Childish behavior

9/20/09

Mark 9:30-37 (New International Version)

Who is Greatest?

 33They came to Capernaum. When he was in the house, he asked them, “What were you arguing about on the road?” 34But they kept quiet because on the way they had argued about who was the greatest.

 35Sitting down, Jesus called the Twelve and said, “If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all.”

 36He took a little child and had him stand among them. Taking him in his arms, he said to them, 37″Whoever welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me; and whoever welcomes me does not welcome me but the one who sent me.”

 

Mark 10:13-16 (New International Version)

The Little Children and Jesus

13People were bringing little children to Jesus to have him touch them, but the disciples rebuked them. 14When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. 15I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” 16And he took the children in his arms, put his hands on them and blessed them.

 

            Growing up in the 1990’s was quite an experience.  I grew up during an era when the cartoons on television were worth watching.  We watched the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, He-man, The Thundercats, and perhaps one of my favorite cartoons of all times, Animaniacs. 

During my Junior High years I was quite the hit among girls and boys alike because of my ability to mimic the voice of Wakko Warner, one of the characters from Animaniacs.  I even had a Wakko shirt, which I bet still hangs in my closet in Ohio.

But something happened between the summer of my last year of Junior High and my first year of High School.  I remember being in the 9^th grade, a freshman, and speaking in my Wakko voice in a mixed gender group.  And this comical voice that had so often brought forth laughter in the 8^th grade now elicited a different response.  I got told by a girl that I was immature and that I needed to grow up.

What the heck!  Last year I was cool.  Now I’m immature?  That hit me hard.  I still remember that 15 years later.  Not only the experience, but the feelings with which I was overcome.  So what did I do?  I tried to grow up, to mature.  Gone were the silly voices and the silly T-shirts.  They were replaced by sarcastic banter and polo shirts.

Perhaps you have a similar story of when you made the decision that it was time to grow up.  But today I want to encourage you to be childish once again.  Today I want to show you that there are characteristics that most children posses at some point in their lives that we should all seek to reacquire today.  And we will get there, but let’s first start by looking at the context of our scripture for this morning.

            I sometimes feel bad for the twelve disciples.  They really are not made to look too bright in the Gospels, are they?  In the text leading up to our scripture for this morning we find that Jesus and his disciples are passing through Galilee and they stop for a teaching moment.  Jesus reveals to them yet again that he is going to be handed over to the authorities, killed, and then rise again on the third day.  And yet again the text tells us that they don’t get it.  And when these things really do happen, we see that the disciples still didn’t understand what Jesus was talking about until after the resurrection.

            So I feel kind of bad for the disciples because I think I can understand why they seem so confused so often.  Jesus was always teaching in parables.  He was always talking about mustard seeds, yeast, lost coins, lost sheep, lost sons, sowers, reapers, and now he was talking about dieing and rising again.  I would assume they were trying to figure out what it was that Jesus was trying to tell them in this parable, only what they didn’t know was that this wasn’t a parable at all.

            In addition to the fact that Jesus often did teach in parables, the disciples may have assumed this was a parable because it did not fit into their understanding of who Jesus was.  They understood him to be the next great king of Israel, like David and Solomon.  Jesus was going to reunite the chosen people and they were going to drive the Romans out of their Promised Land.  So there was no way that Jesus was going to die.  This must have been a parable.

            So these poor confused disciples are walking along the road to Capernaum after Jesus throws this non-parable parable at them and you can see by their conversation that they are still expecting Jesus to be some kind of militant leader or physical king.  They are talking among themselves and arguing about which of them is the greatest.  I would think that they are trying to establish some kind of hierarchy for their future positions under Jesus when he becomes the next king of Israel.  Jesus hears them chattering back and forth as they walk and after they arrive at their destination Jesus asks them what it was that they were talking about back there.  Oops, they just got caught.

Now Jesus launches into a parable, or perhaps more of a metaphor.  He takes this teaching opportunity and sits down to tell the disciples something important.  “If anyone wants to be first, he must be the very last, and the servant of all.”  To illustrate this, Jesus gets a hold of the closest child to him and says that whoever welcomes one like a child welcomes him and welcomes the one who sent him.

