The Phil Files

My heart is in the Dominican Republic tonight! I know all the focus here in the U.S. will be on the elections on Tuesday — and I do challenge us to prayer and fasting about this in my Heartlight.org post this week. However, a group of Compassion bloggers left for the Dominican Republic Sunday and that is where my focus is tonight. During our prayers tonight, Donna not only prayed for our Compassion Children we sponsor, she also remembered to pray for those headed to D.R.

I was blessed to go on the trip to Uganda, Africa, in February of this year. It was the first Compassion Bloggers trip and it was truly a life changing experience. So those traveling to D.R. are in my prayers and I will have to say, I am a bit envious of them. They are traveling with great people — thanks Brian, Keeley, and Shaun — and traveling to help folks know more about a noble cause. In addition, we are in focus on this trip because on our sponsored children is from D.R.

Blessings to all going on this trip and my prayer is that you touch many folks with the opportunity they have to make a difference in the lives of families and help in the mission of “realeasing children from poverty in Jesus’ name.” I encourage you to keep up with the trip on the Compassion bloggers website!

Are you immune yet? I’m not talking about immunity to a biological disease, I’m talking about an immunity to a very needed God-inspired human virtue, genuine compassion.

Movies, advertisers, preachers, fund raisers, sportscasters, politicians, and a host of others, frequently play with our emotions and generate feelings of empathy, sympathy, and pity for people, events, and situations. Over time, we begin to associate compassion with feelings, emotions, and intentions. Before we know it, just having the emotion makes us feel like we have compassion.

As followers of Jesus, however, we need to hear everything in our Bible heritage remind us of one simple truth: compassion isn’t genuine compassion until intention becomes action.

Don’t mis-hear me on this: our intentions and motivations and emotions ARE important. But, these are not compassion, at least not from God’s point of view.

God demonstrates compassion by becoming human flesh and living among us as Jesus — it was not “tender compassion” until God’s concern for us was demonstrated by His action of becoming one of us (Luke 1:78 NLT). Notice how frequently God’s love, concern, and compassion are identified with His actions on our behalf (John 3:16-17; Romans 5:6-11; 1 John 4:8-10 NLT) and how God’s compassion for us should be completed by our compassionate action for others (1 John 4:8-10 NLT). Jesus even teaches this truth about compassion in two of His most famous parables.

Remember in the story of the “Good Samaritan” how the Priest and the Levite walked on past the man who had been beaten, robbed, and left for dead. But the one who had compassion for this battered man was the Samaritan, who got down off his “high horse” (Okay, it was really a donkey, but “high donkey” just doesn’t seem to have the emotional impact!) and he helped the man. He treated his wounds, bandaged the stranger, put the wounded man on his donkey, put him up in an inn, and paid the man’s way until he was healed. (See Luke 10:30-37 NLT for details, notice especially vs. 33.)

In the famous story of the rebellious son, Jesus tells about the father who had compassion for his wayward child. When the father saw him at a distance, he had compassion on him and ran to meet him, hug him, and welcome this son home. (Luke 15:11-32 NLT, especially vs. 20.)

Throughout Jesus’ ministry, the Lord’s compassion moved Him to actions like, touching and healing lepers, mending the broken and the blind, feeding the hungry masses, teaching the confused and shepherdless crowds, raising from the dead a widow’s only son, and defeating the demonic powers controlling the hopeless. (Follow this link for details in the ministry of Jesus about His compassion — you may want to download the Greek and Hebrew fonts to use the language resources.)In cornbread English, feeling concern and empathy for folks in need is good. We don’t want our hearts to become immune or callused to human suffering. However, we must remember that good intentions don’t become compassion until they move us to action. In the picture above, four key elements of compassion come together with mosquito bed nets for the baby and her mom, a worker from the church to do regular check ups and also Bible mentoring, sponsors who help provide regular support, and medical care with good records — all part of Compassion International’s ministry to kids.

