The short-term missions trip. It’s a favorite of Christians everywhere— a chance to see the world, serve the poor, and come home a week later able to sleep better at night because of the feeling that you’ve made a positive difference in the world and the fact that you are once again in your own bed, knowing you can sleep in tomorrow morning.
But what if we’re missing something? What if there’s something more to Christian service than an artificially induced one-week spiritual high which in the long run leaves you discouraged because you always dream of going back and having it like it was for that week? What if love for our neighbors isn’t supposed to inspire us to just give a week and care enough to take some pictures to show to our friends back home? What if truly loving the poor and oppressed in the world, or just our everyday neighbors, involves actually getting involved in their lives personally? What if rather than traveling far away to serve the people in another part of the world for a week, we got involved with the people in our own neighborhoods, and in such a way that they were able to see that we truly cared about them as individuals and not just as photo-ops?
Yes, there is a reason I am writing this. I have realized that I am as much of a sucker as the next guy for the short-term missions trip movement. And, oh by the way, I’m going on one next week, so maybe I’m just writing this post to myself, but as I have taken time to truly invest in the lives of those around me here in Hong Kong over the past few months, I have noticed something. Living here is not like the short-term missions trips I’ve been on before. When one of my youth come to me and tell me about a problem they’re facing, I don’t have the luxury of telling them, “I’m sorry,” and “I’ll pray for you,” and then packing up and leaving two days later. When one of them comes to me with a problem, I have two options—either I personally step into their lives, into the uncomfortableness and dirtiness of what they’re dealing with and demonstrate to them that I truly love them, or I don’t step in and therefore prove through my actions that I truly don’t care about their problems. There is no easy-exit contingency plan where I can maintain the appearance of caring for the individual without getting involved in their problem. At times it is inconvenient and frustrating, but the experience has taught me something that I never could have learned through a short-term missions trip—true love and true ministry don’t happen over a week’s time, they happen over a lifetime. And while the “spiritual high” of the short-term trip is always exciting as long as it lasts (which is never as long as you’d expect it to), the tough day-in and day-out struggle of truly investing in the lives of those around you leaves a much more satisfying and long-lasting feeling at the end of the day.
So where does this leave me? I’m definitely still going to the Philippines next week. My primary motivation for going, as strange as it may seem, is not a desire to serve the ministry we are going to work with (although that is there as a secondary motivation), but rather to continue investing into the lives of the Hong Kong students who will be going on the trip, because they are the ones I get to live life with. They are the ones that will still be around when we get back to Hong Kong. This means I will work my butt off to serve KIM, both out of a desire to serve KIM and out of a desire to set a godly example for the youth from International Christian School who will be going on the trip as well. But it also means that the trip doesn’t end when we get back to Hong Kong. It will last as long as I’m here.
Thursday, March 17, 2011
Thursday, March 10, 2011
Thursday’s Thought—Subtraction by Addition
Yesterday, Ash Wednesday, marked the start of Lent on the church calendar. Growing up in a non-liturgical (although in many ways still very traditional) church, the church calendar was not highly emphasized during my youth. In fact, last year was the first time in my life that I actually celebrated Lent. As I celebrated it, I learned a lot about myself, about certain things that I crave (often with no good reason that I should be craving them), and about my relationship with God. As Lent approached this year, I wanted to celebrate again, so I tried to come up with something that I could give up for the 40-day period.
As I thought of possibilities, however, I had real trouble coming up with ideas. I can’t give up Facebook; it’s an important part of my job. Meat? On my missions trip to Manila in a week and a half, I will be doing hard labor all week and my diet will be at the mercy of the missions agency’s cook, who includes meat in pretty much every meal. TV? With the amount of TV I watch in a week, I wouldn’t be giving up too much. Fast food (last year’s choice)? One of my best chances to interact with my students during the entire course of the week is at Burger King on Friday nights; this, like Facebook, is an important part of my job. Call it a lack of creativity, lack of dedication, or whatever else you want, but I could think of nothing to give up that would be realistic (I could give it up), productive (it would help to give it up), and require a sacrifice (it’s something I would notice being gone).
