Should We Help Syrian Refugees?

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Xenophobes fear people from other countries – and the fear usually produces an intense or irrational dislike or hatred. Most people don’t understand how difficult it is to be a foreigner – especially to be a foreigner in a country where you do NOT speak the language, or the language is not native to you.

I’ve been the “foreigner” before. However, semantically I was the “expat” because there is an unspoken (and not politically correct) idea that foreigners are financially broke – expats are not.

I have never met a xenophobe who has lived in other countries. Because when you spend time in the shoes of someone who can’t adequately converse with the majority around them you develop sympathy for the foreigner… or the expat. You get it. It’s not easy leaving your home country and starting anew. It’s a tough process – and when the locals are angry at you for simply being ‘foreign’ it makes things even tougher.

When it comes to the Syrian crisis, it seems that xenophobia is mixed with theophobia – a fear of religion – and the religion in question is Islam.

Should we be afraid of Muslims?

The simple answer is that we shouldn’t be afraid of anything – because fear is not a friend – it’s an enemy. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t understand how Islam works in the lives of those who follow the religion.

Islam has proven time and time again to be deadly. The Koran endorses the killing of those who are not believers in allah. I sympathize deeply with the Syrian refugees, and I DO NOT think that we should close our borders. However, I think that we have to be incredibly careful screening those we allow into the country.

Islam is dangerous. The sooner we acknowledge that Islam is not a religion of love or peace, the sooner we can effectively deal with the Syrian crisis in a way that doesn’t endanger our country.

Why I Stopped Watching R-Rated Movies

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Some Christians can watch anything. I cannot. I have to be careful about what I watch, and I am. One of the things that I watch very rarely is R-Rated movies – unless I have a clear idea of what I’m actually getting myself into.

I don’t watch R-rated movies for the typical reasons. Most R-rated movies are incredibly violent. And if they are not violent, then they’re filled with sex. The ones that are sexless are filled with cursing and blasphemy. PG 13 rated movies are only slightly better.

Violent television and movies don’t just affect you spiritually – they also affect you physically. There are physical changes that actually occur in your brain when you watch the ‘wrong’ TV shows and movies. Studies confirm that when a person watches the ‘wrong’ thing, harmful brain changes start to occur. But it’s not my brain that I’m worried about when I turn on the television – it’s my conscious.

I don’t want to violate my conscious by what I watch. So, I choose to keep my television diet very simple and minimalist.

The Bible describes Job as blameless and righteous. Job made a covenant with his eyes. In Psalm 101, David says something similar stating that he would not set before his eyes anything that is worthless. Yeshua said that the eye is the lamp of the body. The eyes play a remarkable role in our spirituality.

I’m careful what I put before my eyes. I don’t watch just anything on the tele.

Am I missing out on great entertainment?

Maybe so, but I don’t care because my conscious is clear.

I sometimes listen to the sermons of Zac Poonen. He once answered the question from a viewer on whether or not Christians should watch television and movies. His response is harsh. He explains that when people ask these kinds of questions, what they are really asking is “How close to the edge of a train platform can I stand without falling over?”

The real problem is the desire to stand at the edge in the first place.

When God Breaks, He Multiplies

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On Daystar, I heard a minister preach on the miracle of Yeshua feeding the 5,000. The preacher pointed something out that I had never noticed before. He pointed out that Yeshua blessed the bread and broke it, but the miracle didn’t materialize until it was in the hands of His disciples. His point was clear – We need God’s blessing for the miracle, but the miracle is in our hands – we have to take action. There are times when we should actively participate in the miracle and not just be passive observers of what God is doing, but actually act – with His Blessing.

However, I believe that the miracle of feeding 5,000 was twofold.

Throughout the New Testament, we watch God incarnate heal and fix everything that He touched. And now, finally, He breaks something – a loaf of bread. But, then we discover that God wasn’t actually breaking the bread, but rather multiplying it. Here is another beautiful mystery of the Father – that even when He seems to break – He is really multiplying.

Only God can bring abundance from that which is broken.

