher-sister. Perfect! For $60, I could buy rice seedlings for a farmer in Cambodia to feed his family and generate income. What better gift for my environmentally minded agriculturalist son? And just $25 for a baby goat to almost single-handedly lift a family from Senegal out of poverty—who wouldn’t treasure such a Christmas present?

I had so much fun matching a donation to each person on my gift list. But later, as I began to see more and more statistics concerning misused funds by non-profits, I began to wonder: Did my hard-earned cash actually make it to that little schoolgirl? Did the farmer get his full allotment of seedlings? And what about the family and its budding goat business? Did my gifts really impact the people for whom they were intended? If I had such questions, I was certain others were also asking. So, for all of us, I determined to find out “the rest of the story.”  I would follow the donations all the way to the people who received them.

Because the catalog that first hooked me was Partners International’s Harvest of Hope, I asked them for permission to follow up on their projects—no strings attached. They agreed. So, toting tape recorder and camera, I set off—for North Africa, Senegal, and Sudan; India, Cambodia, Indonesia, and China. And, oh, the things I saw!

12 Days of Christmas at 5 for 50

Tom Davis is at our house right now so we can edit his next book! We're having a great time, but hearing about what's happening in Swaziland makes me want to just pick up and move there.  5 for 50 is having a huge impact and the first place they're heading with tons of food is Ethiopia. You wouldn't believe what even ten dollars will do! Consider becoming a part of this, as a way to keep Christ in Christmas by sharing food with orphans around the world.  Hey celebrating Christmas with "pure Christianity" is about as good as it gets!

Check out his post to find out how you can get involved!

Link: Tom Davis' Blog.

Every time we secure food for a child, we reduce the risk that they will sell their bodies and trade sex for food. Thank you. Also, 5 for 50 is funding 12 Christmas projects for orphans in 12 different countries. The first country we're helping is Ethiopia.

advent preparation: some good ideas!

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Advent begins this coming Sunday and I cannot wait. More posts later on what we're doing.

Our intentional community does Advent up beautifully, and this year will be no exception. This morning we all received an email telling us what we can do to prepare for Advent before this Sunday night's gathering.

-- Remember the world we're really living in - a world full of pain and injustice.

It's easy, at this time of year, to believe Madison Avenue. That in every home around the world twinkle lights are sparkling, cookies are baking, their scent mixing with the freshly cut evergreens looped around the house with glass balls and red velvet bows. In every home somebody's sitting in a spotless room with thick, glossy wrapping paper around them, tying ribbon around the perfect gifts for everyone. Hot chocolate always heats on the stove and music plays a heart-warming soundtrack during all the waking hours.  Nobody gets angry, nobody feels hurt, nobody struggles to put food on the table.

But we know differently. Our own homes, no matter how wealthy we are, aren't like this. We tear our hair out trying to keep things straight: the calendar, the living room, our clothes! We run from gathering to gathering, store to store, stoplight to stoplight. And we're the blessed ones. For so many, just keeping on the heat (if they have a home at all) is the major priority.

So take the time this week to remember why it is we need Christ, and the Kingdom coming, so badly. Remember that all the twinkle lights in the world will not brighten our hearts. Only the love of God can do that. The heavens are breathless as the time draws near for the One who will break into the groaning creation, to banish the darkness and the cold.

Come Lord Jesus. Shoulder yourself into our busy lives, show us Yourself, and show us ourselves in the light of who You are.

________

Practical ideas to remember why His coming was and is so important:

1. Spend an hour sitting on your porch out in the cold with your family. No hot chocolate allowed. Pray for those all around the world and in your town who have no heat or a place to live.

2. Fast during this advent season. Skip lunch, or purpose to serve meatless dinners or very simple dinners. Take the money saved and use it to help others at your local rescue mission or shelter. If you can't skip meals, fast from something else: television, long hot bubble baths, something you really love and enjoy. Offer it up to God on behalf of someone you know is suffering.

3. Read scripture. Here are a few suggested passages.

Mark 14:32-42
Matthew 24: 37-44
Romans 13:8-14

4. Do advent devotionals each night with your family. There are plenty online.

5. Pray. Intentionally and fervently for those around you, for the welfare of your neighborhood, your town, your country, and for the world, remembering that as Christians we don't seek the good of what is ours, but the good of what is Christ's.

