Our first ever missions team from City Community Church started their trip with a bang.  Or perhaps more of a splatter.

After 24 hours in four different airports, a very close call catching a flight out of Miami, and 8 lost bags (which are still lost by the way), the CityCom “crew of 22″ spent their first day in La Ceiba plastering cinder block walls.  Or, well, sort of.

Note to humanity:  learning to spread concrete plaster is an art form that cannot be learned in a few short hours.  I’m “constructionally challenged” to begin with, and this project did nothing to boost my self esteem.

For many, this was a first hands-on taste of abject poverty.  And even with time let me tell you, this is no acquired taste.

In this environment absent of anything resembling our American way of life, this team longs to bring hope. But standing in the middle of a Honduran slum, something that seems so unnecessary, so fixable, you get this uncanny sense that God is near. That His presence is tangible, even in what we would consider incredible discomfort.

And maybe even more so.

So after being here just a few short hours, I wonder what’s more likely this week in La Ceiba.  Will we bring hope into the midst of their poverty, or perhaps find some hope for our own self-sufficiency?

Maybe a little of both?  Time will tell.

I don’t think I was the only Christian to bristle at conservative commentator Glenn Beck’s strong statements this past week against churches that support, or even use the term, social justice.

“I beg you, look for the words ‘social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words [for Communism and Nazism]. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!”
-Glenn Beck

I’m a white, middle-class, suburban-raised, Evangelical christian, so you can quickly deduce toward which side of the political aisle I naturally lean.  And while I do understand what’s at the core of Mr. Beck’s concerns, I think he’s wrong.  Or at best misinformed. Although I’m sure I could never out-argue a pundit of his wit and verbal capacity, I at least want to share my own personal awakening as it pertains to the issue of social justice.

People are broken.  And spiritual leaders, unfortunately far too often, fall victim to using their influence to manipulate God-fearing people towards their own human, political perspectives. There’s no doubt that some pastors push social justice, and the ultimate “God-said” trump card, to promote liberal personal agendas.

But so do conservatives pastors.

And rather than digging for God’s truth, we use Him as as circumstantial support for our selfish motivations.  We form sides aimed at protecting our way of life, rather than submitting to The Way that is greater.

Here’s the (probably) overly-simplified way I see it:  Conservatives desire to preserve personal freedom.  Liberals wants to mandate universal fairness. And depending on which side of the equation benefits us most, we go to battle.  But what if there’s another way? A third option?

The Bible unfolds God’s perspective, His ideals, His Kingdom. The way I read it, God is all about freedom and all about fairness. The catch?  What happens when free people willfully choose to use their freedom to serve one another?

“It is absolutely clear that God has called you to a free life. Just make sure that you don’t use this freedom as an excuse to do whatever you want to do and destroy your freedom. Rather, use your freedom to serve one another in love; that’s how freedom grows. For everything we know about God’s Word is summed up in a single sentence: Love others as you love yourself. That’s an act of true freedom. If you bite and ravage each other, watch out—in no time at all you will be annihilating each other, and where will your precious freedom be then?” (Gal. 5:13-15 MSG)

Mandated justice never works. It spirals towards corruption. Even God Himself doesn’t mandate we follow Him (without choice there is no love).  That’s why I love America, because this freedom gives us unbridled opportunity to live out God’s Kingdom calling.  But only if we choose it.  When we willfully submit to serve, we truly become free. We willfully begin to make right the injustices that permeate the world.

Let’s be clear, the Kingdom of God is certainly not only about social justice (if it were, every secular Hollywood mogul and rock star would have achieved sainthood).  But to ignore the justice thread and call to serve the poor woven throughout Scripture is plain ignorance. Dangerous.  Incomplete.  A puzzle with missing pieces.  A stool with missing legs.

So here’s the ultimate question:  Are we building God’s Kingdom or just fighting to preserve a way of life? What are you willfully submitting to?

I don’t always like answering that one either, but it’s worth asking.

Sorry for another video post, but I have to put this out there.  Love bragging on other people, and my friend Mike Perez deserves some major kudos (not just for his talent, but because he embodies in his life everything he expresses in his art).