Then the idea hit me: rather than taking something out of my life for 40 days, what if I add something new to my life for 40 days, something productive, something beneficial, and something which would require me to rearrange my schedule so that although I am not giving up any one thing per se for Lent, every day will involve small sacrifices in order to do this something new? For example, what if I set out to memorize the book of Philippians over the next 40 days? It may sound like a daunting task at first, but if taken by small steps, it is not as hard as it sounds. Giving myself 40 days to memorize the book puts me at a pace of memorizing about two and a half verses per day—a goal which is realistic, yet will require sacrifices each day to achieve the goal.
As I think about the idea, I think it is a good one. In the grand scheme of things, the goal of Lent is not simply to give something up for the sake of giving it up, but rather to give it up so during the time you have given it up, you can draw closer to God. By adding this Bible memorization, I will be growing closer to God, and although I will do it by adding something to my life rather than subtracting something from it, my addition will certainly involve some subtraction along the way.
As I thought of possibilities, however, I had real trouble coming up with ideas. I can’t give up Facebook; it’s an important part of my job. Meat? On my missions trip to Manila in a week and a half, I will be doing hard labor all week and my diet will be at the mercy of the missions agency’s cook, who includes meat in pretty much every meal. TV? With the amount of TV I watch in a week, I wouldn’t be giving up too much. Fast food (last year’s choice)? One of my best chances to interact with my students during the entire course of the week is at Burger King on Friday nights; this, like Facebook, is an important part of my job. Call it a lack of creativity, lack of dedication, or whatever else you want, but I could think of nothing to give up that would be realistic (I could give it up), productive (it would help to give it up), and require a sacrifice (it’s something I would notice being gone).
Then the idea hit me: rather than taking something out of my life for 40 days, what if I add something new to my life for 40 days, something productive, something beneficial, and something which would require me to rearrange my schedule so that although I am not giving up any one thing per se for Lent, every day will involve small sacrifices in order to do this something new? For example, what if I set out to memorize the book of Philippians over the next 40 days? It may sound like a daunting task at first, but if taken by small steps, it is not as hard as it sounds. Giving myself 40 days to memorize the book puts me at a pace of memorizing about two and a half verses per day—a goal which is realistic, yet will require sacrifices each day to achieve the goal.
As I think about the idea, I think it is a good one. In the grand scheme of things, the goal of Lent is not simply to give something up for the sake of giving it up, but rather to give it up so during the time you have given it up, you can draw closer to God. By adding this Bible memorization, I will be growing closer to God, and although I will do it by adding something to my life rather than subtracting something from it, my addition will certainly involve some subtraction along the way.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Thursday's Thought
Well, after getting caught up on all the latest hysteria about Rob Bell’s new book today, I almost wrote this Thursday’s Thought about Love Wins, but since the book hasn’t actually come out yet, I’ll save all of my—what I expect to be negative—comments about it until a later date…
So, instead, this week’s thought will focus on Inner City Ministries. Over the past few weeks, I have been volunteering at ICM a couple of times per week and trying to get my youth to do the same, with mixed results. ICM is a ministry in Hong Kong that reaches out to ethnic minorities (primarily Pakistanis, Nepalis, and Indians) and tries to create avenues to share the gospel with them through a variety of ways, such as after school tutoring, a cooking school, and more. The saddest part about the need for ICM is that in the city of Hong Kong, where there are more Rolls Royces per capita than anywhere else on earth, there is a section of town where these minorities are all squished together and for the most part ignored by the rest of the city. The city of Hong Kong announced yesterday that it is giving 6,000 HKD ($800 US) checks to all Hong Kong permanent residents over the age of 18 because of a budget surplus last year, yet the children in this part of town are going to schools where even if the kids can stay disciplined enough to graduate high school, most of them won’t have a good enough education to go to college.
