Call to Action: 50 Ways To Love Your Neighbor

A compelling list of tangible ways we can love others as Christ has loved us.

Read it all
HERE

Some highlights from the list:
13. Look up the closest registered sex offender in your neighborhood and try to befriend him.

26. Organize a prayer vigil for peace outside a weapons manufacturer such as Lockheed Martin. Read the Sermon on the Mount out loud. For extra credit, do it every week for a year.

29. Go through a local thrift store and drop $1 bills in random pockets of the clothing being sold.

32. Go to an elderly home and get a list of folks who don´t get any visitors. Visit them each week and tell stories, read the bible together, or play board games.

34. Create a Jubilee fund in your Church congregation, matching dollar for dollar every dollar you spend internally with a dollar externally. If you have a building fund, create a fund to match it to give away and by mosquito nets or dig wells for folks dying in poverty.

35. Become a pen-pal with someone in prison.

41. Cover up all brand names, or at least the ones that do not reflect the upside-down economics of God’s Kingdom. Commit to only being branded by the cross

43. Eat only a bowl of rice a day for a week to remember those who do that for most of their life (take a multivitamin). Remember the 30,000 people who die each day of poverty and malnutrition.

49. Serve in a homeless shelter. For extra credit, go back and eat or sleep in the shelter and allow yourself to be served.

BONUS: Come up with your own list of ways to love your neighbor. Do at least one of them before the end of the week.

-kg

LOCAL HOUSE CHURCH HELPS SENIOR WOMAN

*from the OC Register article HERE

Miracle on Piper Place by Lori Basheda (OCRegister.com)

It all began the day the fires raced up over the hills toward Piper Place. Suddenly a megaphone was blaring: neighbors had 10 minutes to evacuate.
Darcie Campbell and her husband Ken scrambled to get in the car when they saw a neighbor walking slowly to her car two doors down.

The Campbells knew that Sandy Maitlen lived in that house, the one with the overgrown weeds. But no one ever really saw Sandy. And the less people saw of her, the more the tales grew. "We all sort of shunned her," Darcie says.

But now here she was walking to her car in the smoke, looking shaken. Ken ran over: Do you need help? he asked.

And she started crying.

After the fires, after everyone on Piper Place was safe to move back, Darcie and Ken made a decision that they would get to know Sandy. “And actually, our minds were blown,” she says. It turns out Sandy, now 66, is a perfectly friendly lady who has lived on Piper Place since the mid ’70s. Divorced, she raised her two children alone. One daughter died after surgery five years ago. She now has a grown daugther who lives with her, along with a granddaughter.

One day Sandy let Darcie into her house. ”That this was in my neighborhood, on my street, and we never even noticed her need,” Darcie says, trailing off.

In one bathroom there was a hole in the floor, no toilet. In another bathroom, the toilet overflows. There were pipes leaking in the ceiling, black mold, no heat, two broken windows and the front door was hung upside down, on one hinge.

Darcie is part of a Thursday night fellowship group that meets behind Sandy’s house at the home of Julie and Noel Cruz. ”Can we all come together?” she asked them.

And come together they did. This weekend about 50 people are converging on Sandy’s house, carrying cans of paint and tool boxes.

"It's sort of unbelievable," Darcie says. "People used to tell stories if they saw a shadow in her house, and behind that was this very sweet lady."
Sandy chuckles at the idea. "I just tried to do things myself. I didn't want to be a bother to people, so we kind of kept to ourselves."

And now: "It is just beyond my wildest imagination," she says. "I'm just overwhelmed with all the goodness and kindness."

If you want to join the gang of people helping Sandy or donate anything, call Darcie’s daughter Stacie at 714-507-0859 or staciedthomas@yahoo.com

**
NOTE: Some of Darcie's neighbors and friends from a house church on her street will be painting, sanding and doing an "Extreme Home Makeover" of Sandy's house from March 20th - 22nd. For more information and to help out go HERE

OUR POOR

As I hear what people are saying about poverty in America, I always have to mention that, although poverty in our country may not be as "severe" as what we see in Africa or India, etc., it is not any less poverty.

For example, if you were to give air conditioning or color television to one of those families living in a cardboard box in the Sudan, would they cease being poor? Of course not. And families in America with color tvs and air conditioning are no less poor because of their level of comfort. They are still poor. And they are "Our Poor".

I belive that there is a Biblical difference between how we are called to serve the poor in other countries and "our poor". The poor in India, Mexico, Ethiopa, etc. are seriously, desperately poor. No one argues that. This is why I've served on the board for groups like Arms of Love (www.armsoflove.org), a ministry that builds orphanages in the poorest nations of the world to provide homes for street children who live in the city dumps and are forced into prostitution, etc.
So, please, let's be clear; I'm not saying don't help the poor who are "out there".

But the poor in your city, in my city, down the street from me, they are "our poor", and what we're called to do, Biblically, is something about it. Not to solve poverty. Not to cure it. Not to erase poverty forever, but to do what we can to help a few, in the name of Jesus and with the compassion of Jesus.

Actually, as I've said before, the point of serving the poor is not to "cure" or "solve" poverty, but to befriend people who are in need and to learn to love and serve them as we would serve and love Jesus. We are the one's who are most changed in that relationship, by the way.

The quote from Jesus in Matthew about "the poor you will always have with you" was Jesus referencing Deuteronomy 15:7-11. You should seriously read this passage. The point is that God, the Father, is commanding the Jews to not have a hard-heart or a closed fist towards the poor, the stranger, etc., but to give generously, freely to the poor among them. At the end of the passage, God say, "There will always be poor people in the land. Therefore I command you to be openhanded toward your brothers and toward the poor and needy in your land."

That's what Jesus means when he says what he does in Matthew.

Read Matthew 25. At the Judgement Seat of Christ the one criteria is whether or not those who call him "Lord" had any regard for the poor, the hungry, the thirsty, the homeless, the prisoner. The Sheep almost unconsciously care for these poor, not because they think it will get them into Heaven, but simply because they have genuinely been transformed into the people of God. The Goats, who also call Him "Lord", have the same unconscious attitude, but towards the existence of the poor or their needs.

The people of God, redeemed by the Blood, saved by Grace, seem to have an inability to walk past someone who is naked, poor, hungry, thirsty, lonely, etc. and do nothing. They cannot do that. It's not in their new nature.

We have a Biblical mandate (and it's alllll over the Scripture, both Old and New) to care for the poor..."our poor"...and that takes more than writing a check.

Again, this is my very biased conviction. I've been hammered by God on this issue and I cannot let it go because it won't let me go.

Do you know what the sin of Sodom is? Read Ezekiel 16: 49. It's not what you think. "Now this is the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were proud and did detestable things before me. Therefore, I did away with them as you have seen."

Wow.

How about this one?

Galatians 2:10- "All they asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I was eager to do." (Paul being sent out as the first missionary by Peter, James and John).

or...

{God is speaking of King Josiah:}
"He defended the cause of the poor and needy, and so all went well. Is that not what it means to know me?" (Jeremiah 22:16)

Wow.

"Is that not what it means to know me?"

What does it mean to "Know" God? This verse suggests that it means to care for the poor and the needy.

and of course we could also look at, Isaiah 58:6-7, Amos 5:21-24, 1 John 3:17-18, James 2:14-17, etc., etc.

God has called us to care for the poor, not to justify their poverty or our lack of compassion by comparing them to the "real poor" in third world countries.

So..how are we doing with serving and loving and befriending "Our Poor"?

-Keith Giles