Recent Readings

Following in the footsteps of the last On-Site Coordinators (Will and Karis Stemen) we have been able to do some reading over the past months (OTHER THAN THE BIBLE). Michaele is much quicker than I so she has taken on larger books. She has read “The Invisible Cure”, “The State of Africa” and Desmond Tutu’s “No Future without Forgiveness” and is now moving onto “Compassion” by Henry Nouwen. I have read “The Invisible Cure”, “Dangerous Wonder”, “Compassion” and parts of “the Next Level” by Scott Elbin. I am now debating whether to jump into “The State of Africa” or re-read “The Screwtape Letters” by CS Lewis… but I will probably end up reading both at once and taking forever to complete both of them…

I wanted though to share some thoughts from “Compassion”. It is a book discussing the centrality of compassion (suffering with) in the Christian life. Especially as God is allowing us to be in places where there are many opportunities to “suffer with”. The book highlights three ways that we are to have compassion.

1. Patience - This is a spiritual discipline of waiting on the Lord. Waiting until the Lord is telling us to move. It is a patience which, instead of charging ahead because I am uncomfortable, waits to work in his time and in his direction.

2. Prayer – In order for us to know how and where God wants us to be and how he wants us to respond we must be in prayer daily and momentarily to hear the direction of God over the noise of culture and pressures of our world.

3. Action – From the book “Prayer without action grows into powerless pietism, and action without prayer degenerates into questionable manipulation. If prayer leads us into deeper unity with the compassionate Christ, it will always give rise to concrete acts of service. “
In a place where I am obviously a foreigner in a foreign land I naturally want to take action to validate my time and my offering to God, and yet I have a desire to act on his prompting and in his direction more than I am drawn to act for the sake of action.

I am being reminded that the only lasting action here will be that which is to bring the love of God to these brothers and sisters.

And for those of you that know me you know that patience in the face of opportunity is something very hard for me.

I pray that where you are you can have the Holy Spirit given fortitude to take action when he directs and even more so to wait when we are being asked to wait.