At 12:40 past midnight tonight, I will leave LAX and head for South Africa. After a brief stop in Atlanta, I will continue on an 18 hour flight to Johannesburg, then connect for a short flight out to Durban. I hate these long flights, but am looking forward to my time among the people of South Africa. In addition to teaching at the YWAM school in Durban, I will also be meeting with believers in Pietermaritzburg, Ladysmith, Johannesburg and Pretoria. It should be a fascinating journey. I’ve never been to the continent of Africa before and am excited about this opportunity. Please keep me in your prayers if you think about it.

So today is a day of preparation and good-byes. I’ll be gone almost 3 weeks and since Sara isn’t going I’ll miss her terribly. I just had some Aimee time in today. My daughter brought over my only grandchild to say good-bye. We had a great time playing on the floor. She’s very expressive these days and spending time with both of them is one of the great joys in my life. That’s her on the left. She is eight months old today.

Also today is my father’s 80th birthday. He doesn’t like to make a big deal of such things, but he’s the best. If you want to read the greeting I sent him, you can find it here.
It’s on days like this that I’m reminded the best joys in this life are the simplest ones. The family I leave here is a sheer delight, as I’m sure will be the extended family I’ll be spending time with in South Africa. So hug your spouse and kids a bit tighter tonight and let them know how much you cherish them.

I’ll try to put in some updates as I travel about South Africa, but am never sure on the road how much time I’ll get for that. If you want to get your orders for books and CDs serviced faster, it will help to send them directly to the office at our new office email: office@lifestream.org.

It’s one of the most often-asked questions I get, but Holly asked me again this morning and I thought I’d take this opportunity to answer it for others who have the same question she does:

My response to Hollly: I find people who are following Jesus have no end of opportunities and desire to give freely and generously to those in need, to those whom God has asked them to support who labor to extend his kingdom to others, and to groups that are doing relief work around the world.

It does take a bit of a shift in thinking to go from putting a gift in an offering every week where I receive the benefits of facility, staff, and fulfilling an obligation, to seeing where Jesus would want you to help be a blessing to others, but once done, the joy of giving is overwhelming.

For those who want more, I wrote an extended article on this topic for BodyLife titled Giving and Generosity in the Relational Church.

A reader from Lifestream, currently living in the DC area, recently sent me an excerpt from an incredible article about a baby’s need for love. Being a recent grandfather I found this particularly appropriate. It is from an article entitled The Long Term Effects of Institutionalization on the Behavior of Children From Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union Research, Diagnoses, and Therapy Options and discusses the difference between babies who develop in families and those that develop in institutions.

Joshua, who sent me this article, said he came across it after being involved in a small-group discussion as to why Christian growth is so difficult. This is as clear a picture as I have seen about the difference between institutional environments and families, and why Jesus saw the body of Christ not as an institution that conforms the new believer, but as a family that nurtures their growth in him. What do you think? Here are some excerpts of that article (emphasis mine):

The applications of this to the body of Christ are obvious, and explains a lot about ‘institutionalized’ believers. It also gives a great recipe for the environment in which young believers might grow more freely in the life of Jesus in a family setting.

Many of you know that Sara and I moved a few weeks ago, to a house that I wasn’t impressed with at first sight. I could see a number of things that gave me concern. But where I saw problems, Sara saw potential. So we bought the house and moved in. In the weeks since, however, we’ve been exploring that potential. Now I know what potential means. It means LOTS OF WORK AHEAD!

The two pictures to the left represent before and after this week. Fully 1/4 of this two-story house was covered in ivy that had grown for 15 years. This week as part of exploring this house’s potential, we took it all off. Now, you might think it was pretty before, and it was! The ivy was gorgeous, but it is a nesting place for termites, a ladder for rats into the attic and a bottleneck for moisture to rot away the house. I’ve learned often in this kingdom that there is little connection between pretty and fruitful!

Tearing off the ivy and untwisting it from beneath the tiles was no easy chore. (By the way, if you look at the little dot in the first picture, just to the right of the ivy-covered chimney, you can see Sara hard at work.) We spent evening and most of the weekend getting it all off, and cleaning out the gutters that were packed with branches one and two inches across. They had to be removed almost inch by inch. We were worn out by the painstaking work it took to unleash this house’s potential. (And this is just one bit of it. I won’t tell you about the backyard excavation so Sara could turn the desert look into an English garden.).

