Gun Control and How We're Missing the Point

This post is going to be a little different than what I usually write on this blog, but I do like keeping up with politics and writing about it so you may see more of it in the future.

The awful shooting at the elementary school in Newton, Connecticut has relight the fire of the gun control debate. The murder of so many people, mostly children, was horrific and naturally generated very emotional reactions. People have been protesting at the White House, media has been reporting on it non-stop, and politicians are struggling to qualm the emotional tide.
One protester's sign really caught my eye, however, especially because he was waving it in front of the NRA [National Rifle Association] vice president while he was speaking in a press conference this morning.



First, I thought of how disrespectful it was for someone to do that, then I realized how ridiculous this whole thing was. The NRA has had some pretty intense backlash from the country because of their, obvious, stance on gun control and weapons. But how someone could actually believe that they were to blame in any way in the Connecticut shooting is beyond me.
Throughout this situation, the NRA has been very respectful and hasn't lashed back at people who blamed them for the shooting. This morning's press conference contained ideas that were logical and level headed. And I think that they addressed what media and politicians should have been debating about this entire time: school protection.
When I heard about the shooting, my thoughts were not "how did he get a gun?" but "how did he get in?" How did someone enter a school during the day with guns and malicious intent?
Wayne LaPierre, the vice president of the NRA, voiced a plan for school protection, calling "on Congress to immediately appropriate money to put armed officiers in every school in America." -USA Today
Personally, I think that it is a good idea, although it is strongly opposed by most of the country. LaPierre asks though, "Why is the use of a gun [good] when it's asked to be used to protect the president or used by the police, but bad when it's used to protect children?"
The problem is that this issue is very emotional and risky. Having guns around children is concerning to many parents, but I do think that it could make schools safer as long as they are in the hands of well trained guards.
The NRA addressed many other links to violent shootings, such as video games and media coverage, which you can read a summary of here.
When we're faced with situations like this, however, I think that the media, the people, and the politicians of this country have a responsibility to react in a less emotional way. The media especially has been fueling this fire and has reported many of the facts wrong. It's frustrating because we all want to have well thought out ideas. Of course this debate is emotional; there have been so many shootings that have taken innocent lives. But the wrong reaction is to jump on the NRA or gun owners. Guns are not responsible for the crimes that evil or sick people commit.

-Meaghan

PS - I would encourage you to read the transcript of the press conference from this morning if you can! There were some really good thoughts expressed, as I mention before. [read here]

The Problem with Gossip

We've probably all heard the saying "never judge a person until you've walked a mile in their shoes". Basically, that we have no place to judge what a person is going through because we aren't going through it ourselves. I've always loved this quote because it addressed a problem that every person faces in their life: gossip. It's so easy to pass on that little observation about someone. Unfortunately, though, our 'observations' are often so wrong.

In the past few weeks I've realized how wrong I've been about some of the people around me. I've realized how much I've misunderstood them, and while I hadn't gossiped about them, I had misjudged them in my mind [which is just as bad]. The fact is, we can never know what people are going through and for us to do anything but help them when they are going through a difficult time is wrong. 

People go through painful and horrible things and instead of coming alongside them, we have a tendency to judge them. In doing so, we make their situation so much harder. We wonder why suicide is such a high trend in teens and young adults; we wonder why depression is running rampant; we wonder why people have so many fears, when we are our own problems. 

Imagine if you could openly talk about the issues you were having, without the fear of rejection from the people around you? And I know that fear is often unfounded and that it is a tool Satan will use to stop us from having freedom, but Satan is using the attitudes we have as a Christian society against us. 

From my own personal experience and in talking to friends, I can see how much fear has hurt us and held us back. Fear of rejection is very hard to overcome because our deepest desire as human beings is to be loved and accepted. Many of us have had experiences with gossip and being misunderstood and it's a hard place to be, especially when close friends and family members put us there. So hard that we will avoid it at any cost. So often this leads to much deeper issues... holding things in is never a good solution. 

What's missing is unconditional love and understanding. Unconditional love is very hard for us to grasp because we're not perfect and our tendency is to compare ourselves to others and then judge when people don't appear to measure up. Although impossible for us to have all of the time, it is pretty self-explanatory. Deciding to love people unconditionally is saying that you are going to love people despite what they've done. 

