PIN Ministry Update

“If you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed,
then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.” -Isaiah 58: 10

Ross and I would like to thank all of you for the countless donations of hats, gloves, scarves, socks, toys and toiletries that you gave to PIN ministry this Christmas. We would also like to take this time to thank any lama, sheep, alpaca, badger, or any other anonymous animal donors who so selflessly gave of their luscious fur, coats, pelts, and what have you. There was plenty of hard work and selflessness that went on behind the scenes to make this project a success - and a success it was – we made over 200 festively decorated gift bags for men, women, and children.

In the Bible we are continually reminded about the poor and afflicted and how we are to treat them – in over 300 verses actually! But why? What is it about being a Christian that leads us to serve those who have less than we do, to care for the homeless and dejected? Why does the Bible beckon us to look beyond ourselves to the needs of others? Dallas, the creator and director of PIN ministry, reminded me of the reason in one of his most recent sermons to the homeless community…

On the Sunday when we went to drop off Galilee’s donation - the 200 gift bags, each lovingly tied with a green bow and cheerful red tissue paper - Dallas spoke about why he invites outside churches like Galilee to come and do volunteer work at PIN. He said, “It’s not because we need them. I don’t need these churches to come and help – we have tons of volunteer already!”


I began to wonder what the world I was doing there. Why did I just spend so much time trying to work on these darn gifts? Why did I have poor Middle School boys make Christmas cards with markers and construction paper mostly against their will (while making faces that looked pretty similar to the kid on the right)? Why did we ask our parishioners to come every month and sacrifice three and a half hours of their Sunday evening if they don’t even need us??!! I was definitely a little offended.

And then he said it…
“I ask these churches to come and volunteer so that they can experience Christ and the joy of serving as Jesus served us! I ask them to come so that they may actually be encouraged by you (meaning the homeless men and women present) by how you love each other despite your extreme poverty. So that they will see, that though you have nothing and they have everything, the Spirit of Jesus is alive within you – and you have joy!!!!”


Of course Galilee was there to serve the homeless, but what Dallas was trying to say was that when we went to PIN, Jesus was doing something within us! By giving of ourselves we could experience the privilege of commonality with Christ. This is why Jesus calls us to serve and love the poor all throughout the Bible! This is how He loves us, as the ultimate servant. So, let us continue to experience the joy of knowing our maker more intimately - through service.

The phenomenon that is, “fail.”

I love how one-word declarations seem to come into fad every now and then. For me, high school was peppered by shoutings of, “random!” whenever something ever so slightly off-kilter would occur. And then we moved to, “crucial!” for whatever seemed awesome or important. And more recently, there was “awkward!” in order to fill uncomfortable spaces- or to create them for the heck of it.

The current exclamation was first brought to my attention while I was helping to coach a soccer practice. Someone would miss a shot: “fail!” Someone would send a pass just a little too far to the right: “fail!” There was lots of laughing- we were having a light practice and it was all in good fun. However, after having the word tossed at me a couple of times, it got me thinking about the nature of what was actually going on.

Why might it be so enjoyable to highlight subtle mistakes with the word, “fail?” How did a word of weakness and error come into popularity? Could it be that we take comfort in other peoples’ mistakes because we know that we are just as capable of making them? Could it be that we are finally facing the reality of the imperfection we live in? Does the humor of this come from an ironic use of the word considering the fact that we are a culture entrenched in striving for success, achievement, and perfection?

I think that this phenomenon is hitting on one of the sweetest parts of the gospel: we are all the same in our need. It isn’t difficult to see that we are a broken world; we lie, we try to control others, we look out for ourselves, and we fail one another. We need help. We need rescuing from the outside, because no matter how hard we try, we can’t fix ourselves. We need hope that we are not left to work ourselves to death trying to be “better people” (whatever that is).

This is what Romans 3:22-23 is getting at when it says, “There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.” We are all the same in our need, in our falling short, in our “fail.”ure. But, thankfully, we are not left to fend for ourselves in futility. We are met by a God who takes our failure, our sin, upon Himself and dies for it on a cross. He then conquers it and offers us life in Himself. Therein lies the beauty of Colossians 2:13-15: “When you were dead in your sins…God made you alive with Christ. He forgave us all our sins, having canceled the written code, with its regulations, that was against us and that stood opposed to us; he took it away, nailing it to the cross. And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross.”

Therefore, I make this proposition: when we hear the word, “fail.” pop out of our mouths, let us recognize that we are the same in our failure, and let it point to Jesus’ power in and victory over our failure. We are never left alone in that failure; He has come to give us light, hope, and full life right in the middle of it.

