“There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.”

-Mahatma Gandhi

I had an interesting conversation this morning over coffee. There is really no need to give you the details, but the subject was on “The Prosperity Gospel”. The main question that came up over and over again was “Does God want you Rich?”
My short working answer was I don’t think God cares. It seems to me that anytime Jesus made any reference to being rich, it was to someone who was already rich, and when being rich was talked about, Jesus was usually telling someone to give away all that they had to the poor.

Jesus never spoke a sermon about how to make money. He never asked anyone to give a faith seed. He never told anyone that God wanted them to live in a huge house drive a nice care or where expensive clothes. But, he also never said not to.
I don’t think that Jesus really cared if people were rich.He did care if they were poor.
It seems like when he was dealing with the rich, he was always trying to stir them into helping the poor. He was always hanging out with the poor, the sick and the outcasts.On more then one occasion Jesus fed people who were hungry.
Does God want you rich?I don’t know, but I know he doesn’t want you hungry.
Today is Blog Action Day. A day when bloggers from all over the world try to shed some light on a single cause: Poverty.

My life is all about building the church.

I love the church.

I really do believe that the Church of Jesus Christ could change the world.

I believe that the church could and should be the greatest social activists on the planet.We could bring food, medicine, water… Jesus.

We could be the solution to poverty.

There was a boy in the Bible that fed 5000 people with some bread and fish.How did he do it? He just showed up with what he had.Of course, he had to put down his picket signs, his political agenda, his boycott letters, and his overall prejudice of those “not in his group”… oh, wait a minute…no that’s us.

I am not being judgmental myself. In fact, this post is more for me than for anyone. As I type this, I could not tell you when the last time was I helped someone less fortunate than me, and that’s sad.

Maybe, hopefully, today is a day of change for me and others…

There are alot of great places that are doing alot of great things to try and destroy poverty in this world. Some are Christian, some are not. All of them are doing a great job.
Go to BlogActionDay.org/resources to find out who they are.One great organization I would recommend would be Somebody Cares.

It’s Wednesday night, about Midnight, and it hits me… “I’m supposed to speak in chapel tomorrow!” Not a problem. I go into my room, set my alarm for 6am, and sit down to think and pray about what I should speak on. After an hour or so, I go to bed.

It’s 6am, I jump up, get in the shower, get dressed, grab my bag with all of my stuff for the day and start to walk out the door. Just as I was about to leave, something catches my eye. It’s a clock. A clock that reads 4:30am. Yeah. That’s right, I woke up at 4am misread my alarm clock and was about to be 3 hours early for chapel.

I get back in bed, thinking I might be able to get a little more sleep… and I do. I wake up and realize it is 7:20am. I’m late.

I redress and run out the door.

I speed across town, praying that I am not going to be so late that it completely ruins that whole schedule of the school, never to be invited back again.

I pull into the parking lot of the school at the exact time that I was told chapel was going to start.

I grab my bible, jump out of the car, and quickly make my way toward the building that I think is where the school holds chapel.

As I am walking to the door, I am met by the principle. I immediately start to apologize for being late, which is one of my personal pet peeves, so you can imagine how I feel when I am the one who is late.

The principle just looks at me and says, “No problem. Chapel isn’t until next Tuesday.”

So I wasn’t late. I was early… real early.

But the good news is I was at the office before anyone else!

Right out of bed yesterday, my day started… frustrating.

I am not a person who stresses. In fact, I can’t remember the last time I was actually stressed out. I do however get frustrated.

I really cannot nail down anything in particular that does frustrate me, most of the time it is something that I can’t do anything about. Whenever something comes up in my life, I usually ask the question, “is there anything I can do about this?” if there is than I do it, if there is nothing I can do, I get frustrated.

Yesterday morning was one of those days that I had exhausted all of my options in a situation that I was dealing with and it started to get to me.

I am a Christian, I believe beyond a shadow of a doubt that God is in control of my life, and that he not only knows whats going on in my life, He wants to be an active participant in my life. I believe that, but sometimes I don’t remember that.

Yesterday, in the middle of my “crisis”, I was reminded what it says in Matthew 7:11:

“How much more shall your Father which is in Heaven give good things to them that ask Him?”

Once that sank in a bit, and I started to let some things go, BAM! things in my day began to turn around!

It ended up being a great day!

Did all of that days problems go away? No.

Is there anything new I can do in order to fix the situation? No.

Am I worried? No.

A wise man once said:

“Everything is coming up Milhouse!”

-Milhouse Van Houton, The Simpsons

The other day I am sitting in my office working and I notice something… It’s quiet.

Normally people would not find anything wrong with that, but since it was just me and my two year old daughter Reese, quiet is usually a bad sign.

I yelled out, “Reese, what are you doing?” and she responded, “PLAYING”, but it was not just her telling me what she was doing, she said it in a way that meant, “nothing dad, leave me alone, don’t come in here.”

I got up, went to our room where she was playing, and found Reese sitting on our bed, completely covered from head to toe in Lindsay’s make up.

The make up that didn’t end up on her face was smeared all over our bed.

When I look at her and asked what she was doing, she pointed at our kitten Lola, and said, “Lola did it!”

A few days later, Reese was painting in the living room. It was really our mistake to leave her with her paint alone even for one second, but we did.

When we went and checked back we found Reese not painting her paper, not even painting the table that she was working. No, she was painting Lola.

I really hope Lola survives Reese, and quite frankly I hope we survive Reese.

The other day while I was in my home office sitting at my computer, I could hear that Lindsay had just put on a DVD for our daughter Reese to watch while Lindsay made dinner.

Reese is very particular about what she watches at any time. Right now she goes between watching one of these four : Angelina Ballerina, Charlie and Lola, The Bernstein Bears and on occasion she still wants to watch the Wiggles.

In fact, Reese watches those DVDs so much, that I can almost quote them line for line. So you can imagine my surprise (and neck trauma from my head swinging around) when instead of hearing the typical sounds of music and singing I hear the voice of Elmo and the children in the clip below.

Is there nothing Elmo can’t teach to our children?