When God takes away something, we often writhe in pain, not knowing or understanding what He is doing. We don’t realize that when He breaks, He is creating something new. When God took away a rib from Adam, it was because he was going to multiply people upon the earth. Is it possible for God to divide without simultaneously multiplying? I think Job understood this concept when he said “The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” I think Job understood that although it seemed like God had broken him and taken everything away, God could restore even more… and this is precisely what occurs at the end of Job. By the end of Job’s book, we read: And the LORD restored the fortunes of Job when he had prayed for his friends. And the LORD gave Job twice as much as he had before.

Can You Be Christian and Racist?

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I think I should begin by saying that when I met my husband, it wasn’t the first time that I found myself in an interracial relationship. I had dated guys from all sorts of background and races – black, white, Asian, Hispanic – and I never really had any problems with people being negative or hurtful towards my relationships. Nor were there any internal feelings of discomfort.

I have to credit my environment – I was raised in a pretty multi-cultural environment. Even though I was in a small suburban town stuck in the 1950’s, the town was incredibly diverse. I was exposed to all kinds of cultures and races. From kindergarten to high school, I was never just with white, black or Hispanic people – but a mixture of everyone. I never thought that racism was something that I struggled with internally.

With that said, the relationships I had when I was “dating” boys of a different race were in high school and quite superficial. After all, it was high school – you talked on the phone and maybe held hands if you saw each other. The relationships lasted anywhere from a few days to a couple of months.

Years later, I met my husband.

Suddenly, I found myself deeply in love, and I wanted our relationship to evolve. We both felt the same, but then something started to rise to the surface – and that something was racism. I started to realize that I had my own misconceptions and preconceived notions of what I thought people of my husband’s race were like. Even though I grew up around all people, there were parts of me that held bitterness and resentment. I had no idea that this was stuff was hidden in my heart… it was buried deep.

Either I was in self-denial, or I hadn’t spent enough time in an intimate relationship with someone of a different race to realize that it was even there. And then God began to pull back the layers and expose the hatred and all the wrong misconceptions. As the layers were pulled back from the wound of racism, the wound began to breath. As the wound began to breathe, it also started to heal.

As I was experiencing these issues and going through the emotional healing, I was a professing Christian. I know what you are probably thinking. You might be thinking “Well, you weren’t a real Christian because you had racism in your heart.” But I would argue quite confidently that I was indeed a Christian.

In the book of Acts, Peter didn’t have the best perception of Gentiles. He thought of them as unclean, but God came to Him in a vision and removed the veil of racism covering Peter’s heart. God exposed it and then healed it. Peter’s racism and prejudice were erased when it dawned on Peter that God loves Gentiles as much as Jews. Peter was the kind of man who loved what God loved. He couldn’t hate and call unclean what God had called clean.

Can you be Christian and racist? Yes. Racism is a result of imperfect love. The opposite of hatred is love. When you love people, you can’t hate them. You can only love or hate, but you can’t do both – a love-hate relationship is oxymoronic.

When you have a perfect love – the kind of love that God has for people, it’s not possible to hate them. The book of 1 John speaks of perfect love and how perfect love drives away fear because those who fear haven’t perfected love. This is an amazing verse to describe someone dealing with hatred and racism. Racism is driven by fear. People fear what they don’t understand and when people don’t understand or can’t relate to a group of people, the fear often develops into hatred. Much of racism is simply fear and misunderstanding.

Perfect love drives away fear. When we no longer fear, we can finally love.

The Call of 5AM

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I’ve been a night owl most of my life. However, my schedule has been shaken up a few times and I was able to dismiss my night owl ways so that I could party with the dawn and enjoy the sunrise. I require really dramatic shifts in my physiological and emotional clock to get up early. When my son was born, I was no longer a night owl. I did dabble in night-owlism after his birth, but I was mostly a morning bird… because I had to be.

After the arrival of my son, I no longer stayed up till two in the morning as I had previously done, but was up much earlier and making very strong coffee at 5AM. Of course, as he got a little bit older I was able to stay up a little later and sleep in a little longer.

The call of 5AM was gone.

