Little Earth

Okay, I should totally be doing homework right now, but...

Instead of going to the church downtown for a normal Friday night kids club, we handed out fliers, with the help of a bunch of the kids, for an event that will be going on next weekend. The development we were in -- where a lot of the Friday night kids live -- was called Little Earth, and it's a Native American housing complex. It's actually a nice place, although packed really tight for the number of people living there, and, my word, Jessica is in love.

Going made me miss the Rez so bad, but I definitely have a new favorite place in the Cities. Those kids are gorgeous, and I very much did not want to leave after only being there such a short time. If Nicaragua didn't have such a strong, strong pull on my heart, I could easily settle down on the Rez or in a place like Little Earth and spend the rest of my life just living there and loving on those people. (If anyone has a cloning machine or some other magical way to reconcile the two worlds, please, let me know. It would make life a gillion times simpler.)

The rest of my team was very much in culture shock mode -- even more so than after a normal Friday night -- which shouldn't have surprised me as much as it did. Something about realizing for the first time that being white can be a detriment to ministry can take some processing -- I think it was the first time most of them had heard the phrase "I hate white people" come out of a kid's mouth, or any one's mouth for that matter.

Maybe I'm nuts for not being as shocked and appalled as they are, but, if I am, I never want to be sane. I never want to see those kids as anything other than beautiful. I never want to let the rough elements of Native culture and history prevent me from binding my heart to theirs. I never want to feel the need to apologise to someone after they spend time in Little Earth. I always want to remember, and I always want to care.

If I am insane, may God use it to his glory.

Pay it Forward

Have you guys ever gotten something -- maybe a piece of candy or a prize from your Sunday School teacher -- and then given it to somebody else instead of keeping it for yourself?

Sometimes people refer to doing that as "paying it forward," and I just got a chance to see God arrange a really cool incident of paying something forward.

God told me to give a specific amount of money to a friend, but I didn't have it with me at the time, so, I gave him an IOU and went back to my room to write him a check. Now, when you write a check, you have to put the person's first and last names on it, so that the bank knows that it really is theirs.

Well, I forgot his last name, and God told me not to give it to him with just a first name, so I gave it to him without any name in the "for" part.

The cool thing was that, before I had even given him the IOU, God told him to give a specific amount of money to a friend, and he knew he didn't have the money -- not in his wallet, not in the bank, not anywhere -- but he told God that he would do it.

It was the exact same amount that God told me to give him.

Not only that, if I had put his name on the check, he would have had to mail it to North Carolina before the money could get to his bank account to be given away, but, because that part was blank, he could write his friend's name on the check and give it straight to them.

That meant that, instead of getting the money next week, his friend got the money yesterday.

How cool is all that.

Romans 10:11-12

Gut Check

Wow! That's a lot of money!

Reality check number two of Jessica's week: Internship is coming faster than I thought it was.

In so many ways, the six months between now and Kenya feel like eternity, but deadlines are starting to creep up on me. By June 30th I have to have 25% of my budget raised or pledged, and the end of the month isn't as far away as it seemed a few weeks ago.

God is good though, and I'm excited to see how He brings in funds, both for myself and my classmates as we get ready for our internships with Bethany International Ministries. It should be good.

Old Man River

Call me naive, but, whenever I read about "muddy, brown rivers" as a kid, I would picture something like the Yakima -- kinda murky in a greenish blue water sort of way. I guess it never made sense that rivers could be actually brown without essentially being natural sewers.

I stand corrected. Rivers in Minnesota most definitely come brown.

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.