If you raise support, and someone has ever asked you for prayer requests, you will understand this post.
There’s a sort of magnetic p Continue reading “The Passive-Aggressive Prayer Request.”
3 ways you can encourage hundreds of missionaries–without even leaving your computer!
I’ve written 122 posts on this blog. There have been 279 comments, and thousands of people from over 100 countries have checked us out, with upwards of 13,000 pageviews. That’s pretty cool, right?
I read once that you are not officially a blogger until Continue reading “3 ways you can encourage hundreds of missionaries–without even leaving your computer!”
Are you trying to be your own “enough?”
Support raising forced me to really face the core question of my life for the first time.
The question that would come to define the next decade.
The question that, if I’m honest, it’s still tough to ask.
It’s just three words. Those same three simple words have haunted me even since leaving vocational ministry. I’ve shed tears answering the same question over and over.
Is Jesus Enough?
For the first time in my otherwise easy suburban existence, in support raising I was faced with the rubber-meeting-the-road reality that I didn’t actually believe the gospel. Sure, I would intellectually assent to the fact that Jesus was big enough to care for my every need. But to say it with your head was one thing. To trust it with your wallet was entirely another. God was exceedingly gracious to me to allow my first “real job” to be in raising support, relentlessly trusting God to provide for my needs.
By no means did I do it perfectly. But I think that’s kind of the point.
My faltering, hiccuping faith that God would provide for me further underscored my need for a savior. My need to be rescued from my own religious tendency to try and save myself, to be my own “enough.”
It turns out, raising support was just the training ground.
Who is worse: Rob Bell, or…
Rob Bell blew up the conservative Christian blogosphere recently. It got me thinking. I wonder who is worse for the cause of Christ:
(1) A universalist ignoring the clear claims of Christ in Scripture,
or
(2) An arrogant fundamentalist (Me in college, and if I’m honest, still my default mode apart from the grace of God) angrily misapplying and weaponizing the clear claims of Christ in Scripture.
What do you think? Who is worse, me or Rob Bell?
Support raising, Laundry, and Pimples: A cautionary tale.
For 6 weeks during the summer of 2003 I didn’t do laundry even one time. And I could’ve gone for another three weeks, without breaking a sweat (metaphorically… I was in Florida in June, so Continue reading “Support raising, Laundry, and Pimples: A cautionary tale.”