Sunday, June 7, 2009

The Cul-De-Sac of Safety

**note: still waiting for new totals! If you haven't donated your "Swap" money yet, go do so now! We will keep Feed the Forgotten going for one more week!!! Keep praying, posting and giving!

I'm reading "Just Courage" by Gary Hougen of Int'l Justice Mission right now and it is AMAZING! Here's just a little bit of what is challenging me currently:

"The cul-de-sac. . .was designed to address homeowner anxieties about the dangers of automobile traffic in their streets. . .Looking for a pathway to safety, human beings built cul-de-sacs. Ironically, several decades later, studies reveal that cul-de-sacs are the most dangerous residential configurations for children. It turns out that, contrary to our intuitions, children aren't injured by forward-moving traffic nearly as much as by cares backing up - which is exactly what cars do in cul-de-sacs. . .

Good, earnest suburban parents thought they knew a pathway to safety for their children. But they turned out to be tragically wrong. Likewise many Christians and churches in the West, seeking safety from a dangerous world, a threatening culture and personal weakness have turned inward to the prosperous cul-de-sac, only to find a spiritual atrophy, mediocrity and boredom that is lethal to the soul. But, thankfully, Jesus is beckoning us to a better way. Not through the path many of us would have expected but by means of a path laid out in scripture thousands of years ago and well worn by a great company of Christian pilgrims from other eras. It is the route to rescue from the very specific perils of fear and pettiness that threaten this present generation and it is the path to life for many hundreds of millions of people who are suffering in our world.

It is God's Call to:
"Seek Justice
Rescue the Oppressed,
Defend the Orphan,
Plead for the Widow" (Isaiah 1:17)

This is our call to seize today. . .will you seize it?

2 comments:

Carey said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Carey said...

Brandi

My girls (3) and I are traveling to Minneapolis (4 hours) to volunteering at Feed My Starving Children to pack food next week. Do you know if Hopechest has worked with them at all on helping with the food? I did see they help in Uganda.

This is there website. http://www.fmsc.org

Carey