At first glance it might seem like Jesus is just rattling off random things here about humility, children, and being welcoming.  But I think that these things are very much connected. 

How old was Jesus when he began his public ministry?  Around 30 years old.  Why would he have waited 30 years to begin his ministry?  This is God incarnate, he was probably more knowledgeable at three years old than most of us are at thirty or sixty for that matter.  No, Jesus waited until he was thirty to begin his public ministry because that was the common age for someone to be considered to have lived enough to be able to teach others.  Think of Paul’s letters to Timothy when he tells Timothy to not let anyone look down on him because of his age.  Your credentials in the first century included your birth certificate (okay they didn’t actually have birth certificates) that confirmed that you had gone around the sun at least 30 times and were therefore experienced enough to have something worthwhile to teach others.  This makes Luke’s account of a twelve-year-old Jesus teaching at the temple all the more impressive.

Children were to be seen and not heard.  Sure, children were a blessing, especially sons, but they also got in the way when grownups were trying to have a serious discussion.

So Jesus says that if you want to be first in his kingdom, you need to be a servant to all.  Even to the little children, welcoming them in as your guest.  That is humbling, especially for these disciples that were thinking that they were going to be the great decision makers, the great political advisors, and the great generals in Jesus’ kingdom.  No, they are getting stuck with diaper duty.

Evidently the disciples were not listening to Jesus when he spoke these things to them because if we look ahead to Mark chapter 10, people are bringing their children to Jesus and the disciples are chasing them off!  He just said to welcome them, now they are chasing them off!  Jesus rebukes the disciples for doing this and he gives them a stern lesson.  He tells them that anyone that does not receive the kingdom of God like one of these children will never enter into it.  The parallel in Matthew 19 says that unless we become like children, we will never enter into the kingdom of heaven.

So I am getting pretty excited about being a daddy in a little more than three months.  This last week I painted our nursery (Yukon Gold) and I found myself full of anticipation, more so than I have been for a while as I thought about the opportunities that I would have to raise up and teach another living, breathing human being.  But as I looked at these scriptures from Mark about Jesus and the children, I realized that perhaps there was something that we should be learning from children.  We are to receive the kingdom of God as a child does and if we want to enter the kingdom of heaven we need to become like a child.  So what does that mean?

I started thinking about what characteristics children have that we as adults should emulate.  And don’t worry, I know that there are also things that we should not seek to emulate.  The first thing I thought of is that children are inquisitive.  If you have ever been around children, you know that they ask a lot of questions.  How much longer until we get there?  Why can’t I have a candy bar?  Why is the sky blue and the grass green?  Why can’t I have a pet snake?

Many of you will remember Greta Shenk, who was a YPCA member that came to Staunton Mennonite as a part of the Y-church program.  Both of Greta’s parents are seminary professors and I had the opportunity to study under them both in my seminary days.  Greta’s parents, Sara and Gerald, are both quite intelligent people.  Gerald has a PhD in Sociology of Religion and Sara has a doctorate in education.  So they wanted their children to grow up with the opportunity to learn as much as they could.

Sara and Gerald made an effort to answer all of the “why” questions that their children asked.  They didn’t want their children to just mindlessly do as they were told, but to be informed even as little children.  So when asked “why?” they would take the time to explain things rather than just say “Because I said so!”  

But Gerald shared a story one time about when they rented a boat for a family vacation and they were having some issues steering the boat.  I don’t remember what they were heading toward, but I will say that it was a waterfall because that makes the story better.  So they were on this boat and they were heading toward this waterfall and Gerald just starts barking out orders to the three kids.  Grab the sail!  Lower it quickly!  Throw the anchor overboard!  And the kids kept asking, “Why daddy?  Why daddy?”  That was a time when he needed them to just do as he said and not take time to answer questions!

But kids are naturally inquisitive.  They ask questions.  They realize that there is a lot that they have to learn yet, and they believe that they can learn from other people.  I believe that the same is true for us as Christians. 

So often we are discouraged from asking questions as Christians because I guess that we are afraid that asking hard questions will damage our faith.  But I find it much more damaging to my faith when people just throw orders or doctrine or scripture at me than when they actually sit down with me and have a discussion, even if that discussion involves us all admitting that we don’t always have all of the answers.