Understanding is being willing to look past what you immediately see and look deeper. It's too easy to just look at people and their actions, we must look in them in order to begin to understand. And even if you cannot understand what they're going through, you still don't have the place to judge. It goes back to love. 

We're all people; it shouldn't be so complicated, but it is! No matter how many times God teaches me this lesson I still find myself learning it again and again. We have a tendency to judge and misunderstand people. We have to start making life easier for the people around us; some people are really hurting and we are only making their lives more difficult. 

-Meaghan 

Return to What?

This week I received an email from the newsletter called A Slice of Infinity. This newsletter is sent out by Ravi Zacharias International Ministries. The article reminded me of how incomparable God is to everything else this world offers. I thought that I would just pass it along via a blog post. Enjoy! 

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The moment was electric with emotion. Before this group of two to three million people lay the waters of the Red Sea. Behind them rose the spiraling dust from the hoofs and chariots of their former slave-masters, the Egyptians.(1) There was no way to go forward. No way to slip out into oblivion. As they faced their moment of challenge, they discovered there was room to go in one only direction—backwards!

Have you lately been tempted to go backwards? Perhaps to the “good ole days” when the prices were lower, the journeys were shorter, the trousers were longer, the weather was better, the pressure was lesser, the currency was stronger, the youth were kinder, the music was softer, and the world was safer? The human mind has this amazing ability to forget what we are meant to remember and remember what we are meant to forget. The Israelites were no exception. They said to Moses, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you brought us to the desert to die? What have you done to us by bringing us out of Egypt? Didn’t we say to you in Egypt, ‘Leave us alone; let us serve the Egyptians?  It would have been better for us to serve the Egyptians than to die in the desert!” (Exodus 14:11-12). As someone rightly said, “It took one night for God to take Israel out of Egypt, but it took forty years to take Egypt out of Israel!”

Some years ago, my wife Miriam and I met with a young person who came from a home that was not Christian. She had made her commitment to following Christ and was facing pressure from her loved ones to give up that faith. One day while under much pressure, she said, “I even considered their persuasions for a while in my mind, but the question I could not answer was this one: ‘To whom else can I go after knowing the Lord Jesus?’ Go back, yes, but to whom or to what?” In her reflection lies a very critical point of uniqueness. To this young person, no other love-claim would be as real as the one Jesus makes. No other truth as reliable and no other offer of meaning comparable.

Return. Go back. But “to whom or to what?” reads the telltale sign on that dead-end road!

In fact, the key word in the book of Hosea is “return.” The prophet uses the word 22 times in his prophecy. The people of Israel were to seriously consider the admonition, “Come let us return to the Lord” (Hosea 6:1).

Likewise, as the Israelites stood at the edge of the Red Sea one must not forget that they were a generation that had witnessed the ten powerful plagues that befell Egypt. They were the very people to whom the Lord had spoken in the words of Moses:  ”I am the Lord, and I will bring you out from under the yoke of the Egyptians. I will free you from being slaves to them, and I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and with mighty acts of judgment. I will take you as my own people and I will be your God” (Exodus 6:6-7). They were also the very people whose firstborns were spared on the night of the Passover and who were being led in the wilderness by the Lord himself who had revealed himself in a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night.

Isn’t it strange how memory works! They stood between the waters of the Red Sea and the approaching army with so rich a faith experience and yet conceded that life in Egypt was a better deal. One wonders how they could forget the long years of captivity and the burdens of being bonded laborers under the Egyptians.

Yet by contrast, isn’t it strange how God works? God took no offence. God did not disappear. God did not pour down judgment. Instead, God stood by an ungrateful people. All because it is not in God’s nature to forget a promise. And wonderfully, there was one man who believed as he raised his staff over the waters of the mighty sea.

Did Moses know how God would deal with the laws of the physical world when he raised his staff over the sea? Did Joshua know how God would work beyond the imaginings of architecture when they marched around Jericho? Did Daniel know how God would deal with the natural instincts of lions as he was lowered into the den? No they didn’t. All they knew was their God. Today also, those who know God live not by explanations, but by promises.

Arun Andrews is a member of the speak team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bangalore, India. 

