help somebody

Well, tomorrow is a fun day. I will be sending my first letter to Hawa in Sierra Leone. She is the li’l gal over there in Africa who I am now sponsoring through World Vision.

I wrote my letter to Hawa while my girlfriend wrote a letter to the kid she’s sponsoring through Compassion International. We made it like a date. We went, had dinner at Café Brazil in Dallas, and wrote our letters and talked about what we were writing. Doing something like that together is a great way to spend your time with your significant other.

But if you don’t have a significant other, do it with a friend. Even better, a group of friends! Or, if you don’t have any friends, do it by yourself. However you do it, just do it. It’s a manageable and enjoyable way to serve others. If you’re not a Christian, you can at least appreciate the idea of helping others; if you are a Christian, you are commanded to help others.

In his latest book, Forgotten God, Francis Chan says:
“It really is an astounding truth that the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you. He lives in me. I do not know what the Spirit will do or where He’ll lead me each time I invite Him to guide me. But I am tired of living in a way that looks exactly like people who do not have the Holy Spirit of God living in them. I want to consistently live with an awareness of His strength. I want to be different today from what I was yesterday as the fruit of the Spirit becomes more manifest in me.
I want to live so that I am truly submitted to the Spirit’s leading on a daily basis. Christ said it is better for us that the Spirit came, and I want to live like I know that is true. I don’t want to keep crawling when I have the ability to fly.”

That is encouraging, and convicting, to those of us who claim Christ as Lord. If He is our Lord, then we need to live like it. We need to live like we know what that means. That means, in part, that we have the Holy Spirit living in us. And with the Holy Spirit living in us, we can attack hunger, suffering, and injustice all around the world without fearing our time constraints, our finances, or our perceived lack of ability. As Christians, we need to lead the charge.