As I write this I am sitting in my bed. I've just slept a
full eight hours with a pillow under my head. I woke up wondering how I should
spend my Saturday: what kind of food I should eat, where should I go to connect
to the internet, should I watch movies later?

 Also as I write this there is someone down the street, who
went to sleep last night using a cardboard box as a pillow, who awoke unsure
about where his next meal would come from, whose main concern today is not,
where to go to get online, but how to survive the day. Often that means
sniffing glue or getting drunk to numb the senses.

 I feel compelled to give more examples of the suffering in
our world: starvation, human trafficking, the AIDS pandemic, persecution,
genocide. Suffering and oppression take on many forms. I know this isn't new
knowledge to anyone. It's not new to me. Strangely enough, I'm seeing a two-thousand-year
old historic event, something I've heard about all my life and the foundation
of everything I've said I believe in, with new eyes.

 For the past few years, I've felt like I just don't know the
true Jesus.  I've focused a lot on
His sacrifice on the cross, I've learned a lot about grace and salvation. Don't
get me wrong I never want to lose focus of the cross. But I do want to know
more about the one that died there. 
The best place to start learning about him is in the Gospels, right?
Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.  I
remember there have been multiple times where I will have just finished one of
the Gospel accounts, and I will think to myself 3 things:

1. Jesus got kind of angry sometimes. The stuff he says
comes across in a rude way.  (This
version of Jesus doesn't match up with the Sunday school, Jesus-loves-Me
version.)

2. I don't even understand half of the things Jesus talks
about (how is it that the poor in spirit are blessed? What does the Kingdom of
God even mean? Why did the rich young ruler have to give up all his money to be
born again?)

3. I think I need to start over because I'm not any closer
to knowing more about Jesus. 

And this has been my cycle for the past couple of years. It
hasn't been a huge burden on me or anything, I just felt like I was missing
something. I still went about living my Christian life. Being a leader of my
Christian organization at college, leading my Bible study, going to church,
being the youth intern at my home church, trying to be a witness to my
non-Christian friends, doing quiet times, going on short mission trips, reading
Christian books. You may be wondering how I am going to make the connection
between this paragraph and the paragraphs above. Herein lies the problem. There
isn't a connection!

 With all the suffering going on around the world and in my
own town, I've been too busy living my Christian life to be aware of it. Or if I
was aware, I was too busy to care, or if I did care, I was too busy to do
anything about it. Or if I wanted to do something about it, I was too lazy to
go the lengths it would take.  Meanwhile,
there were people at my very secular school campaigning against Darfur, raising
awareness of domestic violence, getting to know the homeless people around
town, getting angry at the injustice occurring around the world. And I
continued to lead my Bible studies and try to be an example for the people
around me, and wondering why people don't take an interest in Christianity?

 Well, I guess God figured it was about time I start learning
about the real Jesus. And this guy has rocked my world. Ready?

 Jesus healed a leper right? Fantastic, Jesus heals people! But
more than that, Jesus TOUCHED the lepers, when nobody touched lepers. He had dinner with prostitutes and tax-collectors. He had "nowhere to lay his head". He wept over the corruption of Jerusalem. Jesus LOVED.
He stood up to injustice, he made friends with the people on the fringes of
society, he got angry with how things were being done. He was love incarnated,
but his love didn't come through distant acts of charity, it came through
touch, breath, life and finally death. 
He calls people to follow him, and I thought I had said yes to that
call, but looking back, my life doesn't look much like his at all.

 I don't want this to turn into a rant on the evils of
materialism in the West. But you can't deny that it is a disease that is
ravaging us. And we are the authors and victims of it.  When Jesus says its easier for a camel
to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom, I'm
pretty sure that was a true statement. We have built a wall made of money and
things between us and the people that Jesus calls us to love. My mom made a
comment last week that makes me laugh. (I love you Mom, and I love your
heart!). She said "I would really love to find a homeless family to bring home
for Thanksgiving, but I don't know where to find one!".  Its funny to think about, but also
speaks to the truth of the situation. I don't know where to find one either! I
know they exist in our town, but I couldn't give you directions to get there.
But if Jesus lived in Winston-Salem, NC, he would know which bridge to look
under. In fact, if you wanted to find Jesus in Winston-Salem, you'd probably
have to look under a bridge. (I really don't even know if people live under
bridges in Winston, its just an example).

 I guess my point is that Jesus wasn't comfortable. He lived
and loved dangerously. And he asks us to do the same. The reason I was unnerved
in the past reading the Gospels when Jesus came across "rudely", is because
Jesus didn't sugarcoat things. He took things like oppression and suffering and
injustice very seriously. And we should too. It's time to get angry with the way things are! Its time to stop being passive and stand up for the forgotten and the oppressed and the hurting. We can not afford to turn a blind eye when our brothers and sisters are suffering. If we want the Kingdom, we've got to fight against apathy and chase after it. I'll end with two quotes from a
book I've been reading called Irresistible Revolution by Shane
Claiborne.

 "Jesus was not simply a missionary to the poor, He was poor.
He was born a baby refugee from the badlands of Nazareth, wandered the world a
homeless rabbi, died the rotten death of insurrectionists and bandits on the
cross, executed by an oppressive empire, buried in a borrowed tomb. Jesus was
crucified not for helping poor people but for joining them."

 "We can admire and worship Jesus without doing what he did,
we can applaud what he preached and stood for without caring about the same
things. We can adore his cross without taking up ours."

 Okay one more thing and then I'll be done. I say all this
because I've been so convicted of it myself. I believe that for me to truly
follow Jesus, I'll have to radically change some stuff in my life. And it will
be hard. And I don't even know what it looks like yet, but something has to
change. So hold me accountable (if you feel comfortable doing that). Don't let
this be all talk and no action. Also, I want to hear your thoughts. If you
think I'm crazy or right or just on an
African-missionary-mountaintop-experience-high, let me know!