Brady White

This week we heard from Brady White, who is the son of Joe White. Brady pastors a church at Disney World, which is pretty neat. The topic he spoke on was sexual brokenness. He did a lot of contrasting between what culture tells us is normal vs. what the Bible says. It is so interesting how what culture tells us is freedom - doing whatever you want - is actually slavery. It completely controls you and you become unable to get out of it. However, the church is in such a tricky situation because culture is so good at twisting the truth. They have made the church look like the bad guys. For example, culture says that true love is unconditional, blind acceptance. It doesn't matter what people are doing or what they believe because we love them no matter what. What is so hard is that culture makes that sound so good. I mean, to disagree with that definition of love, you must be judgmental and full of hate. Clearly, the church is in a tough spot. So what do we do? How does the church address those who are so deep in sexual brokenness or those who are gay? How do we show them the truth without coming off as hateful? The Bible says that Jesus was full of 100% grace AND 100% truth. Obviously these are incredibly difficult questions. However, for a start, we need to change our outlook.

Our current outlook seems to be:
-Us against the world
-judge those who struggle differently. If we are talking to someone with the same struggle as us, we can relate and are full of grace. However, if we run into someone with different struggles than us, we ask, "How can you do that? I would never do something like that." the best example of this was in class when a student mentioned that they knew someone who was a professing Christian but was gay. Brady responded by saying, "You want to hear something crazy? I know a bunch of professing Christians who gossip every day." You could hear a pin drop in the room after he said that because so many of us gossip. We see some sins as worse than others when in reality they are all the same.
-We think, lets change those broken people

Here is the Biblical outlook we need:
-Us for the world
-Accept those who struggle differently
-pointing our people to Jesus. We are all broken and therefore in the same boat.

Another way we can learn to love those who are hurting is to look at Jesus' example in scripture. In John 8:3-11 is the story of the woman who committed adultery. What Jesus does is so powerful and what we need to learn to do. He does not begin by telling her about all the people who she hurt in both her family and the family of the man she committed adultery with. He does not tell her how stupid her decision was. Here is what he does do:

1) He protects her from those who wanted to kill her, judge her, mock her, and condemn her.
2) He protects her from herself. He lets her know that she can move forward and not be torn apart by guilt and shame.
3) He does not condemn her.

If the church looked more like this, I think we would have a lot better reputation and would actually be place the broken came to for refuge. And if we do this, if we really care for them, then maybe they will be more interested in what we have to say. Because we do need to say something. We cannot let them continue in sin without saying anything. But how are we saying it and what is our motivation behind it?

That's all I've got.

Thanks for reading!

David Marvin

In my blog last week I talked a lot about my month long mission trip to the Bahamas. For this post I will talk a little about both this week and last week. Last week we had the opportunity to hear David Marvin come talk to us about apologetics. David leads the college ministry for Watermark Church in Dallas, Texas. Something that really stood out to me while he was talking had to do with Christianity being the only true religion and how we can know that. His main premise was that those who say all religions are ultimately the same, are in fact saying that they don't know anything about any religion, because all religions contradict each other. There is either one that is true, or they are all false. They cannot all be true. After making that point, he began to explain what makes Christianity different than all other religions, and it may have been how he said it, but that is what really hit me. He said in all other religions, good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell. However, in Christianity, forgiven people go to heaven and those who are not forgiven go to hell. In other words, whether or not we go to heaven has nothing to do with how good we seem to be. So many religions teach that if your good outweighs the bad, you get to go to heaven. But, as David, explained, no amount of good can remove the bad. The only thing that can remove the bad we all have done it forgiveness.  The takeaway from that is so encouraging. It completely takes the pressure off our performance.

This week has also been really neat. We took a test to determine what majors we would be good at based on personality and high school classes. We also spent today talking about spiritual gifts. It has been really encouraging to see how the majors the test said I would be good at (Entrepreneurship) are coherent with my top five strengths (Belief, Competition, Deliberative, Responsibility, Achiever) which are coherent with what I am gifted with spiritually. All that information is really helpful while trying to figure out what to do with my future and I am glad Link Year walked us through it all. 

Bahamas!!!

This week is our first week back after being gone the entire month of February on international trips followed spring break for the first week in March. International trips were absolutely amazing. I chose to go the Bahamas, which was more of a mission-based trip. I was stretched and grown in lots of ways. Our focus while being there was at The Exceptional School for Learner – a school in a nearby town for students with learning disabilities. We helped teach both math and English classes every morning. Another really neat opportunity we had there was to build them a cement pad to play basketball on. Before we built the pad, they played on a rocky slope that was incredibly dangerous. It was fun for me because I love construction and I was able to help envision the whole project and figure out how to get it done. However, the most rewarding part was seeing the kids play on it once it was finished. The joy and gratitude they showed was really fun to see.

While in the Bahamas there were also some ways that God really challenged me that I hope to take away while back in the States. The first way was God revealed the idol of comfort in my life and showed me that I need to be content wherever I am or with whatever I have. For example, we ate oatmeal every morning for 28 days. We also only had cold showers, to name a few of the things I was not used to. What is sad is those things are so small. People obviously live with much less. We always had enough food and I should have been happy we even had showers. But that just goes to show how big the idol of comfort was in my life. I had a few of the things that I was used to (good breakfasts, hot showers, etc.) taken away and I struggled to be content. Now that I am back, I don’t want to sink into the lifestyle I had before. I want to live a little more simple life. Starting by making small changes, like not eating out as much, and hopefully continue to do more and more to take away unnecessary things.

The second area God challenged me in was my generosity, and he used a little boy at the school to do it. A young boy named Joshua, who was incredibly poor and whose shoes had countless holes in them, gave me part of his snack every day I was there. Here is a young boy, who has next to nothing, giving me, an American who has way more than I need, part of his already small snack. Why would he do that? I honestly don’t know, but I do know that if he can give out of the little he had, I sure can give a whole lot more than I do now.

Thanks for reading!