And then I moved from the East to West coast which again disrupted my circadian rhythm and I became a morning lark again. After a couple of weeks of waking at 4AM to start my day I couldn’t stop waking at that time. I enjoyed it. But my husband and I both noticed that our schedules were drifting further and further apart from each other.

So I ditched waking up between 4 AM and started to embrace my inner night-owl again. But then something else happened. Our life was shaken up by a temporary family member. Waking up early became a new part of my ritual again. Waking up early made me realize how much I missed the quiet of the morning and the productivity of the day. So, of course, it peaked my interest when I was reading Luke 21:38 which states:  And early in the morning all the people came to Him in the temple to hear Him.

This is a beautiful scripture for many reasons. The first reason it’s beautiful is because you have a demonstration of love that the people have towards Yeshua. Biblically, we love Him because He first loved us. Most people wake up early because they have to – they need to – they have to go to work – or they wake up because they want to. But these people wanted to wake up early to hear God. The voice of God compelled them to get up in the morning before the world awoke.

We all need to wake up and hear Him in the morning before the rest of the day closes in on us. Before we check our email, have coffee, read the news, or cook breakfast we need to wake up and hear Him.

Can Rocks Speak? (Hosanna in the Highest)

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When Yeshua entered Jerusalem on the donkey and the people started to cry  Hosanna, the Pharisees’ immediate response was to tell Yeshua to tell the people to stop praising Him.

Yeshua’s response to the Pharisees is interesting. He tells them that if they don’t worship Him the rocks will cry out. This is intriguing for many reasons. First, it’s interesting because rocks really can cry out, scientifically speaking. Researchers who dug into the mysteries of Stonehenge discovered that there was acoustic energy in the stones. They called them sonic or music rocks.

Rocks speak.

Sound is vibrational energy – and for some strange, metaphysical, geological reason – rocks CAN hold sound. Yeshua was geologically accurate when He said that the bricks would talk because the rocks around Yeshua were carrying the praises of God.

Yeshua wasn’t just a man, but also God in the flesh. I can’t imagine the infinite pool of vibrational energy that must have exuded from Yeshua. Even His clothes carried a divine energy that repelled sickness and disease. Everything about Him and everything around Him was affected by His Presence… including objects that are otherwise ‘inanimate’. Yeshua brought so much life to the earth that even His clothes held the life of healing.

The second thing that’s interesting about Yeshua stating that the rocks would cry out is the humbling realization that God doesn’t need our praise. Everything that has breath praises God – we know that. But here in Luke, we see that even that which has NO breath is capable of praising God. When the Psalmist said that all creation praise the Lord, he wasn’t just speaking of people – but literally meant ALL creation – the trees, plants, water, and even the rocks.

Saturated in Prayer

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I keep a snippet of a short article on my desk that I received from a Missionary Newsletter. The article talks about how blessed the missionaries are for one profound reason – they saturate their work in prayer. In the newsletter, it talks about how they pray for EVERYTHING.

The missionaries have so much and are fully equipped – emotionally, mentally and spiritually because they pray. Now, the Bible clearly says In James 4:2 that you don’t have because you don’t ask.

How many Christians are lacking what they need physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually because they don’t ask God? I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve encountered an obstacle – or something that I needed emotional or spiritual strength to fight through, and I forget to pray. Instead, I tried to fix things myself, which is insulting to God, who wants to supply all of my needs.

God cares about the details in our life and we need to go to Him for EVERYTHING. I once heard a woman teach a congregation about the spirit of poverty. She explained to the crowd that one of the reasons the spirit of poverty plagues people is because they are under a curse of self-sufficiency. A curse of trying to do everything in their own power and leaving God out of the equation.

Christians walk by faith and not by sight. We must lean in, trust, and depend on God. We are to let God direct our paths and fully surrender everything to Him. He supplies all our needs when we are fully dependent on Him. This doesn’t mean we sit there and do nothing – but it does mean that we don’t leave God out of our daily lives and decisions. Never leave God out of your problems – that is exactly where you need Him.

Saturate your life in prayer. Saturate every move and choice you make with prayer. We need to pray about everything and worry about nothing.