As I have gotten to know some of these kids and seen the way they live (like the fact that many of them play in the same parks where numerous drug dealers hang out and run their businesses), it has broken my heart that they are so neglected by the rest of society. This has been a reality check for me, because I know there are similar situations to this happening all over the United States right now, some of them a 5 minute drive from where I went to college, and yet I did so little to help them during my time there. Why was this? And why is it that more Christians don’t get involved in helping out in situations like this? We worship a God who—when we were sinners—did not stay on His throne and say, “Well, that’s too bad, hope they can fix themselves,” but rather got off His throne, came to the earth, and died for us. We have suffering and poverty in our neighborhoods, and we can’t get up, turn off the TV, and go outside to play with children so they don’t have to spend their afternoon hanging out with drug dealers. What is the hope we are proclaiming to the world? Salvation by The Office? I sure hope we’ve got something more than that to offer.
So, instead, this week’s thought will focus on Inner City Ministries. Over the past few weeks, I have been volunteering at ICM a couple of times per week and trying to get my youth to do the same, with mixed results. ICM is a ministry in Hong Kong that reaches out to ethnic minorities (primarily Pakistanis, Nepalis, and Indians) and tries to create avenues to share the gospel with them through a variety of ways, such as after school tutoring, a cooking school, and more. The saddest part about the need for ICM is that in the city of Hong Kong, where there are more Rolls Royces per capita than anywhere else on earth, there is a section of town where these minorities are all squished together and for the most part ignored by the rest of the city. The city of Hong Kong announced yesterday that it is giving 6,000 HKD ($800 US) checks to all Hong Kong permanent residents over the age of 18 because of a budget surplus last year, yet the children in this part of town are going to schools where even if the kids can stay disciplined enough to graduate high school, most of them won’t have a good enough education to go to college.
As I have gotten to know some of these kids and seen the way they live (like the fact that many of them play in the same parks where numerous drug dealers hang out and run their businesses), it has broken my heart that they are so neglected by the rest of society. This has been a reality check for me, because I know there are similar situations to this happening all over the United States right now, some of them a 5 minute drive from where I went to college, and yet I did so little to help them during my time there. Why was this? And why is it that more Christians don’t get involved in helping out in situations like this? We worship a God who—when we were sinners—did not stay on His throne and say, “Well, that’s too bad, hope they can fix themselves,” but rather got off His throne, came to the earth, and died for us. We have suffering and poverty in our neighborhoods, and we can’t get up, turn off the TV, and go outside to play with children so they don’t have to spend their afternoon hanging out with drug dealers. What is the hope we are proclaiming to the world? Salvation by The Office? I sure hope we’ve got something more than that to offer.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Thursday’s Thought: Lessons from LDS
Last night, I went to a family from my church’s house, and they are hosting a couple of students for the week as part of a short-term exchange program. Both of these students are Mormons. While I was visiting, I talked with them for a while about their beliefs (a while being over 2 hours), trying to throw in questions every now and then comparing what the Bible (which they claim as one of their holy books) says to what they were saying. Throughout the conversation, I had a lot of thoughts come through my head, and I am here compiling some of them as this Thursday’s Thought(s):
• The kids knew their stuff. Every morning before school, they go to “seminary” (think: Bible Study on steroids), which is something that all LDS (Mormon) kids their age do. Because of this, they had a level of knowledge concerning the contents of the Bible and their other sacred texts that had a vast amount more depth to it than the level possessed by most (almost all?) of the kids in my youth group. Almost every question I asked throughout the night, they would have the answer right away, or they could look it up online (on the official LDS website, not through Google or Wikipedia) in a matter of seconds because they knew exactly which words to search for.
