Monday, July 20, 2009

Same Kind of Different as Me

One of the very best books I’ve read is Same Kind of Different as Me, by Ron Hall and Denver Moore.

It’s the true story of an unlikely friendship between Hall and his wife Debbie, who were wealthy art dealers, and Moore, a homeless man from a sharecropper family in Louisiana. The story is about how their friendship developed, as Ron and Debbie Hall volunteered at a homeless shelter in Fort Worth, Texas.

An article in The United Methodist Reporter (May 29, 2009) says people all over the world buy the books, maybe at airports, and then order quantities of them to pass out to their friends. What Hall and Moore are hearing in the 200-300 daily e-mails they get is that people’s attitudes toward the homeless are changing.

Hall is quoted as saying, “They begin to look at homeless people and think ‘Could that be a Denver Moore?’ Most people used to look at them as trash; now God is giving people eyes to look at them as potential treasures.”

“God gave us a story,” he said, “and he is using us to affect the way that people look at homeless people.” Their web site describes them as “a dangerous, homeless drifter who grew up picking cotton in virtual slavery”; “an upscale art dealer accustomed to the world of Armani and Chanel”; and “a gutsy woman with a stubborn dream.”

Buy it! Read it! Pass it on to somebody else!

Saturday, July 11, 2009

Out of Retirement

I sort of decided to retire this blog around Easter. But! Now, I have decided to come out of blog-retirement. I think my two main problems have been time, of which there seems to be little, and lack of assurance that anybody out there reads any of this stuff.


As for the first--time--every day still has twenty-four hours in it. We choose what we will spend our time doing; that’s called prioritizing, I tell myself.


The second, I must confess, is a selfish consideration. The Bible says believers must spread God’s word. It doesn’t say we should talk about God if people are listening. It just says do it. So I will start up again, doing it. Also, I have learned that at least one person reads it from time to time. So here’s something I want to point out today:


God is always amazing to me, even if I expect him to be performing miracles--which I do and he does. Oswald Chambers points out in today’s My Utmost for His Highest entry, July 11, that


A spiritually vigorous saint never believes that his circumstances simply happen at random, nor does he ever think of his life as being divided into the secular and the sacred. He sees every situation in which he finds himself as the means of obtaining a greater knowledge of Jesus Christ, and he has an attitude of unrestrained abandon and total surrender about him.


In modern words, I think we could say Oswald means that God arranges circumstances in our lives and works through those circumstances to bring us to a closer relationship with himself through Jesus.


That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it!