Chris Marlow Interviews Tom Davis

Recently, my friend, Chris Marlow, director of H.E.L.P. (Help End Local Poverty), interviewed Tom Davis, author of the recently released novel, Scared. I had the opportunity to meet and get to know Tom a few months ago... and his passion for issues of orphan care and extreme global poverty are contagious.

My friend, Vince Giordano, moved from here in Raleigh to Colorado Springs, CO just a couple weeks ago to work with Tom's organization - Children's Hopechest - which is doing incredible work to transoform the lives of orphans around the world.

I'm grateful for the opportunity to know these guys and to learn from them as they seek justice for people around the world.

Here's Chris' interview with Tom...

Tom Davis Interview from Chris Marlow on Vimeo.

Thoughts on President Obama's Speech in Cairo

While speeches don’t solve problems they do help set the tone and create the environment by which difficult and complex issues can be worked on. And we live in a day where there are several complex issues facing people all over the world.

Even leaders of some of our largest US companies are realizing (as a result of some huge failures) that to lead in today’s world requires listening and learning not just idealistic views that are communicated and adhered to regardless of what effect those views have in the real world and on real people’s lives.

The complex issues that President Obama addressed in his speech such as violent extremism, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nuclear proliferation, Middle East “democracy” and women’s rights are very complex and require dialogue not just monologue. I don’t think there will be progress made regarding those issues with one-sided, dogmatic thinking. And I think his speech paves the way for much-needed dialogue.

The US version of democracy is not necessarily the solution for other countries with deep and rich histories and with very different cultures and I believe we should be careful not to think our version of democracy is what is needed in very different parts of the world. As was said in today’s speech, “elections alone do not make true democracy.”

I am concerned that we, as US citizens, can be so US-centric. I feel like we are living in a day when we have a great opportunity to have a broader worldview, where we can learn about and grow to appreciate people who for so long have been “other”. But we sometimes come across like we are in a competition to be the best and most powerful nation on earth… and – for those of us who follow Jesus - our patriotism seems to trump our Christianity.

I think we would be helped by realizing that we are no longer living in the days of the Hebrew Scriptures (or “Old Testament”) when national boundaries were equivalent to religious ones. Jesus taught us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves….and he used an outcast like a Samaritan to drive that point home - a people group who were hated by Jews and today’s equivalent of a Muslim or a Palestinian.

I am concerned when it seems as though many people’s opinions are formed by email forwards or commentators who are predisposed to be against everything done and every decision made by the “other” party. This has been the case for years and happens from both sides of the aisle.

We have to be careful not to demonize the “other”… whether that is a politician who doesn’t share all of ours views or a people group who practice a religion that is so different than ours.

I think President Obama’s speech in Cairo this morning was marked by wisdom and given with the understanding that we can no longer use language and terminology that incites more hatred, war and destruction, but helps create the environment for dialogue, diplomacy and peace.

Some Christians may have a problem with recitations from the Qur’an in the speech, but it is important to note that Paul used a quotation from Greek poets to build a bridge in his communication with the philosophers in Athens (as recorded in Acts 17).

Yes, there are clear violations of human rights being perpetuated by predominantly Muslim nations, but there is a time and a place to address those issues and I don’t think today was the time nor the place. It is wise to “be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves” and to work in steps toward understanding and peace.

To draw a parallel with our work among the people of La Limonada it would be unwise for us to go into the community and try to confiscate all the guns and drugs from the people. It is best for us to sit down with them, to get to know them, to build relationships and to help lead them in steps out of a life of destruction.

It seems as though it is just as challenging for a nation to abide by the principal “love your enemies” as it is for us on a personal level, but I am hopeful.

There has been so much war, so much destruction and so much pain over the past several years as it relates to our relationship with the Muslim world. Too many mothers and fathers have had to receive news of slain soldiers. Too many Middle Eastern parents have watched their children die. But I have hope that another way is possible.

I Timothy 2:1-3 “I urge, then, first of all, that requests, prayers, intercession and thanksgiving be made for everyone — for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness and holiness. This is good, and pleases God our Savior..."