• It’s amazing the things people accept as truth when they place other things alongside the Bible as having the same level of authority as the Bible. For the Mormon church, this includes (but is not limited to):
o God was once a man, and all of us are the children of God and his wife.
o Heavenly Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are actually 3 separate gods with 1 unified purpose, which they call “The Godhead” (not to be confused with the Trinity). (I asked them a bunch of questions about this one, such as, “What about when Jesus says, ‘Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father,’ or, ‘I and the Father are one’?” One of them caught on to and pointed out the fact that our beliefs in this area are irreconcilable before I got a definitive answer to that one.)
o We are saved by Christ’s work PLUS baptism, obedience, and a few other things.
• Clever arguments don’t make converts, only Christ can do that. For all the money I’ve spent on being a Bible major at a Christian school, nothing I said and no amount of cleverness on my part could convince these guys that God is eternal, salvation is in Christ alone, etc. This is one that I have known for a while, but it was a humbling reminder.
• We should always be prepared to give a reason for the hope that lies within us. Yesterday morning when I woke up, the one of the last things on earth I would have expected to be doing last night was spending 2+ hours talking to a couple of Mormon kids about what they believe and what I believe, but it happened very unexpectedly. Encounters like this one are why we must constantly be saturating ourselves with the Word so we can be prepared when we need to be.
• The kids knew their stuff. Every morning before school, they go to “seminary” (think: Bible Study on steroids), which is something that all LDS (Mormon) kids their age do. Because of this, they had a level of knowledge concerning the contents of the Bible and their other sacred texts that had a vast amount more depth to it than the level possessed by most (almost all?) of the kids in my youth group. Almost every question I asked throughout the night, they would have the answer right away, or they could look it up online (on the official LDS website, not through Google or Wikipedia) in a matter of seconds because they knew exactly which words to search for.
• It’s amazing the things people accept as truth when they place other things alongside the Bible as having the same level of authority as the Bible. For the Mormon church, this includes (but is not limited to):
o God was once a man, and all of us are the children of God and his wife.
o Heavenly Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are actually 3 separate gods with 1 unified purpose, which they call “The Godhead” (not to be confused with the Trinity). (I asked them a bunch of questions about this one, such as, “What about when Jesus says, ‘Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father,’ or, ‘I and the Father are one’?” One of them caught on to and pointed out the fact that our beliefs in this area are irreconcilable before I got a definitive answer to that one.)
o We are saved by Christ’s work PLUS baptism, obedience, and a few other things.
• Clever arguments don’t make converts, only Christ can do that. For all the money I’ve spent on being a Bible major at a Christian school, nothing I said and no amount of cleverness on my part could convince these guys that God is eternal, salvation is in Christ alone, etc. This is one that I have known for a while, but it was a humbling reminder.
• We should always be prepared to give a reason for the hope that lies within us. Yesterday morning when I woke up, the one of the last things on earth I would have expected to be doing last night was spending 2+ hours talking to a couple of Mormon kids about what they believe and what I believe, but it happened very unexpectedly. Encounters like this one are why we must constantly be saturating ourselves with the Word so we can be prepared when we need to be.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
My Sermon
Hi,
I preached at my church this morning. If you would like to hear the sermon, it is online at:
http://218.189.225.94:44057/shares/share/20_Feb_2011_Don%27t%20Keep%20Quiet.mp3
I preached at my church this morning. If you would like to hear the sermon, it is online at:
http://218.189.225.94:44057/shares/share/20_Feb_2011_Don%27t%20Keep%20Quiet.mp3
Thursday, February 17, 2011
Thursday's Thought
Well, for those of you who haven’t heard yet, I am preaching at my church this Sunday. As of about midnight Saturday Eastern Time, the podcast should be available at ibc.org.hk (you will have to click the “podcast” button on the right side of the screen) if you would like to hear the sermon.
