another letter came in the mail for chris and me from linet, the girl we sponsor in uganda. that is three letters in the three months that we have been sponsoring.

“i want you to know how much my family and me love you.”

yeah, i got a bit misty eyed from that.

her birthday is sunday…i wonder what she’ll be doing?

it’s really easy for us to see how a seemingly nominal $32/month and the occasional birthday or christmas gift is helping her. i wish it was just as easy for her to see the difference she is making in our lives.

shaun was right. a trip like this will morph your life. i can’t believe it’s been three months since we’ve been home. honestly, i thought the emotions would wear off by now.

until i realized what i am experiencing isn’t emotions…it literally is a complete and unexpected reformation of my spirit. even though chris wasn’t able to go on the trip with me, god has been reshaping his heart too. we look at everything so differently now. it’s made our marriage stronger. it has changed the way we spend money. the way we look at the world. the way we look at the poor, the rich, and ourselves. we pray differently. we hope differently.

around 30 children have been sponsored from this site. i mentioned earlier that you all purchased at least 110 mosquito nets.

your lives are being changed, too. it’s been beautiful to see us all walk through this in different ways, together.

i haven’t posted a specific child who needs a sponsor for a while, but i thought i would today.

this is gipsi. she is five years old and lives in columbia.

In her home, Gipsi helps by making beds and cleaning. She lives with her father and her mother. Her father is sometimes employed and her mother maintains the home. There are 2 children in the family.

Gipsi is not presently attending school. Playing with dolls, playing ball games and running are her favorite activities. She also attends Bible class regularly.

gipsi has been waiting over six months for a sponsor. i pray that wait will end today. and i am assured whoever takes a step into this little girl’s life will be just as changed as she will be.

CLICK HERE TO SPONSOR GIPSI. please make sure you do not click the “select this child” button unless you are sure you will be sponsoring her, as doing so will make her sponsorship page unavailable for an hour or so, and someone else might miss their chance. thank you…

if you try to sponsor gipsi, but it says she has already been sponsored, you can always search for a child here!

a few people i known have referred to blogging as a grown up and online version of high school. you have all your stereotypical groupings…the cool kids, the nerds, the teacher’s pets, the testosterone-driven, and the moms.

(yes, the moms. i grew up in west texas and in high school, the moms had their own table. but i digress.)

based on the description of others, evidently i sit somewhere on the cool kids table. but since punctuality is not in my nature, i consider myself to still be standing in the lunch line, waiting on my rectangular pizza from a greasy lunch lady named helga.

(but again, i digress.)

i used to watch my stats and analyze them all the time. how did i stack up to others? will i ever break 100 subscribers? 500? 1000? will i ever break 100 authority on technorati? 300? 500? can i hit 10,000 pageviews a month, 30,000, 75,000?

let’s just say i became a little obsessed. especially since the giants of this blogging business are mainly men…i wanted to be the cool little sister who was able to follow closely behind.

to confess: jealousy was a commonly played tune in my head. all the cool kids went to all the cool conferences. they got free stuff. they met each other and it was all off the hook. i mainly sat behind my computer.

if only i could be one of them. if only…

and then i realized…

even if “if only” happened…would i really care?

don’t get me wrong. i love my blogging brethren. i have met many of my fellow bloggers in person and they are sharp, and they are amazing. they are impacting the church culture in so many ways.

but me? my heart and my passions are expressed in different ways. and that’s just peachyfine by me.

for example - i am not a conference-going kind of person. i am not uber-extroverted leader, and speaking to a billion other uber-extroverted leaders would probably make me curl up in a ball and suck on my thumb until jesus comes.

it took a while, but i finally realized that it’s not a large amount of influence that matters.

it’s the right kind of influence.

so, i look around.

kids living in poverty are being sponsored left and right because of the community on this blog. over 100 malaria nets were donated from the community on this blog. pastors who were broke and needed help were helped, mission trips were funded, people were prayed for, addictions were spoken about, and ultimately…god’s name has been glorified by this community BEING the church in relational and missional ways.