And here is a great way to demonstrate our compassion. April 25 is World Malaria Day. The leading killer of children in many tropical countries is malaria. Having been to Uganda, a number of us know first hand what a huge difference in the life of a child a mosquito net for beds truly can be. I’m hoping your concern will move you to two actions regarding this important issue:First, please make a donation to Compassion International’s Malaria Prevention Fund to provide bed nets for children in malaria infested countries.Second, find out more about the effort to “Bite Back” against this awful disease that ravages the lives of thousands of children every day.

So what makes it hard for you to move from compassionate feelings to genuine compassion in action?

• Seen too many ads and heart too many pleas to really be moved?
• Don’t trust the websites for donating or helping?
• Want to help, but not sure I can?
• None of the above, I’m ready to help right now!

Today we’re joining Randy Elrod for WaterCooler Wednesday and reminding ourselves the ultimate creative active is to give someone at chance at life.

Sooner or later, the jet lag, emotion, and amazement of the Compassion trip to Uganda had to hit me. When we arrived home on Monday the 19th, I got a good night’s sleep and jumped right back into my routine with Heartlight and Southern Hills. I was playing catch up and scrambled my way through a busy week.

On Sunday morning, however, about ten minutes into my sermon, an image flashed on the screen of some of the children I had been with in Uganda. Then the picture, the little girl we sponsor flashed on the screen. In a very public situation, and without warning, all the emotions, exhaustion, cultural differences, and jet lag hit all at once. I wrestled to gather my emotions, my voice pushed by will through clenched vocal chords tangled by emotions. The carefully prepared outline of a message suddenly scrambled in my head as my thoughts wrestled with the emotions of my heart. By the grace of God, I got through it without a total meltdown. However, some things slipped out in ways that I wouldn’t have said them under different circumstances. Carefully crafted points suddenly became fuzzily entangled in the moment.

When I sat down with ministry staff and several elders months earlier to speak on the topic, “Unto the Least of These,” I had no idea I was going to Uganda to be with children, and especially this one special child, whose smiles would be indelibly written on the canvas of my heart. But I had gotten through the message … in the first service! Somehow, the Holy Spirit was going to have to pick me up and kick me in the backside and help me through another one.

Before I made it home from that Sunday morning, Megan (our daughter) and I picked up Donna at the airport. She was coming in from a speaking engagement in Alabama with her friends, The Coffee Group. They were excited and tired and glad to be home, but feeling good about their weekend with their sisters in Christ from Homewood. I was excited to be with her and we were both glad to get home and be together.

On the way into the house, there on the counter, was a simple vase filled with white roses. They looked great except for one wilted set of leaves. I had sent them to her for Valentines’ Day, along with red and pink roses — two dozen in all. Somehow the white ones had hung on for nearly two weeks and still looked good, but all the other roses with color had wilted. I had culled out the wilted roses, and left behind the white ones. It was a little thing, but something I knew Donna would notice as a simple way to say, “Glad you are home! I love you!”

As I looked at those roses, that’s how I felt. Glad to be home and loved, but drained of color and wilted on the edges.

My blogging buddies — it is unbelievably cool to think of these incredible people as my buddies connected at the heart through the children of Uganda — have been discussing the challenge we have faced the last few days of speaking about this event. We want to share what we feel, but our feelings are too deep to communicate without tears and laughter. We are not sad, we are just deeply changed. For awhile, as we regain our balance, we are wilted roses. But unlike the roses I culled to leave only the nice looking white ones for Donna to see, we will regain our color and lose our wilt. We have experienced something we don’t want to forget and have been touched by children whom we can’t forget.

After thirty hours in transit from Entebbe Airport to good ol’ Abilene, Texas, I’m back home with my family. Words cannot capture the full emotion of this trip to Uganda. I will, however, share a few thoughts and a video by one of my blogger friends to give you a glimpse of our appreciation and the importance of this ministry

The world is full of hard places and hard people. There are clearly places where darkness reigns. We were introduced to the realities of this darkness as twenty or more folks in their best clothes, and carrying plastic bags full of their life’s belongs, got onto our plane in Nairobi as we were traveling into Uganda. They were leaving their homes to escape the violence in Kenya. We experienced this overwhelming challenge as we entered deep into the heart of Kampala’s slums for home visits.

