Compassion/Justice

Last September I took my Discipleship Training School, which was focused on Compassion and Justice. Now that I'm staffing here at YWAM Charlotte, I'm encouraged to find a home away from home church. The DTS students travel to a different church that supports us every week, but as staff we need to find a church home. I remember last year we went to this church in Ballantyne (which is south of Charlotte). It was having a grand opening as they had just moved from a movie theater to a facility they had built attached to the YMCA. It's one of three campuses (meaning that there is one speaker at one of the campuses and the other two campuses see him on a large screen -- this is becoming commonplace but it's taken me a while to get used too. Each campus though does have it's own pastor, he's just not the speaker). Anywho, because it was the grand opening the speaker was at this campus we went too. He was in a series on Malachi, and that Sunday he was speaking on Malachi 2:13-16 - a section on divorce. He said something right off that has stuck with me. "I like to go through an entire book when I preach a series because it means I can't pick and choose what to speak on. I have to go through all that is written, even the hard stuff". I knew that I was supposed to come back to Charlotte after my school as staff, so finding a home church was in the back of my mind. Skip forward a year and Forest Hill still tugs at me. I've been a few times since, and the thing I love about it is that the Word isn't watered down the same as at 24/7. It will definitely become my home away from home church.
Next week they'll begin a series on justice. Injustice is something that plagues are world, and I think our culture has become kind of numb to it but the statistics none the less are staggering. Today I came to a realization. I'm probably not ever going to return to Canada on a permanent basis. Not that there isn't injustice in Canada as children are killed before they even get a chance at they're first breath, but that isn't the fight I'm called to. Others are called to that war, good people such as Eric Johnston. And there is a war. A war between good and evil, life and death, Creator and destroyer. A war over every single human being on this planet. So I can't just go home and live my life while young girls are sold off for sex in return for some cattle, or entire villages are wiped off the planet simply because the people there were born of a certain tribe. While thousands die every day simply because their village doesn't have a well. I can't stand by while most of the world live in worse conditions then the homeless in North America. No, I'm called to the battlefield. Right now I'm part of training 14 young people who'll take the gospel to Cambodia and Thailand. They aren't going on vacation. They're going to war. They'll see things that they'll never forget, meet people who'll they can't forget, and in the darkness they'll spread light. This is who I am, and this is what I'm called to do.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." -- Edmund Burke