I'm Back

For those of you who tune in here from time to time, I hope you enjoyed hearing from some of the students in my youth group. This past week I took a group of high school students to serve on an Indian Reservation in Mission, SD, located in the 5th poorest county in the entire U.S. This was the best mission trip I have been on so far, including last year's trip to Panama City, Panama. I was so proud of my students for all the work they accomplished in other's lives and in their own lives.

Visiting the reservation is always an eye-opening experience for me, despite growing up 45 minutes from 3 different reservations. We can become obsessed with doing missions somewhere else and totally avoid the blaring needs in our own backyard. We can become calloused to the poverty and oppression in the world around us. In the words of Rob Bell, "The tragedy is when we think that our world is the world." I think that is so true because we can get wrapped up in the everyday things of our own lives and forget that there is a whole other way of life out there that is in need.

May we, as Christians, see the Gospel not just as a way to get out of this world, but as the only way to redeem this world we find ourselves in.