Today – March 11 – I’m turning 41, and I want your money. I want you to join me in helping others who weren’t born into the lives that I and many of you, my friends and family, were born into.

I am a rabid fan of the work of One Day’s Wages, a local non-profit startup that raises funds to help battle extreme global poverty. The challenge is for each of us to consider simply donating one day’s worth of our own wages to help the poorest of the poor in our world. I am doing that for my birthday this year, and I’d like you to join me. Instead of a birthday gift, I want your money – but not for me; to pool together and to help those who don’t have access to clean water, who are ravaged by poverty or are threatened by the ongoing modern-day slave trade.

Most of you know that I’ve been unemployed for the past 6 months. Money is tight, for all of us. But for many of our global neighbors, what we think of as ‘tight’ is what helps the to survive and to build systems that help others escape extreme poverty.

Please explore the One Day’s Wages website, videos and community. Look especially at the partnerships that ODW is supporting with small, grassroots organizations. I know that you’ll find an organization of integrity and who values relationships with those we are partnering with, rather than misguided attempts to help.

And please join me in giving. I’m giving the wages for my birthday (my 4th day on the job ) to One Day’s Wages. My goal is that together, we can raise $4100: $100 for every year I’ve been here on this planet. If you donate your own day’s wages, that’s fantastic. If you can donate $41, that’s wonderful. What kind of impact can your gift make?
Here’s what ODW says:

Yes, a person’s one day’s wages can make a difference. An average working person’s daily wage is approximately 0.4% of their annual salary. Consider the impact we can make for another person, a family, a village, or an organization that is on the ground working to uplift people out of poverty:

• Malaria Net: $10
• Clean Water for one person for 20 years: $20
• Child’s Tuition for Education: $45
• Teacher’s Salary in jungles in Burma: $60/year
• Training & Sewing Machine for one woman: $125
• Machine Drilled Well for a Village: $1400

Together, let’s make a dent in extreme poverty, and to help those who face it every day. Please go to the One Day’s Wages website and donate what you can, and know that I deeply appreciate you and your gift.

Just three months ago, Jason had a stomachache and when it was diagnosed, he found out that he had an aggressive cancer. Despite treatment, he has left us.

This morning when I learned of his passing, I was praying and reflecting on the difficulty of this transition. A friend of mine wrote me on twitter about Jason, and she said this about him:

Thanks brother. It’s a deep loss b/c he was a man who loved deeply.

At first, I read that differently. I read “he was a man who was loved deeply”, and then I reread it. That description is profound.

He loved deeply.

Jason’s life became a centering point for me today. At first, I thought it would be good for me to try to love deeply today, but that seemed misaligned.

I honestly don’t think that would be the description placed upon me today, but I can’t imagine a better epitaph than this. I want to be known as a man who loved deeply.

So then I thought about this, all day: What would it take for me to become more and more capable of loving deeply? What has to change about my life, my time, my personality, my priorities so that when my time comes, my friends and family will describe me that way?

I have ideas about what this means for me, and no easy changes, but … are you a woman or a man who people will describe in this way? Are you satisfied with that description of your life? If not … what needs to change in order for that to be true about you?

Godspeed, Jason. I hope to say that you’ve taught me well.

Turning a gravelly, lifeless storage yard into a green space for seniors is the passion of North Bend resident Burt Mann.

At a point in life where most people are retired, the 87-year-old Mann is still working, as the janitor at the Mount Si Senior Center. His favorite place is the atrium between the center’s old and new wings. Now, with a little help from a North Bend landscaper, Mann is working to turn the space into a garden and koi pond to the delight of fellow seniors.

“Burt is great,” said Ruth Tolmassoff, Mount Si Senior Center Director. “He works here. Everyone knows him.

via Growing Burt’s garden – Snoqualmie Valley Record.

Phillip Toledano – Days with My Father.

Almost 60% of Christians around the world feel their hectic schedule prevents them from spending more time with God. That’s what Michael Zigarelli, a Charleston Southern professor, found after polling more than 20,000 Christians from 139 countries about the busyness of their lives and how it affects their relationship with God. His report, which concludes almost six years of data collection, echoes the obvious: yes, we’re busy people; and yes, our hectic lives prevent us from spending more time with God. A few elements to Zigarelli’s study are particularly fascinating.

**American Christians aren’t necessarily the busiest. Japan, the Philippines, South Africa, the United Kingdom, Mexico and Indonesia all had a higher percentage of believers who stated they often or always rushed “from task to task.”

**African Christians are most likely to claim their busyness gets in the way of developing their relationship with God. (Two out of three South African and Nigerian believers stated this.)

**The United States is the only country where women topped men in saying they were 1) almost always busy and 2) that busyness affected their spiritual walk.