I come back to the text leading up to our scripture for today where Jesus tells his disciples that he is going to be handed over, killed, and then rise again.  Chapter 9 verse 32 says, “But they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.”

I remember being told that when you ask a question you run the risk of looking like a fool for a few minutes, but when you don’t ask a question you run the risk of looking like a fool for the rest of your life.  The disciples did not ask questions and they didn’t seem to understand Jesus’ role here on earth until after the resurrection.

How many of us have never asked the difficult questions that we have, either because it will make us look less intelligent or less spiritual or for whatever other reason you can think of?  I encourage you to ask those “why” questions like a little child.  Ask the tough questions. 

As I shared with someone from church that I would be speaking about the childlike characteristics that we are to emulate he responded by asking about the scripture form 1 Corinthians 13 where it says something along the lines of when I was a child I spoke like a child, thought like a child, reasoned like a child.  But when I became a man I put away childish things.  He asked me why the Bible seems to say in one place to be like a child and in another to put away childish things.  Why does the Bible contradict itself?  Those are the kind of questions I want you to feel free to ask.  Children are inquisitive and I believe that we as Christians should be inquisitive as well.  Ask and it will be given to you, seek and you will find.

The next characteristic of children that I think we need to adopt as our own is that children are inviting.  We were all children at some point in our lives, and we were probably all told, “Don’t talk to strangers.”  Why did our parents teach us to not talk to strangers?  Because most of us would talk to strangers.  Kids don’t understand the norms of society.  They look at people that they don’t know, they smile at them, they talk to strangers. 

Maybe you have had this experience as well, but I have been in a conversation with a young family, meeting them for the first time, and I always try to talk to the little kids as well.  And every now and then these little kids will invite me over to their homes.

I think that the parents are sometimes a little embarrassed by this.  “Hey little Johnny.  We just met Mr. Kevin.  I am sure that he doesn’t want to come to our home.”  Or maybe “He’s a busy man and he probably can’t come over to play right now.”

I think that it is great that kids are so open and inviting to other people.  Now obviously there are some safety issues involved when we are talking about kids, but at what point in our lives do we become so privatized?  When do we begin to walk past our neighbor on the street and not even make eye contact, yet alone say hello.  God forbid we invite them over to our home like I’ve been invited by a little child!  Our lives are private.  We build fences, both figuratively and literally between us and our neighbors.  We go to work in the morning, come home late in the evening, throw something together for supper, eat in our homes, watch television all evening, do it all over again the next day and we never have to interact with anyone else.

We have made our lives private, and following along those same lines we have made our faith private.  We even use terminology that indicates that our faith is private.  We talk about Jesus as our personal savior and we say that we have a personal relationship with God.  Where do we get this stuff?  That isn’t biblical.  Yes it is important to have a relationship with God, but it should never just be about you and God.  It is about a communal relationship with God.  Jesus isn’t your personal savior like you have a personal assistant or a personal trainer.  This even seems to suggest that there is another savior.  Jesus is my personal savior; you better go find your own.  No, John 3:16 tells us that God so loved the world that he sent his one and only son.  Jesus wasn’t just sent for me, he was sent for the world.  Privatized lives lead to privatized religion.  My God is too big to be my personal god.  We need to be more inviting, inviting people into our homes, into our lives, and into a life of following Jesus.

The third personality trait about children that I want to point out that we should emulate is that they are accepting.  Children are not racist.  Children are not sexist (until girls/boys become yucky).  They do not discriminate based on class, level of income, occupation, education, hair color, eye color.  Maybe even more impressive is that children do not judge other people based on what they have done in their past.  They just play with whoever is close by.  They might disagree on their favorite toys and their favorite baby food, but they don’t fight.  I’ve never heard of a baby killing another baby over the rights to oil, gold, or diamonds.  That’s something that they learn later in life, probably from watching us.

This accepting nature is the way that Jesus models relationships for us in the Bible.  Dining with the tax collectors and the sinners, hanging out with the prostitutes, even lifting up the actions of a good Samaritan as the way his followers should respond to people in need.

