I’ll get back to talking about brain dumping again soon. I promise.
In the meantime, I want to share with you a little Christmas cheer. The other day I had my good friend Jennifer over. She was telling me about how she is planning on heading to meet with family for Christmas. Apparently, her parents rank at the top of the stack for dreamers at Christmas time. They want it all - -and they send her an itemized list prior to the holidays, so she can prepare… and save up her money.

Well, this year, she decided to buy them a llama. “A LLAMA?!?” You heard me right: a llama. I could hardly contain myself. Her logic went something like this, “Well, Katrina… It generously helps a family in the south, and it cost about the same amount of money I would have spent on them, and if they complain about it, they’ll have to live with themselves… it’s great.”

Needless to say, I could barely stop laughing out loud. At first, I thought she had physically bought them a pet. Then she mentioned Heifer International. She proceeded to describe a little toy llama she had bought for her family as well. “I’ll put in a box with a card, so they’ll have something tactile.” Brilliant. And the heifer website gives you a printout of the gift you’ve purchased, too. It’s great.

I knew about Heifer before this, but I never connected it with Christmas time. It’s great if you’re doing some last minute shopping. You don’t have to walk into any stores— you just print the card and hand it over. And it’s a great conversation piece. Merry Christmas!

Its been a good weekend for movies. Last night we watched The Last Mimzy, which was like E.T. and the Matrix somehow combined. Tonight we watched Edward Scissorhands one which I YET to EVER see. Both were absolutely wonderful allegories…parables for life.

The Last Mimzy reminds us of the pure nature of the child, and therefore humanity, and how our world’s culture of distrust and isolation ultimately leads to complete annihilation. It is a commentary on the preciousness of human life, and how each person has a crucial role to play in the desperate fight to reclaim that preciousness found in themselves. This movie suggests that as we mature, we lose our ability to actualize the divine gifts we’ve been given, and spend the rest of our lives trying to convince ourselves that we are in a world destined for destruction. For me, it was a powerful reminder of who I am in Christ - a child of life.

Edward Scissorhands was hilarious and awkward, as are all Tim Burton/Johnny Depp films. I was drawn into the heart of the “monster” (Frankenstein anyone?) and the “beauty and the beast” elements were pretty clear too. But the real villain was our humanity; we humans can’t be happy without social equilibrium. If something (or someone) too “other” comes too close to us and what we cherish, we are at best temporarily intrigued, and ultimately we are threatened and outraged. The townspeople in this flick use and abuse the gifts of love that Edward shares (he gives a mean haircut) but then turn on him the moment he is vulnerable. The only friends he has are those who accept his differences as more than just the “fascinating new thing” and see his pained soul deep within. What might happen if we were to learn from diversity, rather than wallowing in our culture of homogeneity?

— — —

In both the theme of “isolation” is given comment. Mimzy says that our isolation breeds distrust, war and destruction, while Ed says that mixing together only brings confusion, conflict and death. How does humanity deal with the fact that we are so very different, yet in absolute NEED of one another? Can we ever learn trust? Or…do we even need to?

Joel News continues to inspire! Read this article below about the commitment of Chinese children to their LORD:

Sister Jing, who has taught children and trained Sunday school teachers all over China, shared the following inspiring account how children in one province in China stood firm in their faith when they were arrested by officials.

Sunday school was in full swing for more than 30 children when the sound of vehicles interrupted the class. Before the children even had time to put away their books, public Security Bureau officers burst into the room, confiscated ‘incriminating evidence’, and unceremoniously herded the children into a van.

By now the children knew what was happening. Their teachers had warned them it might happen one day and had taught them what to do. Now their time of testing had come.

As the van sped toward the police station, the children clung together to steady themselves. Then one child started singing. Before long, the van was filled with song as all the children enthusiastically joined in - much to the annoyance of the officials in the van.

Upon arrival at the police station, the children marched bravely into the interrogation room still singing, “In the name of Jesus, we have the victory.”

This was not the cowering group of children the police interrogator had anticipated! He began to threaten the children, telling them they would have to write “I do not believe in Jesus” one hundred times before he would release them. Instead, the defiant children wrote, “I believe in Jesus today. I will believe in Jesus tomorrow. I will believe in Jesus forever!”

