does trust have to be earned? i’ll post my thoughts later this week.

before we get to blogging…i thought i would update you guys with the unofficial count of malaria nets you donated in the 50 hour challenge last week…somewhere around 110 or so in under 50 hours!! and that is just from here…so many of you spread the word and i know many more were donated! thank you so much!

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today’s guest blog is actually from two guest bloggers…our compassion child in ethiopia (abdukerim, he just turned 6!) and from our compassion child in uganda (linet, she is about to turn 10! i met linet on our trip).

from abdukerim:

Chris & Anne Jackson,

How are you? Praise God! I am alright! I enjoyed Christmas by worshiping at the church and with my family at home. With your Christmas gift (about $15 USD) I got a blanket, a t-shirt, purchased some Christmas presents, and the rest was handed to me. God bless you! How did you celebrate Christmas? Pray for my family! Goodbye!

and from linet:

Chris & Anne,

I greet you in the name of Jesus Christ! Linet is fine and very happy to communicate to you. She says…

I was so excited to meet you at the hotel the last time you visited Uganda. I was SO SO happy and also grateful that you love, care, and support me and my family.

I hope you arrived in your country safely. I pray for you and you will always be in my prayers. Thank you very much for all the gifts you brought and gave me. Thank you for the two teddy bears, play dishes, photo frame, utensils, toys, scarfs, bubbles, the two bedsheets, stickers, flute, jump rope and for the bracelets. I love them very much and I will use them well and accordingly.

I love you very much and I will study very hard at school. God bless you!

chris and i got the letter from abdukerim one day, and from linet the next. we’ve only been sponsoring them both for under a year and we have gotten 2-3 letters from each of them. the front of our fridge is mostly covered with them.

communicating with your compassion child is so important. shaun shares about daniel, a boy he met while he was visiting the dominican republic last week. all daniel wants is for his sponsor to write more. you need to read shaun’s post. for reals.

if you’re not currently sponsoring a child, you can explore that a little bit here.

Pete Wilson is the pastor at Cross Point Church in Nashville, Tennessee. If you think this post rocks, you should read the rest of his blog!

Pete writes:

Let me tell you a little about myself. I’m a pastor. A husband. A father to three little boys. A friend. A Christ follower.

And I’m an addict.

I’m addicted to noise and chaos. I’m addicted to it in the kind of way that makes my life feel totally out of control and overwhelming at times.

And the worst part of my addiction is that I have recently realized that I don’t really “know” Scripture. Oh make no mistake about it. I can quote it, preach it, and debate it, but I’m not sure that I really “know it.”

And I bet I’m not alone. It seems as if we have been conditioned in our culture towards this addiction. We live in a day of unprecedented opportunities to stimulate our minds.

We have blogs, television, text-messaging and 24-hour news. We have iPods, satellite radio, and who could forget? Twitter. Everywhere we go there is some kind of message that is trying to attach itself to our minds.

We pretend as if the problem to knowing Scripture is a lack of access.

So, we have made the Bible more accessible than ever. We have dozens of translations. We have the Men’s, Women’s, and teens’ study Bibles. We have the camo Bible for the hunter. We have a Bible designed just for your purse. We have the digital Bible for your handheld or the audio Bible for your iPod. My favorite is the “waterproof” Bible that one publisher recently sent me.

Never has it been easier to access the Scriptures, but never has it been harder to absorb them.

Even if you’re taking time to read the scriptures, when do you have time to absorb them? When are you escaping the noise and chaos of your life?

And the problem is not what you think it is. You have time. You can make time. But you don’t. Why?

Because you’re addicted to the noise and probably even a little scared of what life would be without it.

Henri Nouwen wrote in “The Way of the Heart”…

“In solitude I get rid of my scaffolding: no friends to talk with, no telephones calls to make, no meetings to attend, no music to entertain, no books to distract, just me – naked, vulnerable, weak, sinful, deprived, broken-nothing. It is this nothingness that I have to face in my solitude, a nothingness so dreadful that everything in me want to run to my friends, my work, and my distractions so that I can forget my nothingness and make myself believe that I am worth something.”

I want to encourage you to take some time to drop your scaffolding and get naked. Run from the chaos and dial down the noise. I want to encourage you to quiet your life. Simply, simplify. Put yourself in a place where you can absorb God’s grace and love and message for your life.

What do you think?

i realize it has been pretty quiet around these parts lately.

(insert tumbleweed blowing across a desert here).

the last few weeks i have been in a season of listening instead of talking. a time of reflection and prayer.

so, i’m still around. and no doubt, i’ll be writing again soon. quite honestly, i haven’t much to say at the moment.

i pray you’ll humor me and stick around. this week, i’m having some friends write some guest blogs for me…and trust me, you won’t want to miss them!

a friend of mine was talking about mother theresa yesterday…how she was significantly influential, but “to influence” was never her pursuit…” she only wanted to love and care for the sick, the unloved, the least, the dying. to allow the actions of jesus to be expressed in her everyday life.

it made me think of this quote from an oswald chamber’s sermon:

“The people who influence us the most are not those who detain us with their continual talk, but those who live their lives like the stars in the sky and “the lilies of the field”? simply and unaffectedly. Those are the lives that mold and shape us.

If you want to be of use to God, maintain the proper relationship with Jesus Christ by staying focused on Him, and He will make use of you every minute you live? yet you will be unaware, on the conscious level of your life, that you are being used of Him.”

i pray to be this kind of influencer.