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Seeking Hope When All Feels Hopeless

Watching Christ Work Through Short Term Missions

Last week, I joined several others from our church on a short term mission trip to the White Mountain Apache tribe in southern Arizona. That was a great trip, and really reopened my eyes to what others may be facing in their own lives.

Desert Landscape

This trip was a perfect opportunity to get out of our own comfort zones and serve others. Our goal was to help clean up a building that American Indian Christian Mission hoped to use as a church building in the small town of Cibecue, on the reservation. That turned out not to be what God had in store for us. Instead, we helped to build the church in other ways.

Our work project was to help tear down some walls, a part of the community youth center that the health department required to be repaired before it could be used again. While three or four of us worked on that, the remainder of our group weeded, picked up trash, cleaned up the area around the community buildings, and interacted with several of the people who stopped by to see what we were doing.

In many ways, this was a much greater impact on the community than cleaning out the proposed church building would have been.

After the work was done, and lunch was eaten, we hosted a Vacation Bible School for community kids. Our highest day was around sixty kids, but we averaged closer to thirty-five or forty the rest of the week. Many of these kids worked their way right into our hearts.

We live in a world that boasts a population of over seven billion people. That is pretty difficult to grasp. But we can simplify it by reducing it to 100 people, and make it easy to understand just how that breaks down across the globe.

Motivation is a massive force in our lives, when it comes to why we do what we do. Our drives are interesting, and understanding what motivates us to do stuff can help us achieve more of what we are capable of.

This video is about ten minutes long, but hang in there. It is quite interesting, and well worth watching.

If you know me at all, you know that I am a voracious reader. I will read almost anything, but especially love theology and history. And I seem to collect books. I have more than I can count, most of them read.

This TED Talk gives the history and progression of books, from their earliest beginnings to the books we have today. It is very interesting.

I have always been fascinated with the life cycle of the butterfly. As a kid, I would capture caterpillars and watch them spin a cocoon. Usually, they ended up being a boring old moth, but occasionally, I found one that transformed into a butterfly.

This timelapse of a Monarch butterfly’s transformation is simply beautiful!