(1) Although there is no record of the precise number that left Egypt in the Exodus, a military census taken not long after listed the number of men twenty years of age and older who could serve in the army as 603,550 (Exodus 38:26). From that number, the total Israelite population of that time has been estimated at approximately two to three million.

Actions that Match Thoughts

...Who knowing the righteous judgement of God, that those who practice such things are deserving of death, not only do the same but also approve of those practice those things. 

                                                                                                            -Romans 1:32

The book of Romans, and the whole Bible for that matter, are very clear on God's judgement of sin and how a Christian should [and should not] live their life. In fact, the verses preceding the above verse from Romans 1 mentions a few of the things that we shouldn't be: unrighteous, wicked, covetous, malicious, envious, murderous, deceitful, gossipers, backbiters, haters of God, violent, proud, unloving, unforgiving, and unmerciful. [from verses 29-30]  No one can claim to be perfect in all of these areas. God hasn't even called us to do that, but we should recognize that acting like that is wrong.
I found it interesting that God would put a verse like Romans 1:32 after that long list. To me it was a reminder of what God is all about: our heart and attitudes. When Jesus came to earth, it was a person's heart that mattered to him. He saw the Pharisees were acting righteous and followed the law, but in his eyes, they still had missed the point because he could see that their hearts weren't in it. In the same way, it is easy for us to get caught up in making sure the we are doing good and acting like 'perfect' Christians. But how many times do we approve of the things that we don't do? How many times do we decide that we won't participate, but we'll stand by and watch?
By standing by and doing nothing are we just as guilty?
Many of you may have watched the Vice Presidential debate between Paul Ryan and Joe Biden. I thought the question about religion [that eventually led to a discussion about abortion] was very interesting. Both candidates are Catholic and both had the same view on abortion. However, Joe Biden's stance was different in that he said something like he wouldn't 'force his beliefs on others' and therefore wouldn't support anti-abortion legislation. When he said that, I sat back and thought about it. It's a very real dilemma for some religious politicians and voters. Eventually my thoughts reached the question, "But if we don't stand up for what we believe in, then why do we believe in it?" Because if we think it's a big enough issue to hold weight in our convictions then we definitely need to act on it. To do anything else sounds too much like hypocrisy to me. And [I have to be careful here], but what's wrong with 'imposing' beliefs on someone if it's true? [if it's even imposing on them]
God has not commanded us to just obey what he has called us to do, but to do it with our whole heart. God will not only judge by the things that we have done but by what we truly and actually felt about those things.
It really comes down to the question of whether or not we're truly obeying him from our hearts or out of a desire to appear perfect.
Bonhoeffer wrote: "The war of Jesus Christ against the gods of this world... is a war that demands the commitment of one's whole life. Is not God, our Lord worthy of this struggle?" God doesn't just want our actions, he actually wants our heart. If we're approving of evil while abstaining from it, we're not serving him with our hearts.
Just a last thought: I think that we have to be very careful in the way that we interpret this verse because people could take it to imply something that is against God's character, namely being judgmental of others. I believe God simply meant is as warning to people, like the Pharisees, who are doing good but aren't totally surrendered to God. God alone is to judge people, that is not our place. We cannot see what God can: people's hearts.

Thanks for reading!
Meaghan

Never Alone

"If I were to say, "Certainly the darkness will cover me, and the light will turn to night all around me," even the darkness is not too dark for You to see, and the night is as bright as day; darkness and light are the same to You." -Psalm 139:11-12 [NET] 

Psalm 139 really spoke to me this morning. Through it God assured me that I will never be abandoned by Him and that I am precious to Him. This one psalm is also so chalked full with encouraging verses regarding purpose, which is something that has been on my mind frequently this summer.
Verse 7 starts out asking, "Where can I go from Your Spirit? Or where can I flee from Your Spirit?" Verses 8-9 describe the far ends of the earth that we could go, but verse 10 brings the assurance that, "Even there Your hand shall lead me, and Your right hand shall hold me."
Often I've thought that verses 7-9 meant that I could never get away from God in the sense that I couldn't escape His conviction or 'punishment' of sin. While it's true that I cannot hide from God, I now think that these verses are illustrating a very different truth: I cannot go anywhere where God is not. The 10th verse makes that abundantly clear; He will be with us wherever we go in life.
The next verses are verses 11-12 [quoted above]. According to Strong's concordance, the word 'darkness' that is used here symbolizes misery, destruction, and death. As I read these verses it was like God was telling me that I will go to some dark places in my life, but that I will be a light in those places and I will never be alone. God isn't intimidated by darkness; He will never send us somewhere that He won't be.
I don't know what my future holds; I'm not sure where those dark places will be, but I do know that God will never stop holding me in His hand and that He will never stop guiding me.
The last verse that really stood out to me was verses 16-17:

Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, the days fashioned for me, when as yet there were none of them. How precious are Your thoughts* to me, O God! How great is the sum of them. 

Even though I don't know exactly what I'm going to do in life, I'm comforted because God promises me a 'future and a hope.' I comforted because I know that God has a firm purpose for my life and that nothing can take that away from me. I know that God's plans are above my and that He can do 'exceedingly above what I could ever ask or think.' And I know that, while I don't have a clue, He does, and He has since the creation of the world.

How awesome is that?

-Meaghan

*purposes, aims [Strong's concordance]

Love.

I was walking out the door to go study at Barnes and Noble today, and as I was walking out I poked into my mom's room, said goodbye to her and told her 'I love you'. As I was walking away I thought to myself, "Do I really mean that when I say it?" I started thinking of how many times a day I say that phrase. I say it when I get off of the phone with friends, family or meaningful people, when I say goodbye to my mom and brother on my way out the door, or even to my pets [is that weird?]. The fact is that the phrase 'I love you' is meant to be much more meaningful, and I feel like I, and our culture, have lost that meaning.

I think we live in a culture that doesn't understand what love is. This has been said over and over again by theologians and Christian thinkers, but it's something that is so predominate in our world today I think it needs to be said again and again so that people start believing the truth about love. Literature, entertainment, music, and even friends have so skewed our idea of love and left us with so many fantasies of what love is supposed to look like.

David Knopp, who traveled with on tour with the APJ team this September described the movie romance phenomenon saying that in movies "people fall in love, get in an argument, make up, and the BAM! they get married." Unfortunately [wait... actually fortunately], reality is nothing like this. It's unfortunate for us if we've believed that the love entertainment portrays is what love actually is.

When you have studied what true love is, the love that media has created looks so fake.
Have you read 1 Corinthians 13 lately? It's the famous love chapter, and it's quoted by non-Christians and Christians alike in discussions of love. In this chapter though, we can find the characteristics and guidelines of real love. Have you ever thought about the fact that Jesus was the ultimate expression of love and the he fulfilled every characteristic of love that is mentioned in 1 Corinthians 13 and in the whole Bible? He did.
And yet, we as humans desire love from each other more. It's unbelievable that we would actually choose a human's love over God's all-fulfilling and sacrificial love... But we do.

Because love is such a predominate theme in everything we hear, watch, and read it's easy to get wrapped up in asking ourselves questions about love such as: "Is it love when he asks me out on our first date? Is it love when he holds my hand? Is it love when we have our first kiss? Are married? When are you in love?" Because, after all, falling in love is our ultimate purpose, right? Culture may say so, but it's not.
Here's a thought: Are we so consumed with the fantasy of being 'in love' that we've forgotten what it is to actually 'love' someone? Because being in love with someone and showing someone love are entirely different. When we say that we want to be in love, we're basically saying that we want to be loved by someone. We are desiring companionship with someone, a desire we were created with, by the way. [that desire can be fulfilled in so many ways, some that are wrong, but that's a discussion for a different post!]
However, I think we were also created for more. Jesus combined the command for us to love God with all of our heart to include loving our neighbors as ourselves [Matthew 22: 36-40]. I think that if our mindset were more focused on loving people and encouraging them, rather than dreaming of the day that we may fall in love, we'll be much more effective. After all, 'love is not selfish' [I Cor. 13:5]. What does that look like? Stop looking at them as a potential husband or wife and start looking at them as your brother or sister in Christ. Something that encouraged and challenged me while on the APJ tour was the thought that God has created me, as a woman, to be a special encouragement to the men in my life. This is impossible for me to do  effectively if I'm focused on myself and what I want and not that guy. We must love effectively.

