Angry

What makes you angry? 

Slow people at green lights.  People walking down the wrong side of the aisle at Walmart.  People chewing with their mouth open. Taxes. Someone not calling you back.  Verizon. The DMV. Walmart. Having to repeat yourself over and over. Rude people.  Did I mention Walmart? People entering through the Exit.

But lets be honest... those things are just inconveniences that shouldn't really make us ANGRY.  Lets think about the things that REALLY make us angry.  Like down in the depths of your soul, can't sleep at night, gut wrenching, mess you up kind of angry.  Righteous anger. Soul Sadness kind of angry.

Did you know that in China,Village family-planning officers vigilantly chart the menstrual cycle and pelvic-exam results of every woman of childbearing age in their area? If a woman gets pregnant without permission and is unable to pay the often exorbitant fine for violating the policy, she risks being subjected to a forced abortion.
THAT SHOULD MAKE YOU ANGRY

A recent NewYorkTimes article published this, "Almost every one of the pregnant women I spoke to had suffered a mandatory abortion. One woman told me how, when she was eight months pregnant with an illegal second child and was unable to pay the 20,000 yuan fine (about $3,200), family planning officers dragged her to the local clinic, bound her to a surgical table and injected a lethal drug into her abdomen.

For two days she writhed on the table, her hands and feet still bound with rope, waiting for her body to eject the murdered baby. In the final stage of labor, a male doctor yanked the dead fetus out by the foot, then dropped it into a garbage can. She had no money for a cab. She had to hobble home, blood dripping down her legs and staining her white sandals red." read the entire article hear

THAT SHOULD MAKE YOU ANGRY

There are more slaves in the world today than at any other point in human history, with an estimated 27 million in bondage across the globe. Men, women, and children are being exploited for manual and sexual labor against their will. A21

THAT SHOULD MAKE YOU ANGRY

 The NewYorkTimes wrote another article called The Face of Modern Slavery where they tell the story of a 6 year old Cambodian girl. "Srey Pov’s family sold her to a brothel when she was 6 years old. She was unaware of sex but soon found out: A Western pedophile purchased her virginity, she said, and the brothel tied her naked and spread-eagled on a bed so that he could rape her.“I was so scared,” she recalled. “I was crying and asking, ‘Why are you doing this to me?’ After that, the girl was in huge demand because she was so young. Some 20 customers raped her nightly, she remembers. And the brothel twice stitched her vagina closed so that she could be resold as a virgin. This agonizingly painful practice is common in Asian brothels, where customers sometimes pay hundreds of dollars to rape a virgin."
THIS SHOULD MAKE YOU ANGRY
(Make sure to read the whole story because she survived it all)

Did you know that in India, one of the hot beds of sex trade, children are sold into slavery as part of a religious tradition? Daughters are offered to temples as a gift. As young as eight or nine years old, these girls are used by priests for their sexual pleasure. When they’re older, they are sold into brothels.

ARE YOU ANGRY YET?

I believe that we are all created differently.  With different passions and different callings on our life.  I believe what fires one person up may not fire another person up. Or what pushes one to act and respond may only make someone else sad. I get that.  I get that the murdering of innocent unborn babies may ANGER some people and they find that must do something.  Where impoverished dying people may break someones heart in such a way that they must go and do something.  Or women, girls, children being kidnapped and sold for sex may make some shake their heads while other weep and protest. But one thing must be central to all that forces us into action....Jesus.  I believe that we must love Jesus in such a way that we must do something about these horrible things. The overflow of love that we feel for God sending his only son to die for us must be action.  So whatever angers you or breaks your heart let your love for Jesus be what fuels you to go and help. Anything less than that does not have any eternal significance and that is what truly matters.

Isaiah 1:17  Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed.Take up the cause of the fatherless;
    plead the case of the widow.

Some ways to help:
A21 Ways to help
A21


Focus on the Family has some articles and tools that I like.
Cause for Concern (although it was written 5 years ago :(
Sex trafficking  (Stats are outdated :(

~LL

Insanity

I having been reading the book Insanity of God by Nik Ripken . It is a book that has really opened my eyes and made me shake my head about many things.  I can't decide if I am more angry about the things that are going on in our world  (outside of the US) or the fact that I had no idea about those things that are going on.  Nik tells of his journeys all over the world and his encounters with people in the persecuted church. One man talks of persecution being "as normal as the sun rise".

It confuses my "norm" that Christians are put in prison, beaten, starved, and even killed simply because they profess faith in Jesus.  I understand the stories of the bible and how Christians were martyred  for their faith, but we are talking about today. In this century.

My "norm" is waking up in the morning choosing to read my bible... or not, choosing to worship... or not, choosing to proclaim Jesus through my life... or not.  To be honest I sometimes don't think I take these choices very seriously.  I sometimes choose one way or the other depending on my mood, my children, the busyness of my day, or day of the week.
But what if living your faith determined if you lived or died?  What if choosing to bow you head before a meal, could land you in jail for years?  Would you do it?  What if leading a friend to Christ or even telling them about Christ could get you killed and possibly get them killed? Would you tell them?  What if "going to church" didn't mean putting on your pretty clothes and going into an auditorium to be entertained. But instead it actually meant sneaking through town, hiding from police, talking in code, only to arrive in a dark basement where you sit on the floor of a small abandoned basement to sing quietly and recite memorized scripture.  Would you want to invite people to meet "that Jesus"? 

I am trying very hard to wrap my mind around how we live and worship vs. how the rest of the world lives and worships.  I don't quite understand why we aren't talking more about this in churches in our country. Why were aren't striving desperately to live and love Jesus with the same passion that our persecuted brothers and sisters do?
I guess because at the end of the day it is much easier to pretend like we (American Christians) are the only ones worshiping. It is easier to simply play dress up with our rose colored glasses and ignore the fact that their are more Christians who were martyred in the 20th century than in all previous centuries combined 160,000 Christians were martyred in 2010 alone (that we know of).
What we can do:
*Cover them in prayers.  We must pray that God will give wisdom and peace as they fulfill the great commission in completely different ways than we do. And we must pray that in their persecution God will continue to be glorified.
 
What we can't do is ignore it all.  We can't continue to operate as if this isn't happening. We can't be quiet with our children. We must teach them so that they in turn can teach. We have got to take our blinders off and support and pray for Christians all over the world.



What may seem like insanity to us, might in turn only be a distorted view of reality.

Pray!

Jesus teaches that if one member suffers, all the members suffer ...1 Corinthians 12:26





~LL