What an Experience...

i am sitting again in the airport...this time in kansas city...

i just spent the last 6 days building a house in juarez, mx with 23 other people for a family who desperately needed it....and it was amazing!

we saw God in so many different ways....i saw students moved to tears and processing through so many things...God messed us up in a lot of ways...i was reminded of how incredibly selfish and entitled i can often be...and there was so so so much more. i hope to write more about it in the coming days, but i want to share two things that made me so sad and so frustrated...

as i mentioned a few days ago...there is much negative media coming out of juarez right now concerning violence in drug trafficking...and as a result there are many people and many teams that are backing out of working with casas por cristo and building houses for families that really need them...

and this makes me so sad and so upset with and for two groups of people...

first, it makes me sad and upset with the american media...because the picture that the media paints about juarez mexico was NOTHING at all like what i actually saw and experienced. as a matter of fact, if i hadn't heard stuff through the media, i never would have guessed any of it was going on at all. it really makes me feel like the media simply cannot be trusted....it makes me feel like they are just like so many other businesses...just interested in numbers and not in truth...

is that to say that bad things aren't happening there...no, of course not...but it is so sad that there representation of what is going on in juarez is keeping incredibly needy people from receiving a house in the name and Christ...

and secondly, it makes me so sad and upset with american christians who allow themselves to be scared by the threat of a lack of safety when it comes to following the call of the Lord. it makes me realize just how domesticated and civilized we are becoming as american christians. it is as if we have taken God's call to "go and make disciples of all nations" and turned it into "go and make disciples of all nations as long as it is safe". and that is simply not the case. it wasn't safe for so many people in scripture...it certainly wasn't safe for someone like John the Baptist...so why do we seem to think that we deserve a guarantee for safety?

these are a few of my frustrations right now...hopefully in the coming days i will find some time to elaborate on some of the amazing ways that we saw God show up and some of the amazing ways that students were being changed and processing through different things...