Category: Causes

this & that

Here’s another batch of links that wouldn’t be a waste of time (in my opinion).

  • If you’re like me, you’ve wondered a time or two if there is a way to discern what to do or not do in the next phase of your life… and what God wants you to do and how you can find that out. Well, here’s a good start. “How to know the will of God” by Tim Challies is actually part of a series that you should definitely read.
  • So, apparently the new iphone is CRAZY awesome. So much so that movies (REAL movies) are ’bout to be made with it. Check out the comparison of the new iphone with a Canon 5D MKII (a really good camera).
  • I always like to give musical suggestions and I don’t mind if you don’t share my taste. Take it or leave it, I’ve been enjoying the The Steel Wheels recently and think you might too. You can get an album for free at Noisetrade!
  • Are you into watercolor? Or maybe you just know good art when you see it? You should check out my good friend Natalie Groves. She writes a blog on the painting process and you can see some of her pieces. If you liked the movie Miss Potter, you’ll LOVE her style and stories! Here’s one of my faves:
  • If you’re getting stuck when you start thinking about what you could make for Christmas gifts, here’s a good place to start: Pinterest. Check out this list for Christmas DIY.
  • I read an article awhile back, an interview actually with Alisa Harris, author of the recent book, “Raised Right.” She grew up in a very fundamental Christian home and the book is about her journey untangling her faith from politics as she grew older. She is now married on the East Coast and still holds to her Christian values without being ultra-conservative like her parents. Of course, I haven’t read it but I would be so interested to see what she has to say.
  • This article by Paul David Tripp seems especially poignant in my current life phase. Read, “5 Reasons God Calls us to Wait” and let me know if you think the reasons are good enough to put us through the waiting ringer. 🙂
  • This link is the ultimate downer, so be prepared. The Atlantic published the article “World War II: The Holocaust” and with it a collection of photos. As hard as it is to view, it’s a reminder of human depravity and despair.
  • I don’t have children yet, but when I do they will NOT have a TV in their bedroom. “In the Danger Zone: Raising our Children in the Age of the Screen” is an article from Albert Mohler that should scare us out of the nasty habit of having the television on.
  • And last, because I want to end on a funny note, check out this Rowan Atkinson skit. It’s hilarious. Good, old fashioned comedy right there.
Happy Monday, folks!
Posted on by Caroline 2

Mission 2011: Here I am. SEND ME!

Our theme verse for our week of focused mission service comes from Isaiah 6:8,

“Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”

Our preparation has a beautiful, frantic fragrance this week. We are running around arranging, buying, planning, and chasing details like one chases a beach ball across a lake on a windy day. One thing is for sure: God is completely sovereign. Even in the foibles, I can claim this as true. I thought some of you might be interested in reading through the short devotionals for each day this week. I’ve included the passage (taken from The Message Bible) and the few questions I’ve asked the kids to ponder. Pray with us as God humbles our hearts and uses broken vessels to reveal His great Light of salvation!

Throughout the week, students will be updating on my blog to give direction to your prayers/praises and most importantly to give God the glory for the overflow of love. So stay tuned this week!

Continue reading →

Posted on by Caroline 0

affirm-entum

Choose one of the following descriptions:

  • Espresso machines whir in the background of a coffee shop/art gallery where laptop computers provide electronic lighting, in addition to the vintage-looking lamps strategically (yet somehow sporadically) placed on end tables and hanging from unfinished ceilings. The aromas of imported, fair trade coffees seem a perfect backdrop for an emotionally charged philosophical discussion on the cultural implications for human rights violations in the country of Ukraine (thanks to a recent blue book exam in Modern European History class).
  • Classic carafes filled grace every perfectly stressed, re-claimed barn board tabletop. Modern color combinations inspire placemats and name cards in the exclusive party room at the uppest of scales restaurant where the sounds of the city’s highly sought after jazz ensemble drift just under the murmuring conversation about the topic of the gala fundraiser: human trafficking.
  • An improvised family dinner, featuring items in the fridge and pantry nearing expiration, quickly evolves behind 12 foot cement walls and coils of concertina wire. The small, makeshift table overflows with potluck plenty and every fresh-from-college, penniless international volunteer settles in for the patchwork courses and three cups of tea to follow. The meatless menu curves conversation around to an all too-high-brow discussion of frightful fast food production and the undeniable consequences on the modern child.