We as Christians are quick to say that we need to love the sinner and hate the sin.  But how are we living that out?  I fear that too often we attempt to isolate ourselves from “sinners”.  And believe me, I get this.  I know why we avoid certain places and things.  We try to avoid certain temptations.  James tells us to resist the devil and he will flee from you.  But there is a big difference between resisting temptation and avoiding the very people that we are told to love; the very same people for whom Jesus died.

As we begin now to decorate the nursery in our home, Sonya has made the executive decision that she wants to decorate the room with items from Ten Thousand Villages.  She wants to decorate it with handicrafts made by artisans from around the world.  Wall hangings and toys from Africa, Asia, Europe, South America.  And though this will be a more expensive alternative to shopping at Target or Babies-R-Us, I support this idea.  I want our child to embrace the diversity of this world.  I want our child to know that all people are not just like him or her.  I want our child to respect other people’s opinions and their culture.  I hope that we can allow our child to maintain that characteristic that all children are born with that says all people are okay, even if we don’t agree with them.  But yet I also want my children to stand up for what they believe in.  Not to be wishy-washy on their theology, but to approach God with awe, reverence, and confidence.

Inquisitive, invitational, and accepting.  Those are three of the personality traits of children that I believe we should seek to adopt.  Which ones do you think would be helpful?

Concerning Composting, Collaboration, and Children

Kevin Gasser

Staunton Mennonite Church

8/17/08

 

Matthew 15:21-28

21Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. 22Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” 23But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” 24He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” 25But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” 26He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” 27She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” 28Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly.

 

            This past week I spent a couple of hours working on a project.  (Actually a lot of hours on a number of projects).  I spent some time this past Thursday researching, designing, buying materials for, and finally building a compost bin at our home.  This bin is a place where Sonya and I will take our scraps of food, our banana peals, apple cores, lawn clippings, fall leaves, and so forth, throw them into a contained pile, and allow them to break down into a nutrient rich, bacterially active supplement for the soil in our garden.

            Now some of you might be thinking, Kevin, I’ve been to your home.  You don’t have a garden.  And you would be correct.  We do not have a garden.  Not yet, that is.  The hours of planning and work, the money spent on materials (I made the bin for around $25), all were done to develop a fertilizer over a period of time for a garden that we don’t have.

            So all of the work that I did was in anticipation of something in the future.  We will not “reap the benefits” of this work for at least a year.  And it may be many years until we see much change in the soil.  We have a pretty hard clay in our backyard and a little bit of compost added each year will not make a huge difference.  So why go to all of that effort?  Why bother making the compost bin, bringing out our garbage on a regular basis, turning the compost weekly, only to see little if no immediate change?  And what guarantee do we have that it will even make a difference?  Well, we are investing in the future, that’s why we are doing it.  And even if we are not the ones who reap the benefits of a built up soil, I am sure that someone will appreciate the improved fertility of the area that we have designated as our future garden.

            Today I would like to look at the scripture listed above to see that this Canaanite woman was investing in the future as well.  And she had to overcome a number of obstacles to do so.  She had to overcome her gender and she had to overcome her ethnicity.  But for her, it was well worth it.  It might have been a bit of a risk, but to her, it was a good investment.

            Our scripture says that Jesus and his disciples left Gennesaret, likely because they were in need of some rest after all of the healing and teaching that Jesus had been doing.  So they want to get away from everyone and head off to a place where it is likely that nobody knows about Jesus.  So they go all the way up to the region of Tyre and Sidon, which is in the area of Phoenicia in the Providence of Syria.  But evidently the word has spread about this man Jesus and the many that he has healed, because a woman from that area comes to him and begins shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.”

            But Jesus just kind of ignores the woman.  Maybe she will go away.  He is on vacation.  But she doesn’t go away.  She keeps calling out, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David…”

            The disciples come to Jesus and they say, Jesus, maybe you could send her away.  She is interrupting our personal time here.  So Jesus tries to send her away.  “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel” he tells the woman.  But she still does not give up.  She comes closer, kneeling before his feet and asks him again for healing for her child.  And then Jesus replies with what seems like the most un-Jesus-like thing I have ever heard attributed to him; “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”

            I can’t fully understand why Jesus answered her in such a way, which seems so out of his personality.  We can speculate as to whether he was testing her, or we can try to make light of the comparison between the woman and a dog (calling her a cute puppy or a beloved family pet).  But the truth is this response from Jesus reflects the common understanding of the worth of this person.