this blog isn’t about me. it is about us. a group of believers reflecting the love of christ to the world in a million different ways.

that’s the right kind of influence.

thank you for being a part.

i recently got a copy of jesus brand spirituality, a book by ken wilson, which came out this week. anyone who knows me well knows i love reading, but i read so much, i really only skim books to find nuggets that will stick with me.

this book, however, had me sucked in from the first couple of pages. technically, it had me sucked in from the title. last weekend, i read it in about three hours and highlighted/underlined so many things in it.

i’m going to have to do another post just to share all the insights, but i thought i’d share the first chunk with you now.

i should also say that nobody asked me to review this book…this is straight up out of my own felt need to share this book with you and express that i think it is one of the most important books any church leader or believer could read.

with that said:

• we can only hope jesus will continue to challenge every effort to hijack his brand, because he is, and always will be, the main attraction.
• jesus invited curious onlookers to help him do what he was already doing so that his actions would have greater impact…there were no faith quizzes to pass before you could help out; all it took was the willingness to go somewhere with jesus because you liked what he was doing.
• jesus was a mystic who prayed with his eyes open
• the roman empire embraced christian faith as the state-sanctioned religion. this in turn gave birth to the monastic movement as devout individuals sought a more spiritually enlivened form of faith, removed from the trappings of the empire (*my thought: we are on the cusp of this again, with people getting worn out from “trappings of the empire” and are longing for a deeper, more Christ-like faith)
• since religion can both illuminate and obscure jesus, sometimes we need to dig to find him. a good place to dig is the gospels. here, we find jesus on a mission from god to repair the world. in his glance, we catch an invitation for us to join him.
• caring for the most vulnerable isn’t a matter of compassion alone; it’s a demand of justice and the true sign of religion.
• as we engage with the realities that engaged jesus’ attention, we are more likely to encounter him.
• the gospel is a message with personal, social, and global reach. if it’s not good news at all these levels, it’s not good enough.
• have we front-loaded people with so many matters of belief that we are, in effect, asking them to swallow the whole package as a pre-requisite for a meaningful engagement with jesus?
• as a result of our long and productive love affair with rationalism, we tend to suffer from an anemic view of what we call “spiritual experience.”

anything resonate with you?

if you’d like to get your own copy…you can get it right here! i seriously can’t tell you how much this book rocks.

(note to my mom and grandpa. please don’t read this post. thank you). :)

remember it is the week of hot sex over at one of the blogs i contribute to, deadly viper. we’re having an honest and biblical discussion about seldomly addressed questions about sex.

yesterday, my friend mike blogged about gay fantasies and homoeroticism. today, it’s my turn with sex toys and videotape…

here is what i wrote…i am closing comments here so please leave your comments there today!
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We got a lot of questions about sex toys. Someone even asked if making a video tape of two married lovers was Biblically alright.

Before we got married, Chris and I went through several weeks of premarital counseling — one or two weeks included what was okay in the marriage bed.

The key word in these questions isn’t vibrator or video, but BIBLICAL. And since these things weren’t really hanging around thousands of years ago, the Bible doesn’t literally state, “thou shall not have edible underpants.”

So, what does the Bible say about the yays and nays of sex?

1. Fornication/Adultery - Sex outside marriage either physical or mental/emotional (1 Corinthians 7:2, 1 Thessalonians 4:3, Matthew 5:28)

2. Homosexual acts - (Leviticus 18:22; 20:13; Romans 1:27; 1 Corinthians 6:9)

3. Orgies - (obviously violates #1 and sometimes #2)

4. Prostitution - (Leviticus 19:29, Deuteronomy 23:17, Proverbs 7:4-27)

5. Lustful passions - (having someone or something you can’t have - Mark 7:21-22, Ephesians 4:19)

6. Sodomy - Contextually in the Bible, this is a homosexual act between men. It is not referred to as anal sex between a man and a woman.