6. Visit someone lonely and in need of Christ breaking into their lives. Does somebody come to mind right now? Make a call today and arrange a get together, show up as Christ showed up, with love and healing in His wings. Perhaps you need to forgive them first. There's no better time for that than right now!

7. In all things, remember to give thanks and praise to God, creator and Lord of all, beginning and end.

May this Advent season be truly blessed!  

mercy story?

If you are involved in being the merciful hands and feet of Jesus, I'd love to send you some interview questions and share your story here on my blog. If you'd be interested, please email me at lisa@lisasamson.com.

mercy kitchen

Fourth and Final Part

Before I head into the last question, I'd like to thank Jimmy for taking time to answer these questions and for providing thought-provoking material for this blog for the past week! May God bless your church, your ministries, your family and your wonderful self, Jimmy. If this series meant something good to you, please let Jimmy know in the comments! Or visit his blog, Woodshavings.

Your honey is incredible. I'm drinking some in my tea right now! Would you tell us about the bees and being a beekeeper, Jimmy?

The buzz of the bee hive is God's voice singing a song of grace to me.  I can go into the bee yard in the middle of the day and hear God working in His garden.  I can almost capture the sight of Him tending His creation with the tools of His trade. 

The bees are a sacrament for me.  Caring for them, tending them, pours out a part of God's grace and mercy in my life.  There are times when the buzz of a colony places me in a spiritual position where I am born again again.  I connect with the finger print of God left on all creation by taking care of the bees.

I never tire of watching them, following them, wondering where they go. I watch the color of pollen change through the year and hope and pray they survive the dark cold nights of winter. 

The bee is an engineering marvel.  She is built to fly, carry food, create wax and turn sweet nectar into thick sweeter honey. She is the only insect that creates a food humans consume.  With every new thing I learn of the bees, I see a new mystery to be solved.

In the sting of the bee I am reminded that creation is far beyond the taming of man.  Every time I open a hive, I balance on the sharpest of razor blades, teetering between sheer terror and ecstatic fascination.

By keeping the bees, I am daily involved in God's words spoken at the beginning of time..."Let there be..."  His words still reverberate through all of creation and speak softly in the buzzing of the bees. As she flys out to gather nectar or pollen, she is moved forward by the rumbling vibration of the voice of God spoken eons ago.

The honey I gather has come from the flowers of plants and trees in my community.  Every flower touched by one of my bees has spread the pollen needed for fruit or fertility.  The bees bless by their presence in the garden and I am blessing my neighbors/community by caring for the bees.

While other men of God will pour over scriptures to gather understanding from Him.  I will look at the bees and see God and know His pleasure.

mercy kitchen

Part Three

Tell us about a few of the kids!

The average age of the kids is about 8-9.  There are one or two who would be 12-14, but for the most part, these are young school age kids.  They are in families that are attempting to make the bold transition away from poverty.  The parent or guardian is working at least part time and many have full time employment in the area.  If a parent struggles with employment, it tends to be because of illiteracy or several generations of poverty and educational failure. 

They are kids!!  They laugh easily and desire to learn, but have never had many of the opportunities we all take for granted.  Many have never traveled outside the county.  To travel in an aircraft is a fantasy.  Most of them do not have books of their own.  Xavier is big on wanting little kids to have and read books they own. He does attempt  to take them on trips if and when he has the resources.  Their vocabulary is more elementary then we would speak in our family. 

I was invited to attend the end of summer celebration.  An African drum troop living in Durham had been teaching them all summer at the community center.
the kids involved in the reading program could also attend a drum class.  They performed well and joy was the theme of the event ...we did experience the joy of children playing music.  I met the reading tutors and they gave me good reports of the advances made over the summer.  I believe reading well in one stepping stone to leaving poverty behind.

They are beautiful children who live in MY community.  We must do all we can to push them forward in this world.  Jesus would expect nothing less of us.

mercy kitchen

(The Chalmers Family)

Part Two 

Why do you feel feeding kids in the summertime is important. Isn't that "their parents' job?"

 It is important because if we as people of faith do not respond then children will go hungry during the summer. It is ungodly in a nation where wealth abounds that little ones who have no choice in being on the planet go hungry.

