Do I really love my brother?

Few people in America have experienced the blessing of material poverty. Contrary to everything that our culture screams at us, I wonder if less is really more. While infant moralities in Africa continue to mount millions upon millions of corpses and children die without even the most basic of medical attention the America culture gorges itself on choice meats and deserts. The American elderly received the best of medical treatment living upon to 80 or so years while the majority of African men die before ever reaching 45. Our brothers and sisters in Africa live on rice, porage and beans and have mud huts while we can't even stand having a car without A/C!

Everyday I live I feel the guild of my sin and selfness. I wish I was contributing somehow to the cause of Christ around the globe but my church barely even makes its budget. I am surrounded by people with expensive items who surprisely have nothing to give anyone else and barely have time for anyone but themselves. People who consider the highlight of their day sitting in front of some electronic screen watching imagines flash around while never really knowing what is like to ever love someone enough to die for them. I am one of them and I feel like I am betraying Christ every day I live like this.

Irrational Obedience?

What definites the morality of any given course of action that I may take? Is there an objective code of human conduct that would definite those things? Or does the essence of all moral merely the radiance of God's eternal perfect character? What if God askes one to do what seems to be irrational or no consquence? Do I have to surrender my confidence in what I know in order to fulfill a higher standard of morality than is comprehensible to my finite mind?

 In Romans Paul says, “I have great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were cursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, those of my own race” (9:2-3 NIV; cf. Ex. 32:32).

Sorrow's Gift

I wish I could replenish the sands of time,

I wish time could heal the wounds within.

Everything I do is a hallow echo of a lost rhyme,

Nothing I do erases the guilt of previous sin.

Nothing is right about I told you I would pray,

Yet I just looked the other way,

Everything I once valued leaves me empty.

I wish, I am sorry, was enough to make peace,

I wish I could have taken your pain.

Yet death was the only hope you accepted,

Now the pain you held within is yours for eternity.

You always wondered if God was real,

I thought that logic could explain him,

As if human words could contain him.

Now you are six feet under as I walk on without you,

I held back, silent as Satan snuffed out your soul.

When you pleaded for a friend I put up reinforced titanium walls,

When you cried out for community I reached for ammunition.

As I preached the sole sufficiency of Christ’s fellowship,

I shut you out of my life in the name of spiritual sacrifice.

I served an image of God made in my own self-absorbed likeness,

Out of fear and self-preservation I maintained my purity by avoiding you,

Yet every time you fell, I felt ashamed.

Every time you rejected the truth, I died inside.

In Christ, I will rise up again,

Though you have no faith in yourself,

I will never stop believing in you,

As I pray I see Christ weeping with me.

Full of color, sound and fury,

This life always moves forward.

With everything I have lost,

I feel I have nothing left to give,

except spreading my arms and dying.

I want to be so much to the people of this world,

but I feel so weak and limited.

My time is not my own,

I have been bought with the blood of Christ,

God's perfect sacrifice for my imperfections.

How is it that I so often loose the purity of the message in its transmission?

How is it that we as the people of have been so divisive and condemning?

How is it that those I love most always feel exclude from the life of the body?

All I have is one life to give for those whom God has laid within my heart.

I pray God makes my love complete and seals the zeal within my bones.

I pray he opens doors for his gospel and bridges the gaps in his body.