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In Romans 12:19 God says that vengence is mine but didn’t say that we couldn’t mock them.
June 14, 2006
June 7, 2006
Back to Reality
I just got back from ‘South Asia’ and am still reeling a bit from adjusting my sleep to the days here. It’s a bit like eating ice cream too fast and you get a headache, travel across to the other side of the world too fast and your sleep will be messed up for a few days.
But it seems almost unreal where I was. Compared to it America seems like paradise. I have spent time in ‘East Asia’ but this trip has thrown me for a loop seeing so much poverty. There weren’t a few people sleeping and living on the street ranging from sleeping under nothing, to a tarp, to a shack on the side walk with a concrete wall for the back. Filthy children and women would come up to the cars we were in while stopped at a red light and knock on the windows and hold out their hands and bring it to their mouth asking for money. But we were encouraged not to give because they give it to a boss man and do not get what they are given and it only encourages such behaviour. What is hard is when one will come up to your taxi in trafic carrying a baby and you know that the child is only being used as a ploy to make others feel guilty to give. It works well. The black ever cawing ravens that help clean the city seem to be the unofficial mascot of the city though quite fitting.
Most prayers of mine seem all too self-centered when I demand for things when a believer there when asked what we would like to pray for him he said he would like a roof. I don’t know all the details like if he has walls but not a roof but it is striking that he did not say he needed a roof but that he would like a roof, like its a luxury. I am given to materialism so I condemn myself when I say I would need A/C in my Chevy but would like a new Acura. It is not too hard to see who has a more basic set of priorities.
We also got to visit Mother Theresa’s home for the dying which was literally right next to a Hindu temple. What is striking though is that most churches in America that I have gone to seem more like that Hindu temple where people worship their $100,000 sound and projection system, 10 million dollar exercise facilities, and climbing walls for the youth. I hear more about what is being built and installed in churches than the gospel of the death and resurrection of Christ from church members.
But I am back to reality in powder puff land where suffering is having to where brown shoes with a black belt to church, not where a Christian convert loses his wife, children, job and the only job he can get is pulling people on a rickshaw on the street. These ‘blessings’ that God has given us are ruining us, or perhaps they are not blessings maybe they are gifts from the devil to spoil us and make us fat, soft, and slow in every sense.
Scott Moore has a quick blog that talks about how we often as Christians in America face these harsh facts.