Between moments of frustration where we vented at the former owners in abstentia who let this thing grow into such a monster, I was constantly reminded that change, even spiritually, doesn’t come without work. If we think freedom is living comfortably in the status quo, we’ll find our lives falling into greater disrepair. Living the life Jesus has called us to live doesn’t happen without intentional action on our part.

Those who misunderstand that, will not see the changes in their life they seek. There is one problem here. When we speak of action, most of us only know the self-effort of legalism that tries to earn his graciousness. First, we must learn that that never works. As we find that freedom, however, we must take care not to fall into the ditch on the other side of the road—lethargy.
Since so much of our effort was the self-effort driven by guilt or fear, when he frees us from those things, we don’t know how to respond.

But he wants us to go on and learn the joy of working alongside him as he invites us to actively follow him day by day. This activity is not an attempt to earn his love or to cover up our sin, it is the only thing that love for him will want to do. Those who find life in this journey discover how to intentionally follow him as he invites us onward. Sacking out on the couch won’t get it done. It takes intentionality to put off the old man and to embrace the potential God sees in us. Yes, that means work, but this work is a joy. It responds to his leading and goes forward on his strength. Each day the disciple takes great joy in asking, “What are you asking of me today?” And then when God makes the way clear we intentionally follow him, even if there is hard work to be done, so that we can feast on the fruits of his work in us.

Our tenth edition of The God Journey entitled Transition has just been posted on our sister website.

Moving from an institutional mindset about body life to a relational one is not an easy process, and often the journey takes very different people through very similar stages. After Wayne and Brad following up on the leadership discussion in their last webcast with questions and comments submitted by others, in this tenth edition of The God Journey they turn their attention to the process so many go through when we begin to hunger for more of God’s life than their finding in their current institutions.

A friend sent me this quote this morning from 365 Days a Year with Dwight Moody which was originally published in 1900. Today’s entry is a commentary on 2 Corinthians 5:14, … “The love of Christ compels us.”

The language of institutions always gets back to responsibility, duty, obligation and commitment. It is satisfied if the work gets done, regardless of what motivates it. But the language of relational life is the language of love. When things just become a duty, we know that our participation in love has begun to cool. We fix that not by trying harder to do our duty, but by being renewed in love. It is as true of our relationship to him, as it is in our marriages, our relationship with others in the body and our compassion for the world. Never settle in this kingdom for any motivation less that the love of Christ flooding your heart.

If you find that cooling off, take the time to draw aside to him and set your focus on who he is and what he has accomplished on your behalf. Ask him to reveal the depth of his love for you and don’t just work harder at the things you know you should do. For that which we need most is to live every day in the reality of his love.

Wow! You never what will capture people’s fancy. I’ve enjoyed reading the comments to my last blog and appreciate all who have contributed. I’d like to continue the dialogue with a couple of additional comments:

(1) I agree that the use of judgment COULD be an appeal to guilt or fear. I don’t know how he intended it. However, I didn’t take it that way. By reflecting on it again after Kelly brought it up, I realized that something in my thinking had changed. I have always been bothered by the fact that in the Psalms the creation exults over God’s coming judgment and yet I was taught to live in dread of it. Religion seems to teach us that God’s anger will one day overwhelm him and he’ll rain down fire and retribution with torment upon the world. That’s not how the Pslamists saw it. They saw God’s judgment as his coming to set things right. Who is it that loves him who wouldn’t want that? After the bombings in the UK, the continued war in Iraq and the total sell-out of the world’s powerbrokers to the wealthy, I have long grown weary of the world’s course. I was with a brother yesterday morning when I heard about the bombings in the UK. I heard him whisper under his breath, “Maranatha!” Even so, Lord Jesus, come quickly. His simple expression, more to himself than me, served to refocus my heart as well and breath hope in the midst of such a dire world.

(2) I didn’t read Bono’s comments and think only of how we might reshape our foreign policy. That is far out of my hands. But I did see it as a personal challenge to rethink my spending habits and activities in the face of such overwhelming need faced every day by members of the human family on the other side of the world. Can we truly live with God’s heart and not see beyond our own borders? There are many ways we as individuals can make a difference overseas, even if it is only one person at a time.

One of the few email lists that I subscribe to is the Daily Dig, from The Bruderhof Communities. Their short, pithy quotes are filled with insights and often challenge the status quo, politically and spiritually.