Do you recognize these scenes? I do. I can put myself in each one, or a variation at least. These scenes play like merry-go-rounds in my generation.

In a recent conversation with a close friend, we were lamenting our generation’s increased probability to begin (and become passionate about) movements and the equally probable end result: to bail out. We are obsessed with the idea that we can be a significant part of change but equally obsessed with the idea that we are entitled to choose NOT to. In this way, all our passion is like a high speed motorboat leaving havoc in its wake. We are good at starting things, planning things, dreaming things, and especially thinking about things – and it’s good to start, plan, dream, and think. But, in five or ten years, will all these efforts be about us or will they be about a different object?

Don’t get me wrong. Understand that I wonder these things because I am continually indicted by the person of Jesus Christ to examine my own motives and tendencies and this is one of those times. I love a passionate conversation, over coffee or wine, but I’m wondering if our convictions carry less commitment because of their root.

I wonder if our convenient conversations would bring anchoring commitment if grounded in the person of Jesus Christ instead of a cause.

We make and break commitments every day to each other, with excuses salt and peppering our well-planned withdrawals like seasoning on a mediocre steak. We expect people to back out because we back out. It’s just kind of the reality for generation Y: don’t expect too much, but then there’s a chance you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Enter my newest created word: affirm-entum.

[af-er-men-tuhm]
–noun
the movement resulting from the assertion that something exists or is true

You would have guessed rightly if you surmised this word is the wedding of affirmation and momentum. I think they will live happily ever, don’t you?

After several minutes of frustration-directed conversation, my friend suggested it would make much more sense to just start encouraging one another. Isn’t that what we’re called to do, in Christ (“encourage one another and build each other up…” 1 Thessalonians 5:11)? This immediately inspired thoughts about causes focused inwardly on the cause itself as opposed to causes focused on a solution in the future.

Why don’t we first assert what we know to be True. Christ is our one perfect example of man and Christ constantly reminded us of our purpose to exalt God rather than to exalt man. Christ pointed to God (and, Himself by association) as the fixed point in the distance. An assertion that this is True (the Gospel) will most definitely be followed by movement.

On a practical level, I am wondering if this means our coffee shop study groups, elite charity dinners, and friendly potlucks should all share this most important fixed point. If our passionate discussion comes from and leads to passionate proclamation of who Christ is, then we are inviting movement toward that fixed point in the distance. People will surely change along with their commitment level, but if we hope for true, significant change then we must defer to the only constant.

This must be our affirmation and encouragement to one another, so our efforts are not motivated by passionate anti-ideas, but rather by the positive agreement that God is greater.

.

.

.

Oh, goodness. I may have just ran around in wordy circles just now. In any case, can you please,

let LOVE fly like cRaZy!
Here’s the sermon that provided some of the inspiration:
Posted on by Caroline 2

thank you, for giving to the Lord

There was a Ray Boltz song that my dad really liked called, “Thank you.” Actually, I think I might have sung it with him once or twice. Today, I thought of that song as I made this video with my students who are going on the mission trip on March 6-13. Each of these students have stories of lives changed by someone’s willingness to share the message of the Gospel. Now, they are taking that hope and boldly walking in faith to share the message with communities around them. We are so thankful for sponsors and support from our teaching staff and community here, but we couldn’t figure out how to express our gratitude for the ones far away. This specific video is a thank you to the church in little Atlantic, Iowa… where the people have hearts WAY bigger than the town!

I hope your heart is as warm as mine after hearing their grateful hearts! These kids are such a beautiful reminder that God is forever moving and working in our hearts to bless others. Each time I hear their testimonies or witness their crazy lives in motion, I praise God for his faithfulness. There are other sponsors as well, from both the States and here and we continue to be so thankful for God’s provision through them!!