Many of you have already heard Mike’s spoken word piece “Just Worship” that he so powerfully shared at the close of our City Community Church message series called [blank] last month.  Well, Mike and one of my other favorite creatives, Adam Bocik, re-recorded the audio and set it to music along with visual images.

Enjoy…and do us a favor, pass this along to other people who need to remember what real worship is all about.  Thanks for the reminder Mike.

My friend Geoff Wybrow hit me with a challenging statement yesterday:

“Offend people with the truth, not your character flaws.”

Some days we offend people with our brokenness, our insecurities, our selfish motivations, with the baseball bat of our own pain that we willingly or unwillingly take to the heads of others like an angry mafia boss (sorry for that visual, I’m a big fan of the movie Goodfellas).

But at times the truth really does hurt.  At times it should hurt.

Most prophets in the Bible weren’t real good at making friends.  Their words were too piercing, their obedience too radical, the Spirit of God too active in their declarations.  Isaiah walked around naked for three years, Hosea married a prostitute, and the prophet Nathan (no relation to my buddy LaGrange) called King David a liar and a murderer.

Bad social skills or insider’s information on some hard truth?

This past Sunday at City Community Church, we were confronted with some hard truth.  Not condemnation – that outward-in, man-made, guilt-ridden obligation that leads to resentment, not long-term transformation (Jesus never worked that way).  But conviction – an inside-out revelation from the Holy Spirit that shows us our brokenness and calls us to repentance. I want to share some of it with you.

Here is the video created by Rachel Richard that interrupted (yes, literally interrupted) the music towards the opening of the service (don’t adjust your volume, there intentionally isn’t any):

And click the link below to hear the powerful spoken word piece (this is a must listen) from our friend Mike Perez that brought the day to a close:

Just Worship: Mike Perez

And if you’ve got more time, linked here is the complete message from my friend and co-pastor Nathan LaGrange:

[blank]: Dismantled: Nathan LaGrange

Love to hear your thoughts.  Have you ever been offended by some hard truth?

Comment at http://www.beyondtherisk.com

You can see a lot in someone’s eyes.  Joy, fear, peace, happiness, hunger, pain.  Even after six weeks, I’m still processing my experiences from La Ceiba, Honduras…mostly when I look into the eyes of my own children.

The eyes on the left belong to my 7 year old daughter Anna.  I’ve met very few girls as care free and in love with life as this little one.  She spends her summer days playing with dolls, dressing up like a princess, riding her new purple bike, and playing with her friends.  She’s getting a passion for fashion, so it’s not out of the ordinary to see her in five different outfits on any given day.  And in the midst of all her carefree summer daydreaming, when Anna looks into the future the possibilities are endless.  Actually, it’s involuntary.  She doesn’t even question it, because she innately knows her future is full of limitless potential if she’s willing to pursue it.  She has the creativity, the relationships, and the culture around her to make it happen.  You can see it in her eyes.

The eyes on the right belong to Lourdess, a 7 year old girl we met in La Ceiba.  She lives in a square, wooden-box of a house with cardboard for “drywall,” about the size of our family room, with her mom and dad (a rare blessing in this community) and a plethora of brothers and sisters.  Dad is constantly struggling to find work in this depressed economy, but unlike so many other fathers from the neighborhood, has chosen (at least for now) not to leave his family for work in the USA.  Lourdess loves to play, too.  She had a doll, some crayons (she even gave us a picture she had drawn), and an old worn-out Disney princess dress.  The same dress hangs in my Anna’s closet here in Indy.

But as I wrote from Honduras, the greatest struggle for me is not the lack of money or even the awful living conditions.  It was in the eyes.  The hope, the encouragement, the possibilities that impulsively fill the gaze of my little Anna aren’t even in the lexicon for Lourdess.  In fact, when we asked many of these young children about their “sueños” (or dreams of the future), they required further explanation.  Not only did they have no vision for the future, they had no context in which to even understand the question.

