"If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper, to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive, because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.
"I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Yet a little while and the world will see me no more, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. In that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me. And he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him." Judas (not Iscariot) said to him, "Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?" Jesus answered him, "If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him. Whoever does not love me does not keep my words. And the word that you hear is not mine but the Father’s who sent me." --Jesus in John 14

We've been praying fervently over the last week for a little boy in Haiti named Job. When we met him in January at Wings of Hope, a home for disabled and handicapped children in Fermathe, Haiti, he was suffering from encephalitis. The disease was causing his brain to swell and create too much pressure for his little body. Anyone in the US with the same problem would have been whisked away to a hospital for treatment. It wouldn't be so for him.

His story weighed heavily on our hearts, and folks were able to pull enough money together once we returned stateside to get Job to a hospital in Haiti to have the procedure done to alleviate the pressure. Unfortunately, while the procedure did help for a while, Job died this week from complications post-surgery.

Job was an orphan until Wings of Hope took him in. When they did, he stopped being an orphan and became family. It's hard to call any of the places the Haitian Timoun Foundation sponsors "orphanages." These kids aren't up for adoption, and the way that the St. Joseph's organization approaches its mission steers us away from this designation. These children, having been thrown out by their own families and treated like trash in their own society, are adopted into a new family, one of faith, hope, and love.

Jesus promises us that he won't leave us as orphans. And he didn't leave Job as an orphan. He surrounded Job with the family of Wings of Hope, a family only God could build. While Job has died, he has entered a new life, one of no suffering and of true belonging and where Jesus comes through on his promises. He was a teacher always, showing us what it is to live in the hope of God's new future.

His story is one of thousands in Haiti, which are always pressing the need for urgent attention. But less we just see the death of yet another child, we are reminded there was much more happening here than meets the eye. Jesus was coming through on his promise for Job. "You will not be an orphan. I will make my home with those who love me."

I've visited Jesus' home. It's in the hills surrounding Port-au-Prince and the capital of despair.

Your new, fancy car that runs on biofuels may be killing the poor....

That's a little bit of a sensational headline to draw your attention to the plight of the hungry in our world. I posted over the weekend on the tipping point of the hungry in our world. Riots are breaking out in every sphere of our globe by desperate people who are hamstrung by rising food prices. There's many ideas as to why the food prices are rising. This article addresses how the increased need for biofuels by developed countries is raising prices so that the poorest of the poor in our world cannot eat. Of particular shock and interest is this quote:

According to Earth Policy Institute president Lester Brown, the amount of grain needed to produce enough bio-ethanol to fill the 25-gallon fuel tank of an sport utility vehicle (SUV) tank could feed one person for a full year.

Haiti voted out their Prime Minister over the weekend because of escalating riots over food prices. A UN soldier was shot and died as well.

There aren't easy answers to these problems. I'm not suggesting that with these posts. In fact, some of the work of addressing these problems will result in a careful look at how we each contribute to the problem or are avoiding wanting to be involved in the solution. Right now, prayer is the most powerful weapon in our arsenal to combat this problem. Lord, in your mercy....

The Hunger Tipping Point...

Widespread riots in Haiti broke out this week from desperate people who can no longer afford the simplest of foodstuffs: rice. You can contribute to the UN's food assistance plan and raise your vocabulary by going over to FreeRice.com.

I was in Haiti in January, and we ate pretty well. There wasn't any mention of food prices soaring and people having a hard time providing for themselves.

That was January...since then, rice prices have increased 20% each month. A BBC report last night noted that rice prices have risen 75% (!!!) since March 2007. When you're poor and food takes up 75-80% of your budget already, this increase now puts food from beyond your reach.

Like much in life, the rising in prices is driven by market fear rather than current reality. A UN spokesperson on the same report noted that rice production in our world will increase an estimated 1.8% this year. There's plenty of rice, just like there's plenty of oil in reserve right now. But, countries are concerned that their people won't have enough to eat so they're taking rice (and oil) off the market. Some rice importers are beginning to hoard rice (and oil).

The problems are numerous to address. Developing countries don't invest in local agriculture and most import their food. Importers are taking advantage of growing prices and passing it on to those who can't afford it.

But the problem is simple: people can't eat and are dying. What can we do?

Pray for the impossible-making God who raises Jesus from the dead will lead people to address and answer this problem.

Pray for the impossible-making God to work through you, somehow, to help. If it were someone in your family, would you change and help? How about in God's global family?

Finding the church's center:

I'm taking the church I serve through the experience that I and another church partner had when we went to Haiti in January. It has taken us a while to collect our thoughts and pictures and hone our message to where we want it to be. But we're there, and now we put it into God's hands to be able to work it in the fabric of our congregational life and into the hearts of all our partners.

Going through all the pictures and asking a larger question of why a church ought to engage in mission work has been running through my mind this week. Thanks to the God-timing of a conference on "missional leadership" I attended on Monday and Tuesday, my mind was a perfect storm of thoughts on mission. At the end of my thoughts, I find myself here: mission is the church's center.

The question of why a church ought to engage in mission is one that questions the identity and calling of church. What you believe about the role of the church and how it understands itself in this world will help you answer this question.

Here's what I believe about the church's identity and calling:

The church is the community gathered and sent by God to live trust in the good news of Jesus alone. What does the church do? It worships the Trinity as revealed to us through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. And through this worship, it discerns the active reign of God in our world and participates in it. This discernment is not without aid from God's Holy Spirit to show us that peculiar reign of God and gift us to participate in it. I can no more participate in the reign of God on my own than help the Dallas Mavericks figure out their downward spiral. Without God's Spirit revealing to us the reign, we're lost.

In our particular time of being the church, this is an 'out of the box' idea. It's not your normal run-of-the-mill way of being church. The way of being church that is now threatened and crumbling is a majority view of a stagnant church that relegates discernment and participating to few but not all. I advocate that the entire church is to be involved of the triune activities of worship, discernment, and participation. No one is excluded from partnering in this adventure of church.

Everyone is a missionary. Not just those adventurous folks who sell everything and take off to the sub-tropics to evangelize a new tribe. Those folks are certainly worthy to be called missionary, but in the enterprise of a church taking seriously its calling to discern and participate in the reign of God, all have a stake in being God's missionary.

God's plan A to spread salvation to the world includes the primary use of the church. To accomplish this, God embeds congregations in communities across this world to live as embedded missionaries, much in the same way as journalists live as embedded journalists during wartime. They hang out with the troops, they go on missions with the troops, and they serve as witnesses to what they see. God is embedding the church in our world to live as witnesses to the reing of the Triune God who promises to raise the dead and restore all of creation.

If the church's identity and calling is to live as witnessing missionaries in God's world, then all of life is the field of mission. The coworker in the next cubicle who has just suffered the loss of a family member is now your primary target. Pray with her, show her the comfort of God, witness to her about the hope of salvation in Jesus. But don't shrug her off because she's not in some faroff place as one who has never heard or experienced the gospel.

Missionary work is a lifestyle and not a one time event. It's not a week where you pay a lot of money to separate yourself from the comforts of our world to get 'down and dirty' with others. It includes these one time events, and these serve as inspiration and training moments for the rest of our missionary lives. But discerning and participating in the reign of God is the purpose and center of our lives. Ephesians 2:10, the rest of the good news, clues us in on this.

"He creates each of us by Christ Jesus to join him in the work he does, the good work he has gotten ready for us to do, work we had better be doing." (The Message version)