So when you tell someone you love them, mean it, study for yourself what true love is so that you can see when what you're being shown is fake and unrealistic, and lastly, focus on loving others and not being 'in love'.
As a last thought about that: God could calling you to be single for your whole life [or at least a good portion of it]. Wouldn't it be disappointing if 'falling in love' with a man [or woman] was all you focused on only to realize that you had been fantasizing about something that wasn't going to happen? Love others in purity and out of kindness, not selfishness.

-Meaghan

"The Mystery of Evil."

A few weeks ago I started the first half of a two lecture series called "The Mystery of Evil, The Sovereignty of Good" by Os Guinness and Ravi Zacharias. Today I finished it and thought it was so good that it deserved a post. Both Ravi and Os are excellent speakers and their insight into this subject was deep but understandable. Evil is ever present in our world today and every person is affected by it. Because evil leads to suffering, people often question why it has to exist or why God, who is loving and merciful, would allow it. It is a difficult question to discuss because it highlights an apparent contradiction in the very character of God, and it is asked by people who don't just want knowledge but understanding. They want to understand why they have to suffer [a place that I have been before].
I've decided to blog my notes on these lectures because of how relevant the question is and because of how coherent these men's answers were.

The first lecture entitled "The Mystery of Evil" was done by Os Guinness. He started out generally talking about evil and it's existence saying:

We're all human beings: any of us may suffer, all of us will die. We live in a world where evil is tangibly real. 

He went on to discuss how we can identify evil and gave four steps:

1. Identify the source. 
All evil has one source, the Devil, but on earth it can be manifested in different ways. Os specified three sources of suffering: our own bodies, nature, and other human beings. Our own bodies in physical and mental diseases, etc, nature through natural disasters, and other humans in terrorism, war, and crime.

2. Listen to the questions. 
He encouraged us to treat people differently in their suffering and to listen to what they were really asking and saying. The most common question a person asks themselves when enduring suffering is "Why me?". We as humans want to know why we have to endure pain. [which is interesting because many deny there's an answer to this question but there is] Secondly people will as "Where is God?". Os mentioned 9/11 here and pointed out that people will blame God when they can't blame anyone else. 9/11 was such an act of violence and killed so many people that many said that God couldn't exist because He would have stopped it from occurring [the same is true of the Holocaust].
Lastly, he said that people will ask "How can I stand it?". He observed that if there is an answer to the 'why?' question, this question is more easily answered... knowing why we're going through something and that there will be benefits at the end will equal an ability to hold on through pain; there's something to hope for.

3. Appreciate the modern transformations of Evil.
I found this point especially interesting because he began by saying that the world is not 'more evil' than it used to be, it's just more modern. Modern technology has made it so easy for evil to be spread because, as Os said, today we minimize pain [through drugs like Advil, etc], we magnify destruction because ordinary people can do tremendous wrong [think about the shootings in schools and public places], and we marginalize traditional ways to hand evil and suffering through video games and entertainment.

4. Assess different interpretations of evil. 
He pointed out that we try to answer this question in the wrong way; that we rely so much on modern technology, science and philosophy that we're frustrated because they cannot answer the question of suffering and evil. They can't tell us why we endure pain, they can only answer a bit about how to handle it.

Lastly he described a challenge that we face today: how we can believe in God when evil exists. He called it a Trilema because there are three core beliefs that we must have in order to deal with evil. I won't go into detail about them because of how long this post is already! (;

-Can evil be all evil?
-Is God all good?
-Can we trust in God as 'all-powerful'?

All of our answers to these questions must be yes. Os Guinness pointed out that Jesus wept when his friend Lazarus died. His weeping showed that things were not the way they were supposed to be, that they were not the way they were created to be. Would he have wept if his friend's death and the suffering of his family was all good? No.
In this question it's especially important to remember that God is still in control. It takes faith to trust that He has a plan in a world with so much wrong and so much suffering. We will not always understand the pain that we endure, but we can understand that we can trust in God because He is sovereign.