While a whopping 72 percent of Christian lawyers said their overloaded pace of life interfered with growing in the Lord, almost two out of every three pastors made the same claim.

Source: ASSIST News Service, reported here.

Well, that’s a big “duh”, isn’t it? We’re too busy, we’re doing too much, and we know it. Our global culture’s Way of Life is busier than we want it to be, and most of us are simply caught up into it, unwilling or unable to think though how we might escape the swirl of activity.

The question is, what are we doing about it? (The other question is, of course, ‘why?’, but that’s not the question I want to focus on here.

I have the honor of leading a retreat this weekend, and we’ll talk about the issue of busyness and more importantly, what we’re doing about it. I hope to introduce some values and practices of spiritual formation gleaned from various monastic movements, and give our guests some resources to help them to live their way of life more intentionally, more slowly, and more on purpose.

More to come.

The NY Times takes another look at the phenomenon of 20-somethings, unable to get or afford insurance, stretching medications and taking a DIY stance on treatment. We’re wondering if you’re in the same boat.

The Times article describes how the young and uninsured get by on borrowing, trading, and stockpiling medications and medical equipment, seeking out free clinics and testing resources, and turning to net resources like WebMD to self-diagnosis and keep healthy.

via Ask The Readers: How Do You Stay Healthy Without Insurance?.

My family currently has medical insurance, but not dental.  It’s the first time in my career that we’re not fully insured.  I have to say that it’s scary.  If any of the four of us were to have any dental needs, we’d be screwed.  Dental insurance is more expensive than we can afford to pay, but we don’t have a nest egg to hit up in case there are problems.

More and more of my friends are in this same boat – lacking dental also, or lacking any insurance.  It’s a stressful position to be in.

For one weekend – TWO DAYS – last summer, I was without health insurance.  The last company I was at closed up shop on a Friday; on a Monday I started the new job with insurance.  I didn’t pay the > $2k in COBRA costs to remain insured, and took my chances.  On that Saturday- the next day – my son sliced his chin open when he jumped on top of me, and we went to the E.R.  $1500 bill, here you go.

Bit by bit, we’ve been trying to take care of that.  But I certainly can understand the plight of my friends who are uninsured for more than a weekend, and I worry along with them.

Theologically, I’m just not in the same realm as those who say that because we love and serve, God is obligated to cover our bills, or to keep us healthy.  I think God acts on our behalf, and miraculously, but I also know that my own financial choices or the reality of cancer or tooth decay can impact my family.  We pray and we hope, but we also realize that this time that we live in isn’t fully imbued with the presence of God the way that we’d hope.

We try to hope, and we try to trust.  And we aim at the center of God’s love for us as a family and as a society, and pray for the best.

Of course, when I say “You” I mean “I” or “me”.

I’ve got a few gifts to finish up with, and I’m taking a slightly different approach this year.

In our family gift drawing (the adults draw names and we have one person to buy a gift for), I got my brother’s name. Seems I always get my brother’s name, so I suspect that the whole thing is fixed, but this is good. My brother’s pretty easy to buy for – he likes motorcycles and hot sauce. We sort of have an ongoing theme between us this way. But sifting through the various ways to find something stamped Harley-Davidson or something spicy felt empty; I wanted to do something a bit more deep.

Last year, my wife drew my brother’s name (thus giving us the perception that it’s not a fix), and she had all the adults write a letter to him telling him what he means to us. She put a scrapbook together for him with all of these kind words. It was a monumental effort and wonderful gift.

I have no such skill.

But I did have an idea.

I’m going give my brother the opportunity to start a bicycle repair shop, or buy a taxi, or breed cows in a developing country.

Let me introduce to you the micro-lending website, Kiva. Kiva is a website and social network that matches up people who want to lend money to entrepreneurs trying to escape poverty in the developing world, and those entrepreneurs.

Say for example that you live in Honduras and you have a bicycle repair shop as your primary income, but you need a business loan to help you buy tools and parts.

Or say that your business is selling baleadas (a Honduran tortilla filled with mashed, friend beans ajd maybe some other ingredients). You need a bit of money to help buying ingredients.

Or, in one specific case, four of you (two of the above as well as a grocery store owner and a shoe and clothing salesman) get together as an entrepreneurial group which receives the funds together and keeps each other accountable.

You work with a local agency which vets you and places you into the Kiva system.

You as a group ask for a small amount of money (in this case $950USD). Your group receives the loan and puts it to work; then you make repayments according to schedule.

Or, as another example, say you area a high school mathematics teacher in Tajikistan. You are married with six children. To make ends meet you have a second job as a taxi driver, but your current car doesn’t work well on mountain roads, so you want to upgrade your vehicle.