Posted on by Caroline 3

joyful readiness

Here is a combination of things (or is it more of a process of things) that will bring joy to my soul, without fail.

students learning/loving God’s Word –> responding to spiritual/physical needs around them –> bridging cultural gaps by one great need of a Savior –> God is glorified and we are satisfied

I’m not sure if this process/combination makes sense to you, but my heart understands completely! Coming up on March 6-13, eight of my students will embark on a mission trip to a nearby community. We have been preparing through Bible study, prayer, testimonies, and many organizational details. I keep hearing this beautiful phrase, “Miss, I want to be different and make a difference.” Every time a student says some version of this declaration I get a little more excited about what God is doing in their lives. He is moving in marvelous and mysterious ways to bring glory to His name and true, deep satisfaction to His servants.

Please join with me in prayer for these students as we prepare for this mission trip. Below they have written their prayer requests and I would love if you prayed for them by name. We are also relying on God for financial provision in this endeavor, so please pray we will believe in His faithfulness.

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I love this quote from John Piper, “To be humble is to be a servant. They are not the same. But humility leads to joyful readiness to do lowly service.” I hope and pray that we will enter into service with this kind of joyful readiness!

let LOVE fly like cRaZy

Posted on by Caroline 0

fathers be good to your daughters… and sons too

This is one of those “been-a-long-time-coming” posts.

I remember calling my dad’s cell phone randomly while working in Texas several years ago and just saying, “Thanks, dad. I know this may not make sense, but I just need to say thank you for doing what you do and being who you are.”

I was spending all my days with college age students at work and some nights with the junior high youth group girls. Over and over and over again I heard about broken homes, a spirit of distrust, and a very real longing from these girls to know their fathers and be known by them.

I’m a fixer by Nichols nature, but as I listened to these stories one thing was certain: this was out of my league.

In every case, every 12-year-old and every almost-20-something, I searched for words and came up speechless. Now, several years later, the stories are piling up like postcards from similar destinations: despair, loneliness, anger, betrayal, pain, and sometimes hope. Those are the ones I like best – the hope ones. The others are ones that make my heart hurt. Those destinations are hard to explain, but they seem to keep arriving at my doorstep.

Tonight, during our Bible study on God’s design for women, my heart broke again for all the girls in my life who have a hard time picturing God as a loving Father. If a father is someone who is silent and distant… or two-faced and secretive… or always offering empty promises, then it is hard to picture God’s role as our Father much differently.

Oh, this hurts! In the French film Amélie, the little girl’s father is a doctor and her mother is a headmistress. They are each particular about different things, but neither very particular about showing affection to their one daughter. One scene read almost exactly like one of my sad story postcards. Amélie, who looks about 5, sits like a statue while her father takes her heartbeat. Her face is emotionless, but the narrator informs us that she, like every girl, wants nothing more than to be hugged by her dad. Since he keeps his distance, she longs and treasures this yearly checkup – where he always finds her heart rate abnormally fast (due to her excitement in being near him).

Almost daily, I am reminded that I have no answers. Nothing I can say today from my mind or heart will hold up tomorrow and will certainly not pass through the many worlds separating me from the home lives of the girls who are so precious to me. I know of only one thing that is true always and it’s the unchanging Word of the Lord. I know without that infallible Word, all of my words will fall flat.

As long as I’m on the subject… there are a few things I wish Dads knew. John Mayer’s song, “Daughters,” scratches the surface of the longing a daughter feels to be loved by her dad, but (not surprisingly) it isn’t strong enough.

Fathers, be good to your daughters
daughters will love like you do

It was simple enough to capture the attention of a whole crowd of daughters who wished for what this nebulously suggests, but I wish this song spelled out specifics.