Due to the fact that I will be preaching this week, this Thursday’s Thought has to do with preaching. It is a direct quote from the book Power Through Prayer by E.M. Bounds, a book which I read last semester. When I was reading the book, this quote stuck out to me so much that I wrote it down on a post-it note and stuck it to the side of my computer screen in the office, which is where it is still located. Bounds said, “A prepared heart is better than a prepared sermon. A prepared heart will make a prepared sermon.” My prayer for this week: a prepared heart.
Due to the fact that I will be preaching this week, this Thursday’s Thought has to do with preaching. It is a direct quote from the book Power Through Prayer by E.M. Bounds, a book which I read last semester. When I was reading the book, this quote stuck out to me so much that I wrote it down on a post-it note and stuck it to the side of my computer screen in the office, which is where it is still located. Bounds said, “A prepared heart is better than a prepared sermon. A prepared heart will make a prepared sermon.” My prayer for this week: a prepared heart.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Third Thursday's Thought
Well, I’m back in Hong Kong, and my time in China has given me a lot to think about. I plan to write more about my trip (and include a few pictures) when I have more time, but for this Thursday’s thought, I have decided to share one of my most impactful thoughts from my trip to China.
On Monday, the day we (my friend Alfred and I) arrived in China, we dropped our luggage off in our room, grabbed lunch, then came back to our room and relaxed for the rest of the afternoon. I love to read, so relaxation time for me meant reading time. Although China limits the number of books they allow you to bring into China with you, they do allow you to bring books into China as long as they are for personal use and not for distribution. Because of that, I was able to bring my Bible and my Kindle into China without a problem. At one point during my reading Monday afternoon, I began to read the Bible. About a sentence into my reading, I was struck with the realization that there have been numerous people in China who have been sent to jail—even within my lifetime—for doing the exact thing that I was doing at that moment. I then realized that in all my life, I have never had to worry about reading my Bible. I can bring it with me wherever I want, and I don’t have to fear being arrested for being in possession of it. Really, the biggest “threat” I’ve ever faced from reading my Bible is that someone would see me reading it and think I was weird or a loser for reading it. I also realized that because of this, I have, throughout my life, taken my ability to read the Bible (on every level: from having the ability to read, to having proper translations of the Bible in my language, to having the freedom where I lived to be able to read the Bible with no fear of arrest, etc.) largely for granted. I was humbled by the fact that I possess multiple copies and translations of God’s revelation of Himself to mankind, and rather than treasuring that reality, I treat it as petty and insignificant; I take it for granted. This realization challenged me to view my Bible differently and gave me a whole new perspective on how great the freedoms are that God has given us. I hope it challenges and encourages you as well.
On Monday, the day we (my friend Alfred and I) arrived in China, we dropped our luggage off in our room, grabbed lunch, then came back to our room and relaxed for the rest of the afternoon. I love to read, so relaxation time for me meant reading time. Although China limits the number of books they allow you to bring into China with you, they do allow you to bring books into China as long as they are for personal use and not for distribution. Because of that, I was able to bring my Bible and my Kindle into China without a problem. At one point during my reading Monday afternoon, I began to read the Bible. About a sentence into my reading, I was struck with the realization that there have been numerous people in China who have been sent to jail—even within my lifetime—for doing the exact thing that I was doing at that moment. I then realized that in all my life, I have never had to worry about reading my Bible. I can bring it with me wherever I want, and I don’t have to fear being arrested for being in possession of it. Really, the biggest “threat” I’ve ever faced from reading my Bible is that someone would see me reading it and think I was weird or a loser for reading it. I also realized that because of this, I have, throughout my life, taken my ability to read the Bible (on every level: from having the ability to read, to having proper translations of the Bible in my language, to having the freedom where I lived to be able to read the Bible with no fear of arrest, etc.) largely for granted. I was humbled by the fact that I possess multiple copies and translations of God’s revelation of Himself to mankind, and rather than treasuring that reality, I treat it as petty and insignificant; I take it for granted. This realization challenged me to view my Bible differently and gave me a whole new perspective on how great the freedoms are that God has given us. I hope it challenges and encourages you as well.
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