Then, switching hats, you are now the lender. You can sort through the businesses requesting loans, filtering by geographic region or market sector or loan risk. Find an opportunity that catches your attention, and with a loan as small as $25, you join the pool of people who are helping that business.

That business takes the loan and funds their request, and then has a repayment plan for the loan. You as the lender are repaid, at which point you can take the money back out as cash, or you can choose to fund a different venture.

This week, says Kiva, 4,364 entrepreneurs were funded; 21,415 lenders made a loan, and $1.6 million dollars was lent out.

To help people unfamiliar with Kiva to get started, Kiva allows you to purchase gift certificates. These can be printed and mailed, or emailed to the recipient. With a gift certificate, the recipient chooses how to spend the money: by helping to start a bicycle repair shop, or buying a taxi in Tajikistan, or breeding cows in Cambodia, or thousands of other ideas that help to lift people out of poverty.

Put your Christmas gift to work helping people lift themselves out of poverty. I suspect you’ll like it more than another Harley Davidson shirt, and almost as much as discovering a new hot sauce

	Make a loan Change a life
Name: Sarah Adjo G Location: Togo	Loan Needed: $1,175 15 % funded

God is up to something for certain.  There are too many people looking at intentional community and new monasticism for this to be a coincidence; the Spirit of God is at work.  Perhaps it is because, in any moment in history in which we’ve had strong Empire, monasticism arose as a counterbalance.  Perhaps it is because in the West we have easy-beliefism and a deep loss of community.  Where I fit into this, only time will tell.

Or maybe there is something more critical at hand.  Consider this possibility, written by Poser or Prophet:

Not that I know anything about this stuff, but I reckon that, if the global markets were to crash and we were to be heading for some sort of Great Depression at some point in the future then… well… then it makes sense for the Spirit to begin stirring now-ish in order to create communities of Christians who are learning how to share the basic elements of life, who are economically dependent upon one another, who are making connections across national boundaries, and who are trying to bridge the gap between the West and the Rest of the world.

A possibility, indeed.  In any case, God is at hand.

Oh, and thanks as usual to my friend Eliacín Rosario-Cruz, who shared another item from this blog on his Google Reader shared items feed.  I love Google Reader shared items…

Kaileigh, now 6 and a kindergartener:

• Has decided that when she grows up she wants to be a doctor (but not the kind that gives shots), a cheerleader, a teacher and a rock star. Not or, but and.
• Continues to detest socks, and may actually make it through her entire youth without wearing them
• Is incredibly helpful with her younger brother
• Is reading and remembering books at an alarming rate
• Is steadily advancing toward earning a gerbil. Or was it hamster? I can’t remember.

Brogan, now 2 and in daycare three times a week for a couple of hours:

• Is addicted to motorcycles and plays with a toy motorcycle during most waking moments
• Is convinced that he is a puppy, and crawls around the house panting with tongue out
• Still has crazy hair, also with Dad’s odd swirls on the top back
• Is addicted to Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, which we watch On-Demand over and over and over again
• Thinks that belts are always necessary, and helps Dad wear one always
• Loves to make people laugh

Pics coming soon…

Check out http://loudandclear87.wordpress.com/2008/10/09/learning-from-monks/, a college student who writes:

So, I have Church History at 7:50 in the morning on Tuesdays and Thursdays and sometimes its a real bear to get up and go to a lecture that early to just hear about the early church and its practices.

Yes, going to class is a spiritual disciplinw for me.

This tuesday, my professor, Dr. Bud Bence gave a lecture on the Monastic Movement in early Christianity. Just by the topic of monks and their practices, I will admit I kind of zoned out for awhile. About 15 minutes into the lecture, my prof got quiet and started to tell a story of how when he was in college he visited a monastery and how fascinated he was by the monks and their practices.

One of the monks expressed to my professor that he was concerned with protestants and their practices. After asking for clarification, the monk explained,”You little protestants are always running around doing and doing. You never take time to just be. Just be and pray for the world and for people you know.”

My prof later told us that one of the other monks at the monastery had stayed up all night praying for all of the visitors to the monastery by name. ALL NIGHT…to pray for people he didn’t even know.

All of this got me thinking. I am doing school. Doing work. Doing relationships.

When do I stop and truly unplug. When was the last time I just stopped and prayed for people.

When do I take time just to BE one of God’s children and rest in the pleasure it is to know HIM.

Needless to say, I learned from the seemingly boring lecture. I am changed by it. Even though Monks might have silly practices in some ways, I found TRUTH in some of it.

This story of a Protestant visiting Catholic monks and hearing about being and doing is not unique. My spiritual director, a fellow Vineyard church planter, heard the same thing as well.

The heart of this issue is abolutely worth considering: Where are our practices hampering just, simply, being with God?