Boggle is the Church?

My roommate hates Boggle. The time limit stresses her out, and we are both *slightly competitive people, so she doesn’t enjoy the 90 seconds or so of word-hunt. I love Boggle. Boggle has to be one of the best games ever made. If you’ve never played it, it may seem slightly simplistic; but it is incredibly fun, and it is a picture of the kingdom of God.

Boggle is a game where 16 dice with letters on each side are jumbled around in a plastic box and then arranged (however they happen to fall) in a 4-sided grid. Your mission is to construct as many words as possible within the time limit using the dice; the catch is that the dice you use to make the words must be touching. The words you create which your opponents do not count as points for you.

At the end of a round, one player reads their list out loud, often to the amazement, frustration, and amusement of the other players. It is ridiculous how many words are there to be discovered. You can often spend the last 30 seconds of a round searching the board for anything you might have missed- staring and trying your hardest to see new words. But you rarely (if ever) find them all.

I realized at the end of the third round today why I love this game. It is reflective both of the beauty of community we get to share in through Jesus presently, and the hope we live in that all will be revealed and made perfect one day in heaven. We each see different words in the puzzle set before us, just as we each see and experience different aspects of the Lord in relationship with Him. We all bring these experiences to the table, and we get to discover even more of how loving, dynamic, beautiful, and good He is. The end of the round is fantastic because you can’t believe that there are any more words to find- and yet, voila! Through the sharing in community, you discover brilliant words you just couldn’t see! And even as you sit with your fellow word-hunters after having gone through your lists, sometimes you happen to uncover several other words you’ve all missed.

I enjoy the game most when I am not in cut-throat competition mode, focused solely on the task of finding words to win (which is a special place for me, if you are aware of my competitive inclinations). I love the anticipation that comes with knowing that others are going to offer up some ridiculously clever finds which make me appreciate that there is always more to discover. I love that we get to bring our finds together to see the puzzle more comprehensively. I love that only God knows all of the words which might be extractable from that crazy concoction of letters, and I love that I’ll one day sit with Him as He shows them to me. (Although I’m not so sure Boggle will be on my mind at that point…)

Christianity Is A Myth?

I haven’t seen Bill Maher’s new movie, Religulous, but I’ve heard a little about it. Within his broad criticism of organized religion, Maher reveals that Jesus was suspiciously similar to the ancient Egyptian god, Horus, who was believed to have been born of a virgin, had twelve disciples, walked on water, died and was resurrected.

By pointing out this similarity, Maher probably wants to shock a lot of Christians. And maybe we should be shocked and worried a little. Maybe we have something to learn from Maher. Let us not simply scoff and dismiss him as some evil atheist and look for the first shallow reason we can find to discredit him. We’re not running for political office, are we?

So is Christianity a myth? That depends on what ‘myth’ means. As opposed to seeing ‘myth’ as a synonym for ‘something false that was made up,’ let’s look at a more classical definition of ‘myth’ as, roughly, something that communicates reality to the senses or to the imagination. In this way, Christianity is a myth, because it certainly communicates reality to our hearts and souls and imaginations as well as to our brains.

But is it just a myth that copied earlier myths? Was Jesus just a copycat of Horus? Here we can turn to one much wiser than we and Bill Maher, particularly in the realm of literature and mythology, C.S. Lewis:

“The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history…We pass from a Balder or an Osiris [that’s Horus’ dad by the way], dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical Person crucified…We must not be nervous about ‘parallels’ and ‘Pagan Christs’: they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t” (God in the Dock, 66-67).

I think what Lewis is getting at is this: some of these ‘myth’ realities are in our DNA. These have echoed throughout human history—here in Egyptian mythology, here in Greek mythology, here in a peasant farmer who wrote a poem one day that no one will ever read, about a god who died and rose from the dead.

So Jesus was a copycat: that’s the whole point. He was a copycat of the entire Old Testament (see Luke 24), and not just that, but he was the copycat of the true ‘myths’—the ones that contained some grain of reality—that popped up throughout history.

But he was more than a copycat. He was the fulfillment of all of these hopes, these prophecies, these ‘myths’—Jewish and Egyptian (and Greek and Roman and Babylonian…). What these imagined, or prefigured, he embodied—literally. He was the body, the human being, who was the dying god who rose again. He was and is the real fulfillment, not just of Jewish prophecies, but of the deepest longings in every human heart, portrayed in the very best myths across cultures and across history.