            In the first century, women were little more than possessions.  Sure, they had come a long way from the days when Solomon had his thousand women friends, but women sure didn’t have the status of men in Jesus’ day.  They were second-class citizens that were kept around to make food and make babies. 

            The different churches today can go back and forth on issues like women clergy, male headship verses mutual submission, and so forth, and it would be very unlikely that every Christian in the world would come out in the same place.  We surely have differences of opinions within this church on the interpretation of the scriptures pertaining to these subjects.  But I hope that we can all agree on this: women are not possessions, they are not dogs, they are human beings.

            But this was a challenge for this woman.  She would not have been respected in her own society because of her gender.  But she wasn’t even dealing with people from her society.  She was dealing with Jews.  She was not Jewish.  She was an outsider even in her own town.  We know from stories like that of the Good Samaritan that the Jews didn’t always, or maybe I should say that they rarely had warm fuzzy feelings toward their neighbors.  Jews were pretty ethnically exclusive.  Ethnically, this person was not a part of the in crowd.

So we have a woman, a Canaanite woman, who would have been seen by most Jews as little more than a dog.  This lowly position is reflected not only in Jesus’ comment, but in the fact that the disciples never try to get the woman to Jesus.  They try to have her sent away.  Yet she sought out a private meeting with Jesus.  The word had gotten around that this man was something special, that he could heal people, that he might be the Jewish Messiah, that he might even be God in human form.  So she makes it a priority, in spite of the gender and ethnic hurdles she needed to cross, to meet this great healer.  And why did she make such an effort, enduring the name calling from our savior?  Because she had a daughter that was possessed by a demon.

This woman was willing to cross over gender barriers, to cross over ethic dividers because she loved her daughter so much.  She wanted to see her daughter live a full life.  She wanted what was best for the next generation.  And she was willing and persistent enough to see to it that her daughter would have a better life.  She was willing to sacrifice her own comfort to assure the future of her daughter.  And Jesus commended her faith for doing so.

I think we could all learn a lot from this Canaanite woman.  It seems to me that we do a lot of complaining about children, but do little to help them.  We complain about the crime rate, the unemployment rate, the poor educational systems that so many children are being brought up in.  But we do little about it.  We complain about the way that young urban people are being sent to jail only to be back out on the streets in a few years, not able to find work, not able to change their lifestyles, not able to keep themselves from going back to jail shortly after being released.  We complain about it, but are we willing to do something about it?  Well, I think that it is time that we become like the Canaanite woman and stop complaining about our children and start doing something about the sources of the problems.

Last Monday, Ronald Friesen was able to join a group of people from various churches and various organizations from around town in the distribution of back to school gift cards.  Gift cards were given out with the intended purpose of being used to purchase school clothes, pencils, paper, backpacks, and other items.  There were some goods distributed there as well.  And these things were not just given out on a first come first served basis.  There were certain groups invited to come and received these gifts.  The poor, the single mothers, the grandmother raising here children’s children by herself.  These were the people that were invited to come and receive these gifts. 

But this wasn’t just charity.  It wasn’t just a bunch of rich white folks giving some money to some poor folks.  This was an attempt to correct an existing problem.  This was people from the community trying to improve their community.  See, the children without “nice” clothes don’t want to go to school because they are going to be made fun of and picked on.  Nor do the children that don’t have their own school supplies.  Poverty breeds poverty.  The poor in our area will have poor children that will grow up to be poor adults if they can’t afford to send those children to school, to provide them with the essential learning materials.  And we as rich middle classed Americans can choose, do we want to pay now and help change the system, allowing these lower-income children to go to school, acquire a decent education, and get a good job?  Or would we rather wait until they are all grown up and pay for the same people to get their electricity turned back on, pay welfare with our tax money, or drop our money in a tin cup as we walk by?  We can pay now and help to correct the system, or we can pay later and allow the wretched system to continue.

