3.17.2007

Spring Break 07

I spent my spring break in San Antonio, Texas with 60 college students, 1 charter bus, 9 soaking wet tents and 5 days of non-stop rain. We worked with the homeless in the city. It was an amazing trip for so many different reasons. We stayed in this gorgeous camp ground called Paradise Canyon, set on the Medina River fed by natural hot springs and surrounded by a rock face canyon wall. The only problem was it started raining on our second day, flooded our tents and soaked all of stuff. So all 60 people moved into this small cabin we happened to rent out for the week on the land. I have never seen community build like I saw there, constant brushing up against people formed this amazing bond.
While we were there I started reading this book called The Irresistible Revolution by Shane Claiborne. It is a autobiography of sorts of this guy is living out the Way of Jesus through his ministry to the poor. It is quite fascinated, convicting and down right disturbing. He is doing the very simple commandments in the bible in his daily life, the ones we like to idealize and never actually do, the ones we sit at Starbucks and discuss and never actually put into action. He says this about giving to charity,
"It is much more comfortable to depersonlize the poor so we don't feel responsible for the humna failure that results in someone sleeping on the street while people have spare bedorooms in thier homes. We can volunteer in a social program or distribute excess food and clothing thourh organizations and never have to open our homes, or beds, our dinner tables. I'm just not convinced Jesus is going to say, "When I was hungry you gave a check to the United Way and they fed me, or when I was naked you donated clothes to the Salvation Army and they clothed me." Jesus is not seeking distant acts of charity. He seeks concrete acts of love: "you fed me..you visted me in prison, you welcomed me into your home...you clothed me."
Very interesting...so am I, by blogging about this, being another detached Christian who loves to idealize the way of Jesus or am I seeking to change my very nature and act on what I know to be the command of Scripture?

1 comments:

Katie said...

I liked that passage so much I stole it. :-O

hope you don't mind. lemme know if the book is a good read. :-)