There are also many who are determined that the words “amazing grace” are more than just religious talk. We met a few others committed to be outposts of God’s Kingdom of grace and hope. I think of Andrew, who quietly slipped into our circle as we worshiped and shared the Lord’s Supper on our last Sunday morning in Africa. Andrew is a native Ugandan who is helping others build housing for HIV-orphaned chilren.And our hearts were touched with a couple who have two “bio-children” who joined our group traveling back from Brussels. They had adopted two girls from Liberia and were returning home. We also were privileged to meet several young adults whose lives were changed by Compassion sonsors. We are convinced they will help change the future of their country for good and for God.

I deeply apreciate your prayers and words of encouragement while our group has been gone. Your comments and emails have been a continued blessing as we fought through jet lag, very little sleep, Internet challenges, and deep emotions hard to capture with our feeble words or contain in our hearts.

Please accept my heartfelt gratitude for your prayers. The impact of the trip and our good health are both clear testimonies to your faithfulness. We know good results will continue to be felt as more children are sponsored and thousands of people know about this great opportunity to help make a difference in the lives of children.

To my fellow traveling bloggers, please know my deep love and respect for you, your love for the Lord, and your desire to see the light of God’s Kingdom shine in dark places that need grace. What an honor to travel with you and to share in God’s sense of humor, creative diversity, and power to use such a interesting and talented group of people.

Most of all, for those who have sponsored a child, a “Thank you!” is not enough. My words of appreciation are not close to being adequate. So I hope that Shaun Grove’s video about “Brenda’s House” will help you know the kind of power you can have in the life of your sponsored child. Please don’t forget to write to them and pray for them. You have no idea how treasured you will be to this child you sponsor. Many of the children we met had saved every letter they have ever received from their sponsor. And if you want to have a taste of the difference you can make, please take a few moments and get a glimpse of the kind of impact your love can make!

 

When a bunch of Internet/blogger types head to Uganda, what would you expect to happen?

Knowing the way our adversary works, you can imagine we have battled Internet issues all week long. I have not been able to get my email to work for several days.

My family hasn’t heard from me in at least three days. So here goes a note to my family on my blog — I find it quite ironic that while I’m on a blogging trip, the only way I can get a personal message to my family is through my blog. So here goes …

To My Precious Family — Donna, Megan, Zach & Mandy,

I’m headed home! My heart has been pointed there for several days. I miss you all terribly and I can’t wait to see you. I’ve got wonderful things to share with you — too many to be captured by a few articles and blog posts. But, more than wanting talk TO you, I want to hear FROM you. I want to hear your voices, to see your faces, and to learn how your week went last week. Most of all, I’m looking forward to being home and being with you!

This has been an amazing trip with a wonderful group of people. No one would have put us together by looking at our personalities and past experiences. We’re quite a collection! But, I believe we all feel that God did what no one else would dare to do: He did bring us together in this far away place. Compassion International and the children of Africa were His vehicles to do it.

There are funny stories to tell about each of my new friends, but I will share those some other time. You’ve read their blogs and probably seen some of their videos. You probably know more about what they’ve said than I do, because we haven’t been able to read each others’ posts.

So, before we leave on the plane to brings each of us home, our team will gather one more time. We’ll share the Lord’s Supper together. We’ll remember the Lord and His sacrifice for us. I know that I’ll miss being able to do this with you.

I know that my journey home will seem longer than the one coming here, because I can’t wait to see you. Yet I will also leave a part of my heart here in Uganda. When I get home, I will tell you more about your new little sister, the little girl we sponsor, and I think you will understand what I mean. Until then, please know that I love each you and hope that we can all do something like this together.

