Where your treasure is there your heart will be also...

Well, it's finally time to take a moment to blog what our family has been processing lately. It all started in Tennessee at Katie Davis' fundraising dinner. (I mentioned her a few posts back.) Well, I went to her BLOG archives and started reading from the beginning. This girl has been radically impacting, might I say righteously wrecking my life! She is putting faces to the orphans and starving of Africa for me. I've GOT to do something, I just don't know what it is but I don't ever want to be the same again.
Then, by way of another adoption blog, I found this SERMON
( http://www.brookhills.org/media/series/radical/ , choose the one on radical giving) by someone Russ and I had heard and loved at a conference a few years ago. It's the best I've heard on what our response to the poor should be. If my life wasn't already wrecked by Katie, now David P. has utterly ruined it! God just keeps sending the same message to me, through many different messengers.
I had to share the sermon with Rusty, so that we could start being ruined together. After it was over we just cried and prayed about what our response needed to be. That's the hard part! What are we supposed to do? This isn't spelled out to us in the Word because I think God wants us to do some serious wrestling with Him and some serious losing of our dreams, goals, ideas and STUFF! So that's what we've been processing and praying about lately. Could it be that our goal to sacrifice financially in order to pay off our rental mortgage early is not so that we can buy our dream home in the country, but so that we can give that income away? Maybe we're supposed to just sell everything now, and move to Africa? But if God has called us to stay here, what changes do we need to make so that we start giving generously and sacrificially to the poor instead of just throwing our scraps at them? We know that we definitely need to start living with less!
In all of this processing, we've been throwing ideas out. Some are big, hairy and audacious, others aren't so much. Russ suggested the other day that one thing we could do is eat beans and rice for lunch and dinner for a week and give our grocery money away. I have to tell you, I don't mind beans and rice for a meal, but after about the third meal of leftovers, I'm ready to not see beans a rice again for a long time! So, I knew this was a good idea, but I really didn't know if I could do that. This is one I'm wrestling with... if I moved to Africa, it's likely I'd eat beans and rice for every meal so maybe I should do it for a week. Now here's where God has a sense of humor. I was googling something totally different tonight and came across a blog that caught my eye. It's an adoptive family and they are saving for their 4th adoption (the addition of their 8th child). I started reading, and guess what the first sentence was? "Tonight starts off our 30 days of beans and rice for dinner." Seriously God, could you be a little less obvious about this one?
I don't know what the answers are for our family. I do know that if we're lucky, we have only about 35 more "good" years to make a difference in this world. I don't want to meet my Lord and have him say, "I was hungry and you didn't feed me, I was naked and you didn't clothe me, I was sick and you didn't come to visit me." I can spend myself on behalf of the starving and dying for the next 35 years because earth is not my home.

"Sometimes I would like to ask God why he allows poverty, famine and injustice in the world, when he could do something about it....but I'm afraid he might ask me the same question." -anonymous