Fathers:

  1. Be transparent about your first and greatest Love. For many daughters, your faith is a secret. You might go to church or you might have a Bible, but your ideas and convictions are as hidden and elusive as treasure on a child’s treasure map. It’s okay to be somewhere in the growing stages of your faith – in fact, it’s refreshing for us daughters to know you haven’t “arrived” yet. When your daughter can see you admit you need God, her heart and tenderness toward you will grow, but more importantly you will have pointed her gaze to the Father that never fails.
  2. Love your wife. One of the greatest ways you can love your daughter is to love and serve your wife. When they see you honoring, protecting, partnering, laughing, enjoying, and living in a way that reflects God’s design, they will be confident as you lead the family AND you will give them an excellent example of a husband. (This is especially important in those years where you cannot relate to your daughter. When nothing makes sense, love your wife well and I promise your daughter will see it!)
  3. Choose to be around. Your daughter will feel special that you’ve decided the best place for you to be in that moment is with them.
  4. Get personal. Some of my favorite memories with my dad are simple ones that we shared while we did chores together on the farm or as we drove out to a football game or prepared our animals for county fair. Every discussion doesn’t have to be deep, but if you open up first then you’ll gain your daughter’s trust and she’ll likely reciprocate (even if it’s not right away).
  5. Encourage, praise, love the God-honoring things your daughter does and push her in those things to be excellent. I’ll never forget my dad’s insistence that I study that little spelling book in preparation for the elementary spelling bees. My dad still types on the computer with his pointer fingers and English wasn’t his strongest high school subject, but when he found out I could put letters together in the right order, he was going to make sure I did it excellently. Those little things (though I assure you I didn’t love them at the time) made his love for me so obvious.
  6. Be gentle. Your daughter will appreciate well-placed words and respectable silences.
  7. Be good to your sons, too. Your daughters are smart. They will see the way you are leading and guiding your sons. Right now they are probably making mental notes in their heart about whether their dream man will act like the father and brothers in their lives. Many hold desperately on to the hope that it can be different. If they have to rely on Hollywood, they will be hoping for something unhealthy and unrealistic. But she’s got a front row seat for what a man should look like, so show her!

I don’t know where all this came from, but it is so my heart to encourage men to be men as God created them. I just read this blogpost the other day and it’s a slightly different tangent, but with the same bottom line – that men would be true men.

let LOVE fly like crazy

Posted on by Caroline 4

giving PRESENCE this Christmas

I intentionally didn’t start out my post yesterday with an apology because I wanted to get right into the strangeness of my gym encounter. Today, I want to post an ENORMOUS slideshow to give you an idea of what the last two weeks have been full of: PRESENCE.

Awhile ago, I posted a video from Advent Conspiracy that challenges people to give more meaningful gifts of time and hand-crafted gifts rather than breaking the bank. Here it is again, if you missed it:

I haven’t quite felt up to pounding out life at the keyboard because there’s been a LOT of presence-making! I finally got my handmade gifts off to the States, via someone’s suitcase and now I’m working on finishing up the ones I still need to deliver here. There’s A LOT of baking going on, to be sure. It could be granola, sugar cut-out cookies, pumpkin cake, or a number of other things… but there’s ALWAYS something to do in the kitchen this time of year.

Well, enjoy this slideshow. I hope it lets you peek in and kind of sit with me as I go about being present this Christmas.

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Posted on by Caroline 1

movement madness

A little while back, I mused my frustrations in this blogpost about the fashion of movements these days.

I rambled on about the ultra distracted, rarely committed, highly energized generation we seem to have become. Our obsession with trends, revolution, and being a part of something “bigger than ourselves” with buzzwords like “countercultural” is a thin veneer. Sometimes, the “make a difference” slogans and painted posters in picket lines advertise self-promotion instead of a cause. We are deathly afraid our lives won’t matter, so we join the loudest crowd, learn their clever chants, and march in their lines, hoping our existence will amount to something.

It scares me to think about what will happen when the fad passes… when it is less trendy to identify with the broken and hurting in our world…

When we realize the $80 shoes aren’t that cute and we’ll never meet those barefoot kids. When we realize how awkward it is to wear a shirt that has the words “sex” and “trafficking” in bold letters.
When we realize the chants we are shouting actually require us to buy less, have less, and give more.
What happens then?

I’m not always this cynical, but I want to ask these questions of myself and our generation because I am concerned. I’m not worried. I believe the Creator of the universe has a plan to restore all of creation and that plan cannot fail.