Love you forever,
Phil (Dad)

P.S. Donna, I want to especially tell you how precious you were to hide a card for each day in my luggage. I can’t say everything on my heart to you face-to-face. Until then, 3 squeezes!

Driving back to the hotel after a long day, I was “wierded out” at the sight of two pearly white manikins standing out front of a clothing store wearing red clothing. The display would have looked strange in any city, but here in Africa, bright white manikins just seemed over edge of the “bizarre-ness” meter.

But that wasn’t the most out of place sight I saw on the trip back. The other was a guy yelling at the top of his lungs standing on a street corner. He slammed his fist on the Bible as he bellowed. While I couldn’t understand all the words he was screaming, he did make it clear that he was warning people about hell. It was also obvious that his message was missing it’s mark. As someone on our bus observed, this was the only abandoned street corner that we had seen the whole time we had been in Kampala. People were avoiding this guy like the plague — they moved to the other side of the street long before they reached him, and if they couldn’t avoid him, they sped up their pace and made sure not to look his way as they raced past him. Even though I believe he was on that corner with good intentions, he clearly had a serious methodology problem to go along with his faulty understanding of the Good News of Jesus.

In a country trying to escape from poverty and from crushing public health issues, yelling a message devoid of grace and randomly warning people about hell wasn’t winning any converts and sure wasn’t helping anyone I saw escape from their own private hell. From my vantage point, his approach sure didn’t appear to be following Jesus’ model of ministry, either. Jesus preached and taught in appropriate places, and he also healed and liberated folks from the bondage when and where needed. But unlike our street corner-preacher, Jesus attracted huge crowds and changed innumerable lives (Matthew 9:35-38).

While in Kampala, we got to share in a partner effort of Compassion International. Compassion uses this service as they seek to pattern their work with children after Jesus’ approach to ministry. I can assure you that their results are far different, and much more encouraging than the guy preaching on the street corner in Kampala. And the projects with whom they partner also call people to genuine discipleship, but in the context of wholistic ministry to the complete person — heart, soul, mind, and strength (cf. Mark 12:30).

Compassion has partnered with The Mildmay Centre in Kampala, Uganda. This is the leading HIV research and treatment center in Africa. We toured the both sides of the center this morning, the outpatient treatment center and the childcare and inpatient hospital for children that are HIV positive. We saw hundreds of people receiving care, children and adults.Uganda was the first African country to acknowledge their need for help with the HIV epidemic and has taken dramatic steps to address this issue at each of the crucial levels — moral, spiritual, emotional, and physical (heart, soul, mind, and strength). Yet so many are trapped in poverty and all it brings with it — poor hygiene, lack of information, despair, and lack of transportation. The Mildmay Centre is a key component as Compassion plugs into their services for children and their families.

The training, treatment, and support that Compassion offers those diagnosed HIV positive, along their families, makes a difference in the lives of real people and real children. This is true in the life of our Compassion child. Through the church project where she is involved, our Compassion child’s mom has been to training to improve her health, hygiene, and habits. They have worked to prevent the condition from being passed on to our Compassion child. So you see, these programs, and these results are not theoretical chunks of data from a place far away. They are personal and real to me and to a child I’ve held and hugged! This holistic approach to Jesus’ message of the Kingdom is our Compassion child’s only hope in this world.So many approaches to problems today make no more difference than the strange manikins on display or the well-intentioned street-corner screamer warning about hell. Political battles in government, and sadly in our churches, sidetrack our focus on Jesus-style ministry. However, some approaches are making a difference in the lives of many people … some of these are people we know and love … and part of the reason they are effective is because they are patterned on Jesus’ ministry to the whole person!

Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.” (Matthew 9:35-38 TNIV).

Read that last sentence again, please. Then realize, you might just be the answer to my prayer for more workers for the His harvest field and a child’s hope for life now and for eternity! Sponsor a child and change the future. (And in tomorrow’s Heartlight.org article, I’ll share with you just how big a difference some of these things have made in the lives of emerging leaders!)