In the world where I grew up it was the parents who took care of their own children. My folks have been married 56 years. They have survived the death of a child and near bankruptcy more than once. I was fortunate to have parents that would risk and sacrifice all to care for me. We are foolish to think ALL adults who have kids are like generations of the past The poverty rate in NC averages about 14%. I cannot change that today or tomorrow, the reasons are many and varied; but in the meantime, children are going hungry. I believe there are parents who want to take care of their kids, but the past has dragged them down to the bottom. I believe there are parents who do not know how to take care of children. I believe bad folks have kids. In all these cases and more, I do not see a way for me as a person of faith and mercy to just turn my head and walk away. The "just get a job" mentality will not feed the hungry bellies of innocent children.
 

If each community of faith would find one family in need to help long term it could change entire neighborhoods in a generation. There is a real reason we will not. People who really need a helping hand sometimes have $h!++y lives and to help them, you have to get down in the $h!+ and pull them out. You end up with it all over you and for many of us, we love our comfort more than the grawling bellies of children.

A personal note from Jimmy regarding my question:

It was written very quickly to capture my thinking and feeling of the moment.  It may be a bit dis-jointed and in the end harsh, but remember, it is coming from a man who a few years ago had a "just get a job" attitude lying under much of what I though about poverty.

mercy kitchen

Part One

This week I'm featuring a friend of mine, Jimmy Chalmers; highlighting the experience he had this summer when he saw a need and said, "This one's up to me."

Jimmy lives in NC with his wonderful family. He is the pastor of a church called The Carpenter's Shop, a contractor and a beekeeper. I'm enjoying a jar of his honey these days in my morning tea and it's every bit as wonderful as he is.

Jimmy, tell us about what happened to you this summer?

This past spring I attended a one-day conference, attempting to synthesize food, faith and farming in the lifestyles of local churches. One of the speakers was Jill Stanton Bullard.  She is the founder of the Inter Faith Food Shuttle here in central NC.   During her speech she started to give the statistics for children, especially those who are involved in the school breakfast and lunch programs in this area. In approximately 8-9 counties in this region there are way over 50,000 kids who are involved in the school breakfast and lunch program.   My first question as a fiscal conservative was "how many people are scamming the system?"  I began to put a mental pencil on the mathematical equation.  I finally settled on what is a pretty high number – 50%.  So if 50% of the kids involved in the program are scamming the system, that means that 50% are not.  50% of the children who go to school in this region everyday are dependent on the school breakfast and lunch program for a percentage of their daily nourishment.  That means that 10s of thousands of children in one of the wealthiest regions in our nation need the schools to provide them one or more meals a day. 

After checking the numbers, I found several thousand kids in Granville County use this program.  That means that five days a week, during the school year, these children have an opportunity for a nutritious meal.  What about the weekends, holidays and the 12 weeks during the summer?   After coming home from that conference and I had a conversation with my wife and children.  We suddenly saw a large need in our community that needed someone to step in and take care of it. 

Several days later, I contacted Mr. Xavier Wortham from the Oxford Housing Authority.  I asked him one simple question … "do you have hungry children in your apartment communities?"

He gave me a very simple, shocking answer.

"Yes". 

Once I knew that we definitely had hungry kids and a contact within a community that we could help, it was then I went to our faith community and told them what I'd learned.  We began to put together a plan of how we could feed children during the summer break.  Xavier explained that during the summer he already has set up a reading program.  This program has children in the community who need and want help learning how to read and there was great opportunity to dovetail bag lunches into his program. 

So, after some prayerful consideration and concern we decided as a congregation that we would be responsible to prepare lunches for 24 children, 5 days a week during the summer break.  We did not have any idea how much food it would take, how much time and energy it would require, but we truly believed that the compassion of Jesus compelled us to do something.   

We started off with $100, asking our congregation and other people of faith to contribute food or cash to help us feed these 24 kids. 

So early summer our kitchen was transformed every morning into a bagged lunch assembly line.  Everyday, 24 sandwiches were made … peanut butter and jelly, cheese, bologna, lunchmeat.  All those sandwiches were then placed in sandwich bags. Those sandwich bags were then placed in a brown lunch sack.  Each sack would then receive a piece of fruit (apples, bananas, fruit cups, applesauce).  We always made sure that there was a juice box to go with their lunch as well as a sweet snack or salty treat.  We truly wished that we could have prepared these fancy, nutritious gourmet lunches, but we also knew that we didn't have the facilities or the resources to make that happen. 