I am concerned because we are given a very clear, very serious command to respond (not just with angry outbursts and clever marketing) in a very human way to the needs we see in this world (Isaiah 58).

I hope we can understand that at the end of the day, after all the cause-claiming blogs have been written and all the cause-supporting merchandise has been sent, that caring for the broken, the hurting, and the needy in this world is first and foremost a human responsibility. We can give up on t-shirts and recycled bags or move on to the next fad, but let us not lose sight of what is most important…

If the roots of our motivation reach deeper than trends to the rich soil of God’s heart, we will see that responding to the needs of the broken is not a cause…

it’s a lifestyle.

Just so you know I can be optimistic, too, here are some links that I think encourage the right kind of movement:
Love in Stereo
Nomi Network
Dalit Freedom Network
Gospel for Asia
International Justice Mission
Strategic World Impact

Posted on by Caroline 2

art is dead. your death killed it.

I was talking to one of my very talented, very artistic friends recently and he made this strong suggestion:

“Art is dead.”

At first, it didn’t sit very well. The period at the end is so… so defeating. If this statement stirs up a response, even indignation inside you like it did me, then I wonder why. Why are you offended by this idea that art and creativity have died a painful death?

I’m offended because I want to believe it’s not so. Somewhere deep down, beneath the indigestion and tortillas, somewhere in that “gut” region people refer to when talking about instincts, I refuse. Something in me revolts at the finality – there is no room for explanation. Just a period and that’s it.

It’s like falling off the monkey bars on the playground and landing flat on my back. I’m laying there, with the wind knocked out of me, unsteady and unsure of what just happened.

After I caught my breath, I realized I agree with him. Nearly everything “creative” these days is a well-dressed marketing ploy to respond to our basest desires. With all our technology and supposed intellectual advancement, we tread the very same trail to bark up the very same tree, whose roots reach only as deep as our most carnal desires.

Instead of searching for music or entertainment that makes us think and question and understand life, we look for a spoonful of sugar so that (what we pass for) art goes down easy. We don’t want art to challenge us or move us or convict us because… well, that doesn’t feel good. We want to take in a movie like we take in the uber-buttered, theatre popcorn… without thinking. We want to walk out with our heads bobbing, digesting the plate full of artistic pudding without questioning the grumblings in our bellies for something of more substance.

The second part of my friend’s thought took a step closer to my offended spirit. He suggested I’m to blame. Art is dead and my death killed it. I again had to shake the shock of such a suggestion, but again arrived at a convicted conclusion. I agree.

How can something dead make something living? How can an unconscious potter work with clay? How can life come from death? We re-work the same ideas, plots, notes, melodies, story lines centered around sex, money, jealousy, and greed. Then we pronounce it “version 2.0” and, with some clever advertising, have people believing they are consuming something that has “never before been seen.” I almost apologized just now for being so cynical, but I held back because it wouldn’t be genuine.

The Original Creator took great care in designing the smallest details, from the juice pockets in oranges to the strange mating habits of penguins. Creation is so complicated that we will never, ever exhaust its intricacies. If we let ourselves marvel, we will never be bored and the subject will never be dull. Never.

How does God accomplish this? How does He keep our attention?

He lives.

This is certainly not the end of my musings on this subject, but please chime in with your thoughts!

Also, I read this article over at The Gospel Coalition and I really appreciate the views on creativity, the arts, and the church.

Posted on by Caroline 0

social networks; freedom networks

Dalit girl, Andhra Pradesh, India
Image via Wikipedia

Thanks again to social networking, I’m making more amazing connections. Yesterday, via Twitter, I talked with The CO, a band who shares a love for Honduras (Troy came here in July) and also a love for living a life redeemed with a purpose to restore. The band promotes the Dalit Freedom Network through their music and presence on Brite Revolution. I love how they are using the gifts God has given them to make louder the call to respond to the broken.

The Dalit Freedom Network works in India to restore the dignity and freedom of the lowest caste (Dalits).

This is the kind of thing that gets me excited on a Tuesday… social networking that supports freedom networking.

Seems to me like it

lets LOVE fly like CrAzY

Posted on by Caroline 0