Honestly, I don’t know what to do with all this.  Guilt is not a valid motivator, and God doesn’t use condemnation to push us in His direction.  But I do know we all need to embrace the journey, to ask God what He wants from us.  He never holds us accountable for what we don’t have, but He has high expectations for us to properly use what we do. That’s why we’re partnering with organizations like Mission of Mercy to try and do what we can to make a dent into the hopelessness we encountered in Honduras.

How do we fill both sets of eyes with the same limitless hope?  Not hope for the American way of life which is found in a temporary, man-made culture; but the Hope of the Creator of life, the limitless God-possibilities woven into our very being and intended for eternity.  The truth is, you don’t have to go to Honduras to find the injustice of hopelessness.  Just look into the eyes all around you.  Time for God’s people to right that wrong.

Poverty sucks.  It didn’t take me too long to determine that.  Bet you don’t disagree either, even if you’ve never touched it, tasted it, or smelled it for yourself.  As I walked the streets of Las Delicious, a small shanty-town community in La Ceiba, Honduras, the reality of what I knew existed was literally all around me.  It’s almost as if my brain instinctively compartmentalized, packaging up the things it could process and eliminating the pieces it didn’t know what to do with.  No one should live like this…dirt floors, cardboard box walls, scraping for food, families of six all sleeping in a room smaller than my master bedroom closet.  But it wasn’t the lack of money or resources that bothered me most.

Hope had left the building.  There was none.  Nowhere to be seen.  When these little kids…kids with names and faces and eyes I could stare deeply into…when they look into their future, they see nothing.  Nothing.  There is no vision of better circumstances, of greater opportunity.  There’s no encouragement to discover the fullness of the “Imago Deo,” or image of God that is imprinted into their very being.  Creativity is smothered by lack of vision, and the untapped creative potential in these little faces was the hardest thing for me to digest.  They live in the slums, they are the slums, and they will always be the slums.  That is a recipe for hopelessness.  And that, my friends, is the worst of injustices.

How do we make that right?  I guess that’s the million dollar question.  I think it starts somewhere inside of me, with the realization that I actually have something of value to offer.  Money?  Sure.  Resources are imperative to solving this crisis.  But perhaps the single greatest thing we can offer another human being is hope.  That obviously starts with Jesus Christ.  But encapsulated in that is an opportunity and responsibility for me to help someone else look into their future and see what God originally intended.  To pull back the weeds, clear a pathway, remove the rubble that keeps them from seeing God’s vision for their lives.  I can do that in Honduras.  And we will.  But I can also do that in the lives of those I encounter every single day.  Will we?

Hitting the sack here in Honduras after a long travel day.  Two short flights with one long layover.  For the record, if you have 5 hours to kill, I would strongly suggest you not do it in the San Pedro airport.

Tomorrow we head out early to help with a new Mission of Mercy mobile dental clinic.  In the afternoon we visit the first of three future sites for MoM childrens centers.  City Community Church is hoping to get in the mix literally from the ground up here in La Ceiba.  We’ll meet the local pastors, get a hands on view of the area, and spend time visiting the homes of the families and children that will be affected by the presence of this center.  It’s sure to be a wildly emotional day.

Please pray for us, that we see clearly what God is already doing here in La Ceiba and know what part we have to play in seeing it become reality.  More to come soon.

The name of my blog unfolded from a huge dose of sobering reality. I’m a relatively “safe” person…plan, figure things out, pick the logical, safe route…always follow the voice of God, but really take your time and make sure you’ve analyzed all possible outcomes and know all the risks involved.  You know…hedge your bets.  Eliminate the unknowns. Not all bad, unless you allow it to control you.

Fortunately, I’m learning an important yet difficult lesson:  the amazing adventure of following Jesus is found beyond the risk.

As Gary Haugen, the president of International Justice Mission says in his book Just Courage:  “Do you want to be safe, or do you want to be brave?” I don’t want to live as if the purpose of life is to arrive safely at death.  I’m far from being there, but I hope this blog documents well the life of a man striving to discover the heart of God that lies beyond the risk.