Unprepared for such a strong stand from young school children, the officials weren’t sure how to respond. In exasperation, they called the children’s parents. When the parents arrived, they were told the children would be released only if the parents said they were not Christians. Because many of the parents were not believers, they readily affirmed they didn’t believe in Jesus and took their children home.

But when a widowed believer came to pick up her twin sons, she refused to deny Jesus. The officers threatened her, “If you do not deny Jesus, we will not release your sons!” Unshaken, the widow replied, “Well, I guess you will just have to keep them, because without Jesus, there would be no way for me to take care of them!” Exasperated by continued, unexpected resistance to their threats, the officials said in disgust, “Take your sons and go!”

We thank God for stories like this because we know that children are the future of the Church.

Great times over the weekend.

Friday night was the big night - TMNT came out in theaters!!! The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were an epicenter in my growing up years, and for the last several years they have been a means of deep, meaningful, personal reflection…and kick-butt ninja action!

The flick was CGI, so you felt like the 5th turtle as you watched mutant turtles with bulging muscles swinging and flipping across NYC’s skyline. The story was all about how after the Turtles defeated the Shredder, they couldn’t find a real reason to stay a family - so they begin to drift apart. What unites them is learning to appreciate each other’s unique strengths, rather than using each other to defeat evil. An interdependent team of 4 rather than a 4 person (turtle) team. Sounds a lot like Ephesians 4! (What’s with the four’s in this post?)

So in honor of the ninja turtles, me, my bro, and some others dressed up in ninja turtle garb and ran into the movie theater, with ninja kicks and “hi-ya!”s. When all the kids saw us, they literally flipped out, especially the younger ones. Some actually thought we were REAL ninja turtles, and one asked me if I liked pizza. We had a pre-show ninja fight, which got us really pumped up for the flick - and got the kids screaming with delight. I’m sure the parents loved us…

Saturday was our second ACU “Discover Abilene” day. Its basically a day of missional prayer, where students and anyone else interested head out all over town to “see what God is already doing” in our city. We sent them out in 28 groups of 2, and gave each a certain zone to pray over. Agent B apparently saw one of these groups take a picture of Obi Wan’s house, which is just goes to show that God truly is placing “workers (or secret agents) in his harvest field” (Luke 10:2).

As we discussed on Saturday, its not that there isn’t enough work to be done, its just that there aren’t enough harvesters!

Trina and I went down to an area with a lot of retail and coffee shops, as well as a lot of post WWII houses and a new uppity neighborhood with huge lawns and sparkling cars. Among houses, we saw old-run-downs next to old-but-maintained, with huge mansions-with-corvettes just a couple of blocks away. It made me wonder what all these people could really have in common.

At one of the coffee shops we visited, there is a fountain that is usually turned off. What good is a well that has no water? Trina and I discovered that part of our job as missionaries is to find those wells that don’t have any water, and to help those at these dry wells learn how to retrieve it.

Christ is the living water - and people dig down to find a distorted version of that life at coffee shops or mini malls, or sometimes at church buildings or lots of other places people gather. But entertainment and coffee is not the deepest, most satisfying aquifer we can find. Missionaries call on people to dig deeper at their wells; to discover the living water that awaits them - that lives within them!

It’s strange having ACU Lectureship in September.

Of course, we still have torrential rains and unruly weather (at least the first day), which is of course only part and parcel of the whole Lectureship experience.

One thing I think is just great is that my lovely wife Katrina, who married a nerdy little bible major and hung out with lots of my bible major buddies, is the first to be a speaker at Lectureship; with an art degree! How ironic.
Over the summer, she’s been working on a series of pieces regarding the suffering in Sudan and Northern Uganda. It has been facinating to journey with her in the emotions she has felt for this part of the world. A rage…(How could this be happening for so long and no one here knows about it?)…a confusion (much of her earlier artwork shows a lot, but some is not accurately reflective of the actual events going on in that region)…and hope.

Hope is what brought her to speak today before the curious crowd today. Hope told her that within each child soldier is a seed of promise - that things will actually turn out right - that there is a new King coming to set the record straight. A kind of king that binds up the broken, busts the slaves and prisoners out of captivity, and shouts at the top of his lungs that the Lord has come to bring comfort for those who mourn. Katrina’s paintings were a glimmer of that new Kingdom - a shadow of what we can already see breaking in to our hopeless world.

Yeah, Lectureship is strange in September- I am beginning to think that almost anything can happen…