Monday morning and a little Francis Chan!

During this season of Lent, we are reading A Place at the Table: 40 Days of Solidarity with the Poor by Chris Seay.  Each day at the end of the reading Seay has a country to pray for and a specific peson/family to pray for in that third world country.  I haven't been able to make it through a day yet without getting emotional.  How could I read about a boy in Brazil named Mateus who drinks weak coffee mixed with a little flour each morning because it's all he has to stave off his hunger for a few hours, and not be smacked in the face by the fact that I have so much?  I have so much that I get choices for breakfast, lunch and dinner.  I am  never hungry unless I choose to be! But yet how do I live? I live to be comfortable...we as Americans live to be comfortable... our churches live to be comfortable.  How do we as Christ followers expect to change the world if we are so self focused that we can't get past our own comfort?  How can we look at ourselves in the mirror when we will happily spend so much on ourselves or raise millions of dollars to build our churches when kids like Mateus live the way he does?  Francis Chan hits the nail on the head in this sermon clip and challenges me to live for eternity.



Do you see what this means—all these pioneers who blazed the way, all these veterans cheering us on? It means we'd better get on with it. Strip down, start running—and never quit! No extra spiritual fat, no parasitic sins. Keep your eyes on Jesus, who both began and finished this race we're in. Study how he did it. Because he never lost sight of where he was headed—that exhilarating finish in and with God—he could put up with anything along the way: Cross, shame, whatever. And now he's there, in the place of honor, right alongside God. When you find yourselves flagging in your faith, go over that story again, item by item, that long litany of hostility he plowed through. That will shoot adrenaline into your souls!

Hebrews 12:1-3, The Message