I am glad to say that we as a church were well represented by our giving to these under-privileged children.  We accumulated $340 worth of gift cards for the lower income families.  Evidently we think that the future of these children is worth investing in.  Evidently we think like the Canaanite woman who believed that ethnic and gender boundaries were not going to keep her from improving the future of her child.  Nobody said it would be easy, but by coming together and with God by our side, we can change the future by investing in children today.

I shared with you a little bit a few weeks ago about the Jericho and Damascus Road Outreach here in Staunton that intends to be a place where ex-offenders can come to find employment in a faith-based environment.  I had the chance to sit down with the woman who is heading up this ministry, Elaine Rose, this past Friday.  And I have to tell you, she is quite inspiring.  Elaine told me her story, how her son was getting into trouble, getting into fights, and was actually set up to be killed.  He was shot at one night at a party and Elaine told me that the entire room was full of bullet holes.  Even her son’s clothes had bullet holes in them.  But he wasn’t hit.  It was then that he knew he needed to change his life, and it was then that Elaine heard God calling out to her to invest in the future of local children because if she didn’t, there might not be much of a future to invest in.

Elaine walked me through the building that is currently being renovated on Beverly Street where they will have the restaurant and smoothie bar set up.  The 16-25 year old ex-offenders that enter into this program will be employed at the restaurant and given the opportunity to learn a skilled trade, such as that of a beautician, chef, electrician, and other trades in mandatory classes each Monday.  There will be Bible Studies, there will be mentoring, there will be a 24 hour Outreach Team available for counseling.  There are also plans for urban gardening, an outdoor patio with local artists performing on a regular basis, and even some communal living opportunities for the young adults.  This is meant to be a community-building opportunity.  Because it is not only meant to provide a way for ex-offenders to reenter into society after incarceration, it is meant as a way to prevent the crimes from ever happening in the first place.  It is a lot harder to steal from someone after breaking bread with them. 

Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?  But how much will it cost?  And where will the money come from?  Elaine Rose helped me to understand this one a bit.  Yes, it will be costly to get this program underway and to keep it operating.  But she said that to house an inmate for one year costs about $40,000.  That money comes out of our paychecks in the form of income taxes.  She asked me, “Now wouldn’t it be better to take that $40,000 per inmate and invest it in keeping them out of prison in the first place?”  I had to agree.

Now I can’t imagine that the state is willing to give a lot of money toward a faith based program like this, but I sure am.  I would much rather improve education and opportunities for ex-offenders instead of paying for them to go back into jail.  The system is not working.  It is time that we got uncomfortable with the status quo and did something about it.

So I come back to my compost bin.  But let’s call it what it really is.  It is a pile of garbage.  It is stinky.  It will attract flies and rats.  Most people would simply toss away the garbage and forget about it.  But I am focused on the future of that “garbage” not the present state of that garbage.  Because I know that God can transform that garbage into something useful, something valuable.  I am not going to say that the compost pile isn’t going to be work, even with God’s help in decomposing the material.  I know it is going to take work.  I am going to have to go out to the pile every week and turn it with a pitchfork.  I am going to have to sort my garbage and take it out to the bin regularly.  And even after the garbage has been transformed into a nutrient rich fertilizer, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done in order to have that nutrient rich fertilizer produce a bountiful harvest.  But I know it is possible and I believe it will be worth it.

The Canaanite woman knew that Jesus Christ could heal her daughter.  But she also knew that she had a lot of obstacles to overcome just to have the opportunity to petition to Christ for the healing.  But she knew it was possible and to her the work was well worth it.  The future of her child was at stake.

Maybe your children are all grown and moved away.  Or maybe like me, you don’t have any children.  But we all know children, and we all know children that need healing; healing from a system that will cause many children to amount to less than they are capable of being.  Healing from broken families, broken hearts, and broken relationships.  These children need the transformative power of Jesus Christ. 

It is my hope that we will be like that Canaanite woman who overcame many obstacles for her child.  Whether it is ethnicity, gender, or what ever other obstacle we find ourselves up against, I hope that we will be able to endure and overcome these obstacles.  And hopefully, like the compost pile that I have begun, with the help of God, we will be able to take what much of society looks at as garbage and use that to produce bountiful harvests in the name of Jesus Christ.