This one came today for those of you who haven’t already seen it. It’s a quote by U-2’s Bono. Now, I am not a U-2 fan, but I have appreciated a lot of Bono’s comments in the past on the failures of organized religion to live as Jesus did in the world. He is truly an out-of-the box thinker who struggles with the reality of Christ’s life and words. His call to take seriously the overwhelming crisis in Africa and do something about it rings true from someone who seems to put his life and his money where his mouth is. This quote is entitled, “As We Forgive Our Debtors.”

Ouch! For more information on this proposal, click here, And please don’t think I posted this hoping you’ll make a connection between it and the request below. That is not in my heart, nor my desires.

Today more people die of HIV/AIDs every 22 days than died in the tsunami in Asia this past Christmas. That may be hard to believe since HIV/AIDs has faded into the background in much of the media coverage. This disease is ravaging Africa where misinformation and poverty have combined to create a pandemic of epic proportions. The Live 8 festivities this weekend were intended to draw the world’s attention to the poverty, disease and tribal warfare that is devastating an entire continent.

I have been asked to come to South Africa later this month to teach at an HIV/AIDs Intervention School that is being conducted by the people I often visit at the AIDs outreach in Kansas. The school will do outreach in one township of South Africa where nearly 50% of the 400,000 people have tested positive for HIV. Children are often born with HIV and many are orphaned by parents who have died of it.

I have taught this school a number of times, doing one week of the four-week school. The topic I work with is “Father’s Compassion for the Afflicted,” which is designed to help people move from religious thinking about suffering to relational living in the love of Jesus and how they can share the reality of that love effectively with others at moments of extremity. I am excited about the opportunity to help overseas and touch firsthand the people who bring the light of the Gospel into such incredible pain. I would appreciate it if some of you would keep me in prayer in my travels, my week of teaching at the school (July 24-29), and as I stay on in the area to meet with some out-of-the-box thinkers from South Africa who have been in touch with Lifestream for some time.

Also, people ask me from time to time if we ever have a special project were we could use extra money. Since we really don’t do projects, I never know what to tell them. If you’re a frequent reader of the Lifestream site, you will know that we almost never mention our need for money because God continues to be our provision as we do what he has asked us to do. I only mention the opportunity to give on one of our web pages where those who want to find ways to help us out. But truly without the regular generosity of brothers and sisters whom God asks to share some of their resources with us, we would not be able to provide the free web sites, articles, recordings, BodyLife mailings, and blog entries that encourage people on this journey. That generosity also frees my time to interact with people in travel, email and in phone calls who are sorting out how they can live freely in Father’s life.

We are confident he will take car of this trip as well, though the expenses are huge. This school is designed for African nationals who may attend free of charge. At this point over 70 Zulu health outreach workers have already signed up for the course and this has put a financial strain on the school and staff. They are not even able to cover the expenses of those coming in to teach at the school. Thus I need to cover my airfare and expenses. Additionally, the school is in need of $100.00 donations to scholarship each African taking the one-month course. They are also looking for $10.00 contributions to put together ‘relief’ bags for those living with HIV/AIDS that the school will be meeting on outreach. This includes medical supplies and small toys for children.

I would love to a number of us be a conduit of God’s blessing to them. I don’t want anyone to feel guilty or obligated to help, but I did want to put this before the body in a specific way in case God might speak to your heart. If you’d like to help financially with this project, please let me know. You can either send contributions directly to us at our new address: Lifestream; 7228 University Drive; Moorpark, CA 93021, email them via PayPal or phone with a credit card number and expiration date. If you designate your gifts “Africa Outreach” we’ll make sure that your gifts go to help in this task. Your gifts will be tax-deductible and we can receive them up until July 20, 2005. Thank you for your consideration of this opportunity, and please get in touch with me if you have any questions.

Our eighth edition of The God Journey entitled It’s About Relationship has just been posted on our sister website.

Living relationally in body life begins with our own relationship to the one who creates the reality and power of that body life. In this webcast Brad and Wayne explore our own personal relationship to the Head of the Church, how that is essential to the power of the New Covenant and how each of us can share an ongoing dialog with him as a daily part of our lives. They also respond to comments and questions from their listeners.

We are blessed that so many of you from all over the world listen in to The God Journey and have found it an inspiration and encouragement to your own journey. If you have any comments or questions to add to the show, please get them to us.