Challenges/Joys of Starting & Leading a New Organization

Ever since Lemonade International hit the one year mark in late March I have been reflecting a lot on the challenges and joys that we have experienced in the past year. It has been incredibly rewarding, but there have been some definite challenges along the way. Here's some of both from my personal experience.

I'll start with the challenges:

Time. It takes a lot of time to start an organization and a lot of time to move it forward in the early days. When I left my previous job I had a few people ask me if this new work would keep me busy for 40 hours a week. My response has been that it is hard to keep myself from working 70 hours a week. This is something I am passionate about and it's tough to pull away and create boundaries. There have been many late nights on the laptop and on the phone with our friends in Guatemala.

Money. While I knew it was a huge risk financially for me to leave my job last year to do this work full-time (when it didn't make sense on paper to do so) I wasn't prepared for the amount of focus I would personally have to invest in fund-raising for this work. I really don't want to be perceived as the guy who is always asking for money, but it has become clear very quickly that it takes money to keep moving this work forward. Even though I feel like we live fairly simple lives nothing stresses me out like money. It doesn't stress me out to raise funds for the direct work we are doing in Guatemala, but it is a very real challenge for me not to be stressed out about whether or not I'll be able to draw a paycheck in order to provide for my family.

Staying organized. There are so many dreams in my heart for expanding our work in La Limonada (e.g. microfinance, community development projects, specialized music and arts programs for the kids), but as it is with anything new I find myself focusing so much of my time playing catch-up. I concur with what @ericbryant posted on Twitter today, "I really want to increase the amount of time per day that I'm creating rather than reacting". I am adamant about responding to emails within 24-48 hours and it's easy to have four hours go by just doing that.

Now for the things that bring joy:

Devoting my life to something I am passionate about. It is exciting to get up each morning knowing what I do with my time is making a direct impact on the lives of the people of La Limonada. So may of them have become our friends and it is so energizing to know that what I do is helping to change lives. I thank God for giving me this opportunity.

Working closely with my wife. While I know this type of arrangement doesn't work well for everyone it has been so great to work so closely with Cherie. Somehow I was blessed with a wife who is so great to be around. She does so much to help Lemonade International to be a really solid new organization. Along with being an incredible mom to Ben, Alex and Miyah.... she works tirelessly managing our child sponsorship program and our donor database.

Working with a great team. Cherie. Leah. Donnie. Kate. Tita. Monica. All incredible people with huge hearts for God and for the people of La Limonada. These people inspire me every day to keep pushing forward with what God has put on our hearts to do.

Meeting incredible people along the way. In just over a year we have had the opportunity to meet some great people. People we didn't know a year ago have become close friends. God has brought us together through a mutual love and compassion for the poor.

Getting close to the heart of Jesus. Regardless of your religious background or worldview you have to admit that the poor and marginalized were closest to the heart of Jesus. And as someone who desires to follow him with my life it has been a great journey to work closely with people who are closest to his heart. When you get close to the poor you really end up learning so much more from them than you could ever teach them.

These lists really do ring true. The things that bring joy really do outweigh the challenges. That fact doesn't minimize the challenges when they are staring me in the face, but it does provide strength to push through them.

Philippians 3:14 "I press on toward the goal to win the prize
for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus."

A Re-Jesus Re-View

Re-Jesus: A Wild Messiah for a Missional Church by Michael Frost and Alan Hirsch is the first of (I hope) many titles I will read and review for The Ooze Viral Bloggers.

Frost and Hirsch pull material from their former collaborative effort, The Shaping of Things to Come and personal works, Exiles (Frost) and The Forgotten Ways (Hirsch) by reminding individuals and church communities not to forget that Jesus needs to be at the center of our mission.

Throughout the book they sound an alarm to the reader that Christianity's focus is Jesus. But they also creatively reveal that there have been many "pictures" (in some cases literally) of Jesus that have shaped not only our view of him but our living out what we think it means to be a follower of him (see Chapter Four: "Bearded-Lady Jesus, Spooky Jesus, Ordinary Galilean Jesus).

For the individual they claim:

"...it is time to recover a vital and active sense of Jesus: who he is, what he has done for us, the life he laid down for us to follow. His passions and concerns must become ours."

