The Fatherless

So I know I have gotten in the habit of copying and pasting parts of other people's blogs, but sometimes I can't help myself. I came across an entry from Sarah Olds, a former director at Wesley who works with street children in South Africa. Here is what she wrote:

Today, the sections that I read in each one of these books all quoted Matthew 25:31-46 in part or its entirety.

"When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left. "Then the King will say to those on his right, 'Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.'

"Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?'

"The King will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers of mine, you did for me.'

"Then he will say to those on his left, 'Depart from me, you who are cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. For I was hungry and you gave me nothing to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink, I was a stranger and you did not invite me in, I needed clothes and you did not clothe me, I was sick and in prison and you did not look after me.'

"They also will answer, 'Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or needing clothes or sick or in prison, and did not help you?' "He will reply, 'I tell you the truth, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me.' "Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.

"God created you and I to express His goodness. “Every time you perform a loving act; every time you alleviate human suffering or bring hope and joy into a person’s life, you’ve expanded the good and increased the honor God receives for creating you in his image. God loves when his children reflect his character. (Wide Awake)

I’m a missionary in Africa. . . yet I’m challenged by this passage of scripture. How many times do I miss an opportunity to express God’s goodness to the people so close to His heart – the fatherless. Look at these statistics I read in Fields of the Fatherless:

•More than 1 million children are trafficked every year as sex slaves and another 8.4million children work under horrific circumstances – forced into debt bondage or other forms of slavery, prostitution, pornography, armed conflict, or other illicit activities.
•Today there are over 143 million orphans in the world. That’s one child in every 13!
•10.9 million children under the age of 5 die in developing countries every year – malnutrition and hunger related accounting for 60% of these deaths.
•More than 13 million orphans were added to the total in 2006 alone.
•Every 5 seconds a child dies because he or she is hungry.
•By the end of 2006, there were 2.3 million children living with HIV around the world, and over half a million children became newly infected with HIV in 2006.

These statistics break my heart. They overwhelm me. They challenge me. How many times have I passed by a hungry child begging for food without offering him something to eat? How many times have I seen a child living on the street and dressed in rags yet not given him clothes? 143 million orphans in the world. How many of them live in Maputo, Mozambique? How many of them do I pass by everyday?

Thanks Sarah.... http://sarah-n-africa.blogspot.com/

I'm Done!

After 13 years of public school, 4 years of college, and 2 years of graduate school, I AM OFFICIALLY DONE WITH SCHOOl! Praise God! Let it be forever! After 7 years in Athens, I am ready for a change.

Disclaimer: This graduation regalia is not actually mine. I refused to give in and purchase them. My fellow friend Anissa insisted I take a picture in hers (by force :) One UGA graduation ceremony was enough for me...

2009 School Counseling cohort with our major professor. Woo-hoo!

The Bridge

The Bridge

Answered Prayers

Some cool answers to prayer we have seen lately:

I wasn't sure what I should do about my Compassion sponsored child while we are in India. The day after I asked God to show me, I was at a district counselor meeting. A counselor I never knew until that point turned to me and asked if I knew anything about Compassion because she heard them doing a campaign on The Fish radio and was thinking about sponsoring a child! I told her about my child, how I like Compassion, and within a few minutes the answer to my prayer had come. She is taking over my sponsored child for me and her own children can write to her! And a friend is taking over Ben's sponsored child.

What do we do with all of our stuff- furniture, kitchen stuff, everything, when we go to India? Should we store it (but where?), give it away? (to whom?). We were praying a lot about this and then after a few weeks we learn of a missionary family from Scotland who are taking a year long furlough of rest in the US beginning in August. They will need everything- furniture, dishes, all living items. What an incredibly perfect answer to both of our needs! Now our stuff will be a blessing to another family of believers who have been serving God for 7 years.

What to do with my car? Hesitant to sell it and not have a vehicle when I return, plus it's not worth much. Where to store a car and who will take care of it? Should we get rid of it? Were praying about this and our friends who live out in the country offered to keep our car. Their daughter will be home for the summer so they could use an extra vehicle for that time and would be willing to keep our car maintained. Thank you Chris and Janett!

God is good and really showing his faithfulness in helping us get to India. We are still praying about a lot more things but are confident in God's response!!

Pray for North Korea

I'm not sure if you guys know much about the situation in North Korea, but God has really burdened my heart with this country and the people and Christians there.

North Korea is currently the most isolated country in the world, with restricted entry in and out by the most heavily patroled border of over 3 miles. The country has been labeled more 'purely genocidal' and oppressive than any other country in the world right now. In the past little information has been known about what goes on except when people escape to countries like China and are safe to be witnesses.

