On May 9th SafeWorldNexus is having a benefit in Nashville and I'm going! So are the other interns! It will be the first time I meet everyone in person. I'm so excited! If you are in Nashville or can get there you need to go. Go to http://joinanewstory.org/ (I just now learned how to make links to other sites. This internship is already paying off!) to buy your $25 ticket. I've known for awhile now that we had a major benefit coming up, and that it was for Haiti, but I naturally assumed the benefit was all to help fund SafeWorld so WE could serve in Haiti.
No.
SafeWorldNexus is doing a ton of work to host a benefit for a totally separate organization. These are the crazy awesome people I will be working with! What I love about SafeWorld is they don't think of it as a "separate organization". We're the same because they are our brothers and sisters in Christ. They need help, so we're helping. The organization is Heartline Ministries. They're loving expectant mothers and newborn babies in Port Au Prince, Haiti. They do a lot of different things. (Watch this video.) Our goal with the benefit is to raise enough money to build Heartline a 7,000 square foot maternity center to ease some of their difficulties.
If you can imagine for a moment, there are a lot of difficulties in running a maternity center in Port Au Prince. For the last couple weeks I've been reading about it on the blog of an American family working for Heartline. I have totally fallen in love with the Livesay family. I want to relay their story to you, or at least say something that will make you go read their story, but I really don't know what to say other than our God is great! Here's a post where they mention SafeWorld's visit back in January. I WILL share with you these beautiful quotes on their blog:
I know I pitied and judged the teen moms when I read about them, but Tara Livesay quoted a musician named Jason Gray and it definitely is opening my eyes. It says, "Both pity and judgment are too easy and are therefore the enemies of genuine understanding, which to some degree, requires that we enter into at least a portion of the struggle of those we would genuinely understand. But because that might be painful, and because we are allergic to pain, we flee to the less costly emotions of pity and judgment." I've been using Paul's prayer in Colossians 1 a lot lately. I was jumbling wisdom and understanding together like they were the same thing. This quote really opened up my eyes to what understanding is- something you have to work for.
Another quote on the Livesays' blog is a Franciscan Benediction. "May God bless us with discomfort at easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships- so that we may live deep within our hearts. May God bless us with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people- so that we may work for justice, freedom, and peace. May God bless us with tears to shed for those who suffer pain, rejection, hunger, and war- so that we may reach out our hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy. And may God bless us with enough foolishness to believe that we can make a difference in the world- so that we can do what others claim cannot be done, to bring justice and kindness to all our children and the poor. Amen." Churches don't pray enough for discomfort, anger, tears, and foolishness. I know I had never even heard a prayer like this until at USC. At Campus Crusade for Christ we often asked God to break our hearts for what broke His. I remember it really jumping out at me the first time I heard someone pray their heart be broken, but that's what God calls us to do. Remember (especially this week (I could so write tomorrow's sermon.) ) Jesus did not want to die on the cross. He was man. He knew that wasn't a good time. But because he loved the Father and loved YOU he prayed for the Father's will and not his own. The Livesays get that. They know that God calls them to do stuff they don't want to do, but they're obedient, because they love Him, love people, and know He knows way more than they do.
They quote E. Lutzer saying, "Better to love God and die unknown than to love the world and be a hero; better to be content with poverty than to die a slave to wealth; better to have taken some risks and lost than to have done nothing and succeeded at it." So together SafeWorldNexus, along with The Dave Ramsey Show, will be hosting a benefit, taking some risks, to try and raise $850,000 for a highly functional maternity center in Port Au Prince, Haiti. Join a new story.