Our first goal was to make sure that little bellies had a lunch five days a week.  The 24 lunches then had to be transported to the community center in downtown Oxford, where tutors were working with these children on their essential reading skills.  At the end of the class as they went home, they would each be handed a bag lunch. 

There were some weeks, at the beginning of the week, that we didn't have the funding or the resources to make 120+ lunches for the week, so we would purchase the items out of our family budget, but each and every time during the week someone would send us a check or hand us cash or drive across the county with items they just purchased.  By the end of the summer, we took the "leftovers" to the community center (6 bags of juice boxes and peanut butter and jelly). 

After the summer, Xavier contacted us and told us that this had been the most successful reading program he had ever had and he was thankful to us for helping him with the more than 40 kids that were involved in the program.  That was when we realized that he had more than 24 involved in his reading program.  To us that meant more than 16 kids went home everyday without lunch.  So, now we are trying to figure out how to feed all the kids involved in the summer reading program for 2008.  We don't have the slightest idea how we are going to do it!

Put Jimmy and his family on your prayer list, won't you?

third annual AI Warm-Up a Refugee . . .

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I'm getting an early start on our annual drive for gloves, scarves, hats and mittens for refugees who Kentucky Refugee Ministries resettle in our area. So many of the refugees that arrive in the US come from warmer climes, so you can imagine what the coming of winter must mean for them. Not only is it a shock to their bodies, but they don't have many, if any, warming items we are usually prepared with.

So if you're interested in helping out this year (last year we had something like twenty sets of gloves, scarves and hats and you all rock) email me or leave a comment and I'll get back to you with my address. We need all kinds of these items for men, women, boys and girls. Gently used is welcomed as well, so if you're doing the 100 bits 'o junk challenge, think about getting rid of some winter items you haven't used in a long time! Don't forget to get the kids involved!

If you don't want to be bothered sending out a box of scarves and such, (if you're like me, it takes an act of God or the IRS to get me to the post office) consider providing such items for the homeless in your area, or find your local refugee ministry. If you live in a college or university town, stop by student services with a box of this stuff. The students from warm climates will appreciate it.

Update: Patty asked when would be a good time to send them in by. Well, anytime is appreciated, but by December would be wonderful.

Thanks friends.

church or book club?

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I was heading home from researching in Eastern KY (thank you, Jarrod Hunt, my tour guide, and his mother, Sharon, who treated me like a queen at their home in Grapevine!) and listening to some Bible teaching CD's, when the priest said something that just jolted me. He was speaking about confessing our sins, and made an off-hand comment about whether we treat church as church or as a literary club. Now that wasn't the main point of the CD at all. But it got me thinking.

Do we treat church as church or as a book club?

Do we go time after time, enjoy what was said, but go home unchanged? I know that happens at book clubs. We sit around, talk about the book, how much we loved it, and then place it on the shelf afterwards, forgetting about it. 

Or maybe all we do is study the book. We read, read, read, going over every inch, and we get to church, and read some more, and hear some more about it, and our life is all about that book. Yet for all that reading of that book, we're still depressed and discontent, we're still doing the same besetting sins, we still hate your boss and take our husband or wife for granted. We still don't do much to love anybody else.

Please don't misunderstand me and say that I think some brands of churches are book clubs and others aren't. Although some may be, I don't know. That's your call. But ask yourself, am I treating my church like a book club? Is my church only about the Bible, learning it, studying it, memorizing it? Or is there the challenge and the opportunity to live it out, really live it out? All of it? Even the parts that put a cross on our back and send us to places we'd rather not go?

I'm not saying the reading and studying of the Word of God isn't important. But I am saying, it doesn't mean much if we don't do something with it, if it doesn't expand our hearts to love more, if it doesn't change us into the image of Christ. And that, of course, goes back to our willingness to let the Spirit move in and through us. As St. Paul said in I Cor. 13, "Though I can fathom all mystery and all knowledge . . . and have not love, I am nothing."

If you are going to a book club every Sunday, maybe God wants you to be the one to provide those opportunities to shine the Light of the World to your community and your world. Being the hands and feet of Jesus is great on your own, but it's even better in the company of your brothers and sisters in Christ. Whether by ourselves or in full force we're still the singular hands and feet of the Body of Christ. I love how that works. 

Just something to think about. Still have a long way to go on this one myself!