Word Soup

Y'all, what a letdown. I had been working on this one post for a week. I began it in a moment of deep theological pondering and wondering and wrestling with serving God in missions and just started typing away. I posted another post in the meantime as I wasn't ready to publish the "deep one" yet, I had so much feeling and heart left to write in it. So each night, I would think about it some more and add some more to it. I thought it was close to getting put on the blog on Friday. It was very long week-I really wanted to put it on there Wednesday, but, well, hahahahaha, I have 4 kids, one of which is a TORNADO. (I will maybe post pictured of how she got unto my (permanent, un-removable, bright turquoise) alcohol inks from my jewelry buisness and graciously decorated the carpet, sofa, ottoman, AND hardwood floors--but I also may not, the pain is still too fresh...) So, long story never short when I am writing it, I hopped on here Friday night to put the finishing touches on my moving, make-you-think, deep theological blog post and get that sucker on the innerwebs for all to read and be enlightened. However, when I read it through, I had this thought: WHAT THE HECK DOES ALL THAT MUMBO JUMBO EVEN MEAN???? I seriously do NOT know what I was talking about, and I am the one who wrote it. I am thinking late at night after a days of wrangling ink spreading tornados maybe is not the best time to tap out some Deep Thoughts. It IS a good time for putting together incoherent snippets of Jesus words that are great fodder for mockery, apparently. So, in lieu of inflicting my word soup upon your fine eyes this Monday morning, I will share several bits from other peoples' posts that were the very words of my heart that I seem completely unable to express. The Compassion Bloggers were at it again on a tour in Guatemala-all the posts were truly fabulous-go read through them if you want to be blessed and please sponsor a child (click the link on my sidebar), or 10, if you can-you will not regret it, we have been sponsors for years and seen firsthand the work Compassion does in country. Anyway, I wanted to share some words from this post by Ann Voskamp as "A Holy Experience":
...our lives full of cluttered ease, muffle out the songs. That when we go to the places that strip life back to its barest essence -- of courage and love and raw, unmasked pain -- our hearts feel again, beat again, hear again the haunting music of a beautiful, bleeding humanity.
Maybe it's this: God hides with the poor and in the pain and we can only witness Him at His most beautifully creative work in the places needing redemption.
Maybe we are only at our most beautiful work in the same places too --- the places where we don't hide behind the distractions of stuff, where we finally empty our hands of all our possessions and idols and come to God empty and ready. The places where we can make art with tears.

and she adds this:

No one tells you that wealth numbs you to life and consumerism callouses your soul to the sacred.
Or maybe Someone did: “"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God." (Mark 10:25 NIV)
Oh AMEN!! Read it again if you have to-I have over and over.
I will end with these oh-so-true yet jarring words also from the CB Tour by trip leader Shaun Groves' post that cuts straight to the heart of what poverty and injustice are:
When someone, because of war or insanity, brings death to a village or classroom all at once – in an instant – we’re outraged. When 3,000 people are sent to early graves by airplanes punched through skyscrapers, we hold telethons and fight back. But when 24,000 children under the age of five died from poverty related causes today – and yesterday, and the day before that – it didn’t even get a mention on CNN. Their deaths didn’t fling us into impassioned action either. Or even prayer.

Because poverty is slow violence.

It IS. And we DO ignore it. But we SHOULD NOT.

"Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter— when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?....spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,then your light will rise in the darkness,and your night will become like the noonday" (Isaiah 58:6-7, 10)