Ham with a side of hope

Cool story from Thanksgiving Outreach...

Saturday morning we're buzzing around the Baton Rouge Dream Center resembling bumble bees on meth. There are volunteers everywhere: some holding signs on street corners, some waving traffic through the parking lot like air traffic controllers and some moving (literally) hundreds of pounds of smoked meat onto the sidewalk. The infamous Thanksgiving Outreach is underway.

I got there late and I missed the instructions so I have basically no idea what's going on. The cool thing is, it doesn't matter. We have such an amazing team of volunteers that I just wander through the lot and enjoy the excitement. It's raining, the wind is biting and hundreds of HPCers are there to serve.

Cars are lined up waiting to deliver Thanksgiving groceries to families they've never met. SUV's packed tight with kids, friends piled into sports cars, pick-up trucks with life group buddies...all of them eager to feed the poor and pray for the hurting. This is what church is all about.

One family, in particular, got to serve in a whole other capacity. When they knocked on the door to deliver the Thanksgiving ham, a young woman came outside and got into their vehicle. She told them she was working with a counselor from HPC and needed to leave with them. Almost without explanation, she threw her belongings into the trunk and asked them to drive her to the Dream Center. Without hesitation, the family packed her in and drove off.

As the volunteers were driving off, they called the Dream Center for instructions. I was dispatched from our side to go and meet up with them. I grabbed two of our faithful volunteers and we headed out.

The details are irrelevant but here's the bottom line. Within an hour, the young woman found herself in a safe place, with safe people around her, for the first time in many years. Saturday morning she woke up in an abusive, violent situation where she was forced to trade herself daily. Saturday night she went to sleep in clean bed, in a safe house, without fear.

The family that helped save her did not get up Saturday morning hoping to rescue a victim of human trafficking; they simply wanted to be a healing place for a hurting world. They showed up intending to deliver groceries; instead they delivered hope. Ordinary people taking part in extraordinary life change; that's what the Kingdom of God is all about.

All glory to Him!

In the silence

We are building a new worship space at my church and it's been in the works for a few years now. Minor things like category five hurricanes and global recessions have slowed the progress, yet we forge on. We will open the doors in a few months and everyone is getting really excited about it. This past weekend we did something that totally impressed me. Any of you who know me personally will know that I'm not easily impressed, as my internal cynic sometimes gets the best of me. But this past weekend, I was utterly impressed.

Pastor Dino decided that before we open the doors of our new facility, he wanted the Word spoken over the facility in its entirety. We signed up for 15 minute time slots and read the Bible from cover to cover. It took several days (and all-nighters) but we made it from Genesis to Revelation. It was one of the coolest experiences I've ever been a part of.

The section I read was out of Matthew and had lots of 'Woe to you, brood of vipers' stuff. As I was reading it I began to wonder if God was speaking to me specifically. Jesus was rebuking the Pharisees for being white-washed tombs; clean on the outside but full of deceit and corruption on the inside. I began to wonder if I should just lay down the bible and repent.

I am a sinner, saved by grace. I don't live the life of overt sin that I once did, but I still struggle with being more like Jesus and less like my self-serving, me-focussed, center of the universe self. I want my life to glorify God and bring the saving knowledge of Christ to the lost. I want to be, as Pastor Dino puts it, "a paper plate to serve up Jesus".

What is it in us that demands that we be heard? What broken part of us cries out for our rights, even in the midst of our sin?

I don't want to be a white washed tomb. I don't want to be a Pharisee that loves to be noticed and needs the approval of others. I spend lots of hours every day in silence. I used to want God to speak to me and tell me what to do. Now I want to get to the place where I'm content to sit in the silence, just knowing He's here with me.

Have you gotten to a place where God's presence is all you seek? Not His voice, not His direction, not His hand: simply His silent presence. If you have, lemmino how you arrived there. I'm eager to learn.

Be blessed and be free, in Jesus' name. All glory to God!

What's your story?