For the church community:

"...we believe that the church must constantly return to Jesus to find itself again, to recalibrate, to test whether we are indeed in the faith. The inference is that by and large the church as we currently experience it in the West has to varying degrees lost touch with the wild and dangerous message that it carries and is duty bound to live out and pass on."

While there are times that the book slips into more theological terminology than I was prepared for it is not simply for the audience of pastors and church leaders who will inevitably make up it's primary readership. All followers of "Jesus" (I intentionally used quotation marks because for some we may at times be following a different version of him) would receive a much-needed challenge to recalibrate our lives to the life and message of the true Christ revealed in the Gospels.

The straight-forward, no-holds-barred, yet conversational approach Frost and Hirsch take is the kind of jolt the church needs today. Where in many cases our "creative" and "relevant" sermon series packaged in TV show titles, our American Idol-looking stages, our trendy-dressing pastors, our Starbucks coffee-serving cafes and even our recent adoption of social/global issues have become the focus... we need to be reminded that:

"...we can hold up the models of church we find around us today... against the example found in the Gospels and the New Testament, and we can ask some serious questions about the disjunction we find there. It is time to recalibrate the church around the person of Jesus rather than around marketing ploys developed for a shallow consumeristic age."

Some find books like this to be attack on the church or look at those who say such things to be "anti-church". Frost and Hirsch provide a response to this that needs to be heard:

"...we have presented some rather pointed criticism of the way church is being done in the West. This has riled some readers and led some critics to suggest that we don't love the church, but we submit to you that it is our very love for the church that motivates us to write what we do. And besides, there is a difference between liking the church and loving the church the way Jesus commands us to. To be sure, we do not like gatherings of strangers who never meet or know each other outside of Sundays, who sit passively while virtual strangers preach and lead us in singing, who put up with second-rate pseudo community under the guise of connection with each other, who live different lives from Monday to Saturday than they do on Sunday, whose sole expression of worship is pop-style praise and worship, who rarely laugh together, fight injustice together, serve the poor together, eat together, pray together, raise each other's children together, serve the poor together, or share Jesus with those who have not yet been set free... But if it's a family of Jesus followers striving, no matter how inadequately, to be Christlike, holistic, peace-loving, worshipful, devoted, graced, holy and healthy then we will love it with every ounce of physical and emotional strength we have."

Re-Jesus is a glaring reminder for us to live a Jesus-centric life and for our church communities to be Jesus-centric in all we do. As followers of Jesus we have to believe that if we desperately cling to the Jesus of the Gospels we will be changed, our church communities will be transformed and the world around us will be moved forward in the redemption process in distinctly evident ways.

The Future Of Work

While taking my son, Ben, for a haircut this afternoon the latest issue of Time jumped out at me as I sorted through the stack of magazines on the table in front of me... as I frantically looked for something male-oriented (ESPN The Magazine, US News & World Report) to pass the time.

This particular issue of Time grabbed my attention because of the title on the cover, The Future Of Work, and the creative corresponding photo. For the first three years we have lived in Raleigh, NC (it's hard to believe it's been four years now) I worked as a recruiter and then a branch manager for Kelly Services, a fortune 500 company and a global leader in temporary staffing and outsourced human resource solutions. In my time there I was trained to be a student of the ever-changing job market and the state of employment in our city and beyond.

Even though that's not the world I am in today I still have a special interest in the shifts that are taking place in the workforce.

The feature story in Time addresses "Ten Lessons For Succeeding in the New American Workplace", and covers a wide variety of issues such as technology, corporate integrity, benefits, the absence of the traditional "corporate ladder" climb, the increasing influence of women in the workforce, and my favorite "The Last Days of Cubicle Life", which is written by Seth Godin the author of the best-selling book, Tribes (side note... I highly recommend watching the video below of a lecture given by Seth Godin).

I think corporations, organizations, churches, employers and employees would do well to be students of the shifts taking place in our world today. It's almost a necessity to recruit, retain... and more importantly to engage in meaningful relationships through the work we do.