To finish his session, Os Guinness presented a quote from Victor Frankl that illustrates one way God uses suffering. I mentioned before that people question God's existence in the midst suffering because they don't know why God wouldn't have stopped evil from occurring. Perhaps the biggest blights on world history were the events of the Holocaust. Millions of people were murdered by a dictatorship and regime that couldn't be stopped. One of the most infamous concentration camps where these murders took place is Auschwitz. The horrors people endured there are unspeakable. When people look back on the events of the Holocaust they question how there could be a God. Frankl's answer was this, "The people who say this weren't there. Many found Christ in Auschwitz."
His words do not in any way excuse what the Nazis and Hitler did to the Jews, but it illustrates that God is still sovereign and that He can use evil for good.  It is the same for us.

If you get the chance to watch this video, I strongly recommend it. [this post just cannot do it justice] I'll write a post up on the second video by Ravi Zacharias called "The Sovereignty of Good" later this week.

-Meaghan

September and A Passion for Jesus

Remember when I said I would start blogging again? Seeing as it's been a month since I've blogged, I obviously haven't been too successful in that. Part of the problem may be that I'm really good at making plans but terrible at carrying them out.
Here's a little update on my life though! For the month of September I've also had the privilege to be traveling the A Passion for Jesus, a ministry dedicated to reaching girls through conferences and retreats.
 Going into this three week tour, I know that every staff member's prayer was that God would be working through us and that we would not be speaking, acting, counselling, working, or living apart from His power and grace. Now we all praise God for the things that HE has done, because without Him, we cannot have done anything.

The first conference and retreat took place in Tampa, the hometown for most of the staff. We did a camp at the Sputo's house from Monday to Thursday followed by a conference on Saturday. It was the first time that I had shared my testimony of how God has worked in my life in the area of forgiveness. It was challenging and exciting;  the perfect way to kick-start the tour.

After a couple days of rest, our staff of twenty-three girls, one guy, and three moms left for Georgia and Alabama. We did a conference and retreat in Georgia and a conference in Alabama. Ester Dales [one of my new Aussie friends!] led a team together at the retreat. During the retreat, we kept praying that God would be leading us in the direction He wanted for the team. I love our team and praise God for the things He's done! God's grace carried us through all of the events and once again we saw His power and love displayed.

I wish that I could tell every testimony of what God did in the past couple weeks. I wish that I could describe to you all what it's like to be able to see girls have freedom in Christ after being in bondage for so long. I walk away with this APJ tour with a deeper understand of who God is because of what He has done. The tour was truly a Spiritual journey for all of us staff members and we've all grown closer to God and each other because of it. It unceasingly amazing to me how God takes broken things for His good. The fact is that all of us who are on staff with APJ have past struggles and experiences that have been hard or bad, but to God that's okay! He delights in using broken and scarred people. It's unthinkable but true.

Oh and the memories... oh the memories. Travelling with that many girls is pretty exciting and lends to some fun times. There were long talks, car rides, pranks, encouragement, and MANY giggle 'sessions'. I can't even begin to describe how many times we were left with tired stomach muscles and tears streaming down our cheeks from laughing so much.

But now it's finished. I'm sitting at the Jalbert's house listening to Carrie and Jacinda play the piano together while Ruthann and Laurie go over finances. Shanna and Caitlin are laughing over facebook statuses, Hannah and Hollie are playing in the yard, and everyone else is getting ready to head to the beach for a final goodbye and celebration. I am so blessed by the friendships that have been made and strengthened this month. Looking forward to what God has in the future for all of us and especially A Passion for Jesus!

the fear of being 'too young'

"The Lord has said to me, "Do not say, 'I am too young.' But go to whomever I send you and say whatever I tell you. Do not be afraid of those to whom I send you, for I will be with you to protect you... They will attack you but they will not be able to overcome you, for I will be with you." [Jeremiah 1:7-8, 19] 

As I read this verse in Jeremiah this morning I was encouraged because it dispelled one of the biggest fears I have as a teenager: the fear of being too young. That may seem like a strange fear to have but it makes sense. We teenagers have all heard the voice in our heads telling us that we can't do it, that we aren't capable of doing certain things because, after all, we're not adults yet. 

This is verse confirmed to me that God has a calling for all of us and that His calling isn't dependent on our age. God will very often be calling us to something that feels too 'big' for us too do... and most of the time it will be because God wants us to depend on HIM! 

If God calls you to something, He's definitely not calling you to do it alone. He will be there all along. 

So it doesn't matter if you think you're too young... walk in the plan God has!