Random thoughts

I am sitting here with more to do than I can even think about, so I thought I'd blog a bit.
I'm thinking about kids lately. Anda is reading a book that 2/3 of the people that become Christians do so before they turn 18 years old. If someone reaches the age of 21 as a non-Christian, they only have a 23% chance of ever becoming one. That makes it seem logical that focusing on children is a wise use of time.
The problem is, even if we spend an hour a day with a child, that means he or she has 23 hours of influence that will almost certainly be non-Christian, and much of that will be downright anti-Christian. So if the parents can be reached, the atmosphere of the home changes and the kids are able to see what life God's way looks like.
Sunday I took a mom and 3 boys to church. The boys are certainly difficult at times, but the entire time they were with me Sunday, their behavior was excellent. But from the minute the mom got in the car she was yelling at them and telling them to stop being bad. She was mean. I cried during worship as I thought about how difficult it must be for those boys to have any comprehension of the loving God we were singing about. That same mom is living with a boyfriend who is not a Christian.
The hard thing is that Sunday she told me how much better she was doing. She told me she had turned her life around and stopped doing the bad things she used to do, and she has. I believe she genuinely wants to follow God. But as she reads her KJV Bible she says she's not able to understand it. She's working at a nursing home and trying to get her real estate license so she can make a better living. She lives with the boyfriend mostly so she will have someone to watch her boys as she goes to work.
So what does she need? A friend. She needs hours and hours of sharing life with someone who knows Jesus who can lovingly lead her along the difficult path she has to walk. But she's hard to be friends with. She can't even afford gas to come over for lunch, and if she does come she won't be able to pay for her share of the lunch. As much as she tries to be nice, her misery is thinly veiled. And yet, when we spend time with her our life seems easier to keep in perspective.

I pray that you might have someone like her in your life that you can be friends with. I am painfully aware that most people don't finish the race. We have all loved those who dropped out at various points along the way.
Thankfully, God keeps filling me with hope, even in the failures.
And hope does not disappoint us. My sense is that for every one that I love and lose, I gain a taste of Christ that I would have never known without them.
A friend once said that loving the poor is a sacrament. In loving the poor, we experience Christ in a physical way through our senses as we touch, smell, see, hear, and even taste Him in our interactions with people.
May you be blessed to taste again the tears you cry for the poor in your life.
I love having a family like you who is doing it already.
Randy