From the cover of Time magazine:

"Throw away the briefcase: you're not going to the office. You can kiss your benefits goodbye too. And your new boss won't look much like your old one. There's no longer a ladder and you may never get to retire, but there's a world of opportunity if you figure our a new path."

What are your thoughts? Maybe it's time for you to pursue that new path?

Heading Back to The Land of Eternal Spring

While I have been back to "The Land of Eternal Spring" a few times since then... it has been since February of last year that Cherie and I have been in Guatemala together.

We are really looking forward to reuniting with Leah, Tita, the teachers, the kids... and Jocelyn and Suzy (the two girls in the photos above that we have been sponsoring for the past five years).

It was shortly after that trip that we followed our hearts to devote our lives to the work we felt God calling us to do there. A month after returning Lemonade International began and we moved into a new phase of our lives that has been somewhat of a whirlwind since then.

The book, The Barbarian Way, by Erwin McManus has been instrumental in encouraging us to step out into the unknown and to take risks (that don't necessarily make sense) and to give our lives in partnership with our Guatemalan friends to serve the people of La Limonada - an urban slum community of between 60,000 - 100,000 people.

Here are some quotes from that book:

"True religion always moves us to serve others and to give our lives to see those oppressed find freedom."

"A world without God cannot wait for us to choose the safe path. If we wait for someone else to take the risk, we risk that no one will ever act and that nothing will ever be accomplished."

"If you chose to make the insane decision to live your life for the sake of others, if you chose to follow the One whose barbarian path led him to the brutality of the cross, and if you embrace his invitation to take up your own cross and follow him, then it has begun. If you dare to allow God to unlock your primal spirit, He will unleash the raw and untamed faith within. Then you will know you have chosen the barbarian way out of civilization."

It still seems crazy to me at times that this is the path our lives have taken, but I wouldn't have it any other way. I'm thankful that God has directed our lives this way... and thankful that I get to serve Him together with my wife and our friends.

More to come from this blog and from the Lemonade Int'l Blog in the coming days...

Bono: Post-Easter Soul Searching

In Saturday's edition of the New York Times, Bono wrote a brilliant Op-Ed piece as a guest columnist.

He draws our attention to the rhythms of the Easter season; from Carnival (or for some "Fat Tuesday") to the "giving up" of Lent season to the celebration of new birth through the resurrection, he reminds us that as we reflect on this season there are parallels to our own lives. It is a time of soul searching. But it is a soul searching that should not only be personal... but global.

Here is an excerpt:

"I come to lowly church halls and lofty cathedrals for what purpose? I search the Scriptures to what end? To check my head? My heart? No, my soul. For me these meditations are like a plumb line dropped by a master builder — to see if the walls are straight or crooked. I check my emotional life with music, my intellectual life with writing, but religion is where I soul-search.

The preacher said, “What good does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his soul?” Hearing this, every one of the pilgrims gathered in the room asked, “Is it me, Lord?” In America, in Europe, people are asking, “Is it us?” Well, yes. It is us."

What should we do in response to our soul-searching?

"Lent is upon us whether we asked for it or not. And with it, we hope, comes a chance at redemption. But redemption is not just a spiritual term, it’s an economic concept. At the turn of the millennium, the debt cancellation campaign, inspired by the Jewish concept of Jubilee, aimed to give the poorest countries a fresh start. Thirty-four million more children in Africa are now in school in large part because their governments used money freed up by debt relief. This redemption was not an end to economic slavery, but it was a more hopeful beginning for many. And to the many, not the lucky few, is surely where any soul-searching must lead us."

The primary focus of the Easter season for followers of Christ should be his life, crucifixion, death, burial and resurrection... but the life of Christ was one of feeding the hungry, caring for the poor, reaching out and touching those who had been marginalized, challenging the religious institutions of his day. It is this life we are to follow.

As Jesus so clearly reveals to us in the parable of the Good Samaritan found in Luke's Gospel... we cannot walk by on the other side of the road while people of other nations, tribes and tongues lie there beaten and bruised.

We have to go to them, bandage their wounds, pour in oil and wine, put them on our donkey, take them to the inn, give our silver coins and make sure they are taken care of. After all this we may even need to go back, check in on them and give some more.

This is a picture of redemption.