The country is strictly ruled by "Dear Leader" Kim Jong il, son of the "Great Leader" Kim Sung. Without enough food supply within the country, the people regularly starve and live in barenness. Stories of parents allowing their children to starve to save themselves is common. The people live under the strictest of laws, with army guards to enforce them on every street. Anyone who is a threat to the regime, especially Christians, are sent to labor camps where they are tortured and executed. The Word of God is not allowed into this country in any form, neither is any communication with the outside world through any form of media, which results in a people who are made to believe that the rest of the world is poorer and more opporessed than they are. Those that manage to escape the 3 mile border into South Korea or China are often hunted down and returned for punishment. If anyone is found to be a Christian, his family and three generations of his family is sent to camps to eliminate the 'seed of dissent'. There they are tortured, executed, and used for experimentations in developing nuclear chemical weapons.

I'm following this post with some information because I think it's much easier to pray when you know what is going on. I copied exercepts from a few articles from BBC and other European papers.

The first article I read was on Camp 22, one of the horrific concentration 'labor' camps in N Korea where Christians and other enemies of the regime are sent. A former prison guard escaped the country and lived to tell about what he participated in and what he saw while working there. It's a pretty disturbing article because the things going on are like those at the Holocaust. Revealed: the gas chamber horror of North Korea's gulag

Here are the excerpts from the Human Rights Watch Report and the South China Morning Post.:
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Hundreds of thousands of people, often Christians, are in concentration camps, enduring regular torture. Executions are common. Prisoners unable to contain their horror at executions are deemed disloyal to the party and are punished with electrical shock, often to death. Others are sent into solitary confinement in containers so cramped that their legs become permanently paralysed. Eight Christians working in a prison smelting factory died instantly when molten iron was poured onto them, one by one, for refusing to deny their faith.

Yet something remarkable is happening. A growing number of North Koreans are escaping, to China or South Korea, and many of them are turning to Christianity. There at last they find hope.

German doctor Norbert Vollertsen was stationed in North Korea in 1999-2000 for the relief agency German Emergency Doctors. Later he interviewed hundreds of North Korean refugees in China and South Korea. His message: what has been going on in North Korea for more than half a century bears a strong resemblance to the World War II Nazi genocide against Jews.

“Like the Jews then, Christians in North Korea face their executioners praying and singing hymns," he related. But as the church father Tertullian…said at the dawn of Christianity: "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church." Vollertsen, whose reports have made him a legendary figure in Japan and South Korea, found out that as a result of this Communist campaign of persecution an underground church was growing rapidly. "I am sure that once North Korea is free, Christianity will boom there in a way that will even dwarf its growth in the South."

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YANJI, CHINA- Mayhem suddenly erupted at the Sunday service last month in the capital of the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Region of Jilin province.

Plain-clothes North Korean agents raided the church and seized the stunted children, shouting and struggling. Witnesses said they were led away and almost certainly taken across the border back to North Korea to face indoctrination in labour camps.

The children are a handful of those caught up in a secret war being waged on both sides of the Tumen River between Christian missionaries and North Korea's security service.

As a starving and despairing population loses faith in the cult of former leader Kim Il-sung, many North Koreans are joining underground churches, suspected by the regime of being at the heart of a growing resistance movement.

This year there have been reports of a large-scale manhunt in North Korea and the execution and imprisonment of North Korean Christians and their families, many of whom are fresh converts. "

Kim Jong-il is now using the army to operate house-to-house searches for Christians. They look for any pieces of paper, " said one source.

"Whoever has a Bible in their hands is accused of being a spy - anything connected with the outside world can mean arrest and death," said another.

The North Korean security apparatus has now taken the counter-attack into China. This year the number of refugees crossing the border has fallen sharply.

"Some think they are fewer coming over because they are toughening controls - it is certainly not because their lives are any better," said Erica Kang of the Good Friends, a Seoul-based Buddhist charity group that has carried out surveys among refugees.

Fear may be one reason that North Koreans stay at home. Another is that China is said to be hunting down the refugees and returning them in larger numbers. It is also believed that Beijing is tolerating the activities of perhaps more than 100,000 North Korean agents who are allegedly kidnapping refugees and murdering missionaries on the mainland.

For North Koreans caught in underground churches, punishment is swift and brutal. In December, a small group of Christians in Chongjin, in the country's northeast, were discovered at a meeting and arrested. The 11 men were beheaded at a public execution as a lesson to others and the women and children were sent to labour camps.

Yet letters smuggled out of the country are dangerously frank. "We almost starved to death but you sent food unexpectedly. We have unspeakable joy," reads one letter.

"We don't know how long this suffering will go on. We have joy in our hearts. Almighty God prepared paradise in heaven for us and this mortal life is short. We are diligently preaching the Gospel. We tell people the food comes from Christians around the world. Our members are increasing day by day."

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Please pray for the people of North Korea! Our prayers are effective!