Revealing Grace

For the past few days my team and I have been helping prepare for a wake. The father of one of our students passed away in a car accident, so we have been moving wood for the fires, bringing other students up to hang out and help out, and most times, simply being there. For the Apache tribe a death means a 2 day wake, where people stay up with the body for 48 hours straight. The days before the wake are spent preparing for it. Preparing the food, clearing the land, putting up the metal structures, because for 2-3 days there will be people, fires, food, and mourning. Still after the wake comes the funeral. All in all it is a long drawn out process of saying good-bye after a very sudden loss. And these sudden losses happen all too often around here. A few months ago, as I was preparing to come out to Arizona I had a crisis of faith that had to deal with a similar type of sudden loss, though it was not a person close to me. In a tragic and rare course of events, a young college student...

We have all believed a lie. That this life is not about lives at all , but about satisfying our own desires. When we are at once consumed with buying more shoes or the newest technology, we quietly forget that people are dying. We forget that this world is not about making a better life for ourselves, but about saving others from an inevitable death if they are not told about Jesus Christ. We give into the lies and we forget our purpose. With just the smallest of desires, we lose our identity and walk like robots in exactly the wrong direction. Consumerism becomes the norm and it becomes radical to give up one's life and possessions to save the lives of others. It becomes radical to move to another country to build wells and schools, engaging with locals and learning their culture. It becomes annoying to be passionately vocal about Somalia or the Sudan or Syria. We write off those who harp on the needs of the world because we have become convinced that our biggest problem is the...

Today I sit at the Kennel (our Apache youth center) feeling confident about life. Its not that I have everything together or anything figured out, I just feel like God is in great control of it all. Its a good feeling to have, especially when each day brings new trials and new situations to overcome. As I sit here, watching all of these students hang out and my coworker John play carpetball (thanks to Zion Lutheran Church in Iowa! We love you guys!) I am spending some time thinking over who Jesus was and what his ministry looked like. (Because if there is any ministry you would want to emulate it should  obviously be Jesus's ministry. I went to seminary for that kind of knowledge :). So. What I am reminded of was how Jesus interacted with people. I think he was probably pretty intense, and it does seem like he had a slightly snarky side (which makes me like him even better). He wasn't afraid to shoot straight and he never minced words. I don't really think Jesus was the...

"Why did you write that you think it is time to die? That you don't care if someone kills you?" "I don't know. Things just got really bad and I started thinking those thoughts." "Listen to me. How many times have you tried to take your own life? 3? 4?" "3" "And who protected your life? Who saved you?" "The doctors." "No, who really saved you?" "God." "Yea, God. Your life has been protected. Do you realize that? Your life is so valuable because God has kept you alive for a purpose, because He has a plan for you. Its dangerous to even think for a moment that things would be better if you were dead. If anything happened to you, I don't know that I would recover. Do you believe that? You are the most important thing in the world to me." "Me? Why me?" "I don't know. I guess I just think that God brought us together on purpose, for a reason. You are fa...

A lot of things have gone down lately. Today I found a puppy. It was walking on the rez with its seriously malnourished mom, looking for food and I fell in love with it. When its mom walked away and it laid down and looked at me, I couldn't help myself. I decided I would embrace potential diseases to save it from imminent death (puppies have that effect on me). So I missed the meeting I had come down for for the sake of a puppy that I most likely can't keep. Welcome to my life. (She is soooo cute though!) In other news, we had a seriously awesome weekend with our high school girls in Phoenix. I prayed for 10 girls to come and on the day of the retreat 10 girls climbed into our van. The weekend was filled with great talks, dance parties, train tours ("train museum" ended up as a seriously cooler outing than we had counted on. While we were just hoping we could find a way to spend the afternoon and hopefully spin it as awesome, it actually turned out to be the m...