7. Incest - (Leviticus 18:7-18; 20:11-21).

So, what does this mean??

We are free in Christ, and we are free in our marriages - as long as we don’t do something that the Bible forbids. Paul says that nothing is unclean in itself in Romans…and that everything (within God’s law) is permissible. This doesn’t exclude what happens in the bedroom.

So…if a guy and his gal are BOTH cool with using some toys to enhance their love life, it doesn’t violate any Biblical principles, then…rock and roll with it, sweetheart.

For a porn-free, Christian based “Marital Resource” store (wink, wink)…go here - http://www.book22.com.

*Special thanks to Linda Dillow & Lorraine Pintus who covered this topic in their book, Intimate Issues.

What do y’all think?

COMMENT HERE

one would think i think entirely about boobies too much.

over the last week, i have had some great conversations about my thoughts on boobies, part 1 and pete’s rendition of it on his blog as part 2.

so far, the conversation has slanted towards things like lust and fantasizing and a guy’s reaction.

today, we’re talking about how the boobies might affect the ladies.

women, generally speaking, are notorious comparison makers. i know i am, and if i’m not careful, it can take over my thought life. women check out other women — not so much because we get turned on — but because we, either consciously or subconsciously compare.

for example, let’s say i see a woman at the mall.

in about .005 seconds, my mind has already compared:

-height
-weight
-hair
-how well dressed they are
-skin & complexion
-chest, stomach, junk in the trunk

and if i “win” i feel good about myself. if she “wins,” i feel like the most hideous person on the planet.

(please realize, this illustration is by far the comparison thought process at its worse, not the norm.)

the situation presents to me two choices. i can either bounce my eyes (which is what i try and do most of the time, instead of checking someone out and playing the comparison game) or i can do just that. stare and compare.

and let’s face it. when people wear less clothes, people tend to be noticed more.

now, i realize this does not place every ounce of responsibility on that person (especially if he or she doesn’t know any better).

i love what eugene cho wrote when he discussed part 1 and part 2 on his blog.

MY SIMPLE TAKE: We’re all responsible for our own selves but we can’t dismiss that [Christian] men and women are called to mutuality, partnership, community, and fellowship. Simply, we don’t live on an island to ourselves.

could the way women dress cause other women to stumble? it can put our heads in the wrong place too, if we let it.

CompassionBloggers.com - WOW. from the first time brian mentioned the trip to me, to now, three months after returning from uganda, i don’t think anybody really knew the impact blogging could make in releasing children from poverty. well, needless to say, it has blown everybody’s stinkin’ minds.

shaun (in between wearing a dress and a cute little girly hat, and hanging out with cuban assassins) has been working really hard on this site which connects bloggers and children to the world. the next blogging trip is in november, and he is looking for people to go that want to passionately explore this new road of getting children sponsored and having their own lives changed forever. oh, and you can also post about 2873 cool widgets and stuff on your blog.

VISIT COMPASSIONBLOGGERS.COM NOW! :)

WeTheChurch.org - i love prayer. i love praying for others, and hearing how god is working in their lives probably more than anything in the world. it is powerful and transforming.

my friends chad and scott launched an amazing site called WeTheChurch.org. people submit either prayer or praises — keeping their thoughts within 140 characters like twitter — and from all over the world, people can pray and celebrate with them.

my favorite part of this site is that i can get new prayers/praises in my twitter feed. let me tell you there is nothing like reading,

“A friend’s father had a massive stroke today, in ICU, doctors said he has 50/50 chance of surviving, if he does, he’ll have permanent damage”

in between the daily tweets of “at starbucks” and “my cat barfed up a hairball.” it’s divine. truly.

CHECK OUT WETHECHURCH.ORG and FOLLOW THEM ON TWITTER.

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in all the craziness, i have had some great posts brewing in my head this week that i haven’t fleshed out. thanks for hanging in there with me.

what site or blog have you been digging lately?