I've been back from Chicago for a week and a half but I'm still trying to process everything that I heard. The Story 09 conference was incredible; great leadership, innovative and more creativity than I can even describe. It would take 50 posts to convey everything that I learned, but I'm going to focus on one thing.

Donald Miller recently released his new book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. If you're content with your life, please don't read it. It jacked me up entirely. I bought it several weeks ago but I didn't read it until I was flying to Chicago. If reading the book wasn't enough, Donald spoke at the conference as well. By Wednesday night I was wrecked.

The premise of the book is this: you are telling a story with your life. It might be a great story or a horrible story, but either way you're telling it. You are the leading character, for better or for worse. The whole story line revolves around the choices you make.

I'm a writer, so I think a lot about characters, plot lines and settings. I have a whole collection of people who live in my imagination, just waiting for an opportunity to leap onto the page and start living their stories. What I've realized in the past ten days is, I spend more time thinking about their stories than I do living mine. My fictional characters have all kinds of adventure, romance and suspense. I spend nine hours a day at my laptop. I'm not living an adventure, there is a most definite absence of romance, and the only suspense I have is whether my pay check will cover my bills. That's not a good story.

I've realized that some part of me believed that once I write the bestseller, my life (my story) will really begin. Here's the scary part though; Donald Miller had already written the bestseller and moved into the new condo and he still had a story he didn't like. The condo didn't make the story any better and neither did the bestseller. Those things may have changed the setting, but they didn't do anything for character development. He had to make choices to change the story he was living; not just the stories he was writing.

I want to live a better story...and I have no excuse not to. I belong to (arguably) the greatest church on the planet, I have great friends, a supportive family and enough sense not to play in traffic. I should be living a great story!!!

I've decided that my problem is based primarily in selfishness and fear of the unknown. I say I want adventure, but I don't like talking to people I don't already know. I say I want suspense, but I sit on my couch instead of taking a risk. We don't even have time to enter the romance debate, but suffice it to say that I have some hang-ups there too. And the downside to all of this: writing a bestseller won't change any of it.

So here I am, again, at the foot of the cross asking God to heal me some more. I want to live a great story...a story that makes Jesus famous and brings glory to God. That's probably not going to happen sitting on my couch.

What's your story? Are living life to the full or do you have a remote in one hand and cheetos in the other? I don't want to have another conversation about somebody else's adventure; I want to be living my own. Any thoughts on how I can get started?

Sausage gravy at the truckstop

The single waitress and the lone cook did not seem excited when ten of us strode into the diner at 9pm. We repositioned a table and made ourselves at home, passing the sticky menus around the booth and laughing about something I can't recall. The most pressing debate: the big breakfast platter versus the philly cheese-steak omelet. One of life's tough decisions.

Our real purpose in visiting the truck stop cafe was to scout out the land. Our new outreach (which just happens to involve eating biscuits with sausage gravy) is to provide public awareness and a point of contact for victims of human trafficking. Most of the people I talk to tell me that human trafficking is a problem in India or Thailand. I tell them that it is, but it's also a problem in Baton Rouge. Many will argue with me. It wouldn't be right for me to point across the room to a thirteen year-old whose sister was sold to a neighborhood pimp, or to the single mom on the third row who was only eight when her mother traded her for crack.

These aren't people we met at a strip club on Midnight outreach; they are in our church, sitting in our pews every week. If human trafficking is a third-world problem, then it got lost. It landed, alive and well, smack in the middle of the land of the free and the home of the brave.

I volunteer with an organization that helps fight human trafficking so I hear a lot of stats. Did you know that it is now more profitable to sell people than drugs? The only criminals that make more money than traffickers are arms dealers. Weapons, people, drugs; the 3 most profitable criminal activities in the world. It is estimated that over 100,000 Americans will be victims of human trafficking this year. Most of them will be women and children; many will be teenage girls, hoping to escape abusive situations at home. Sadly, the streets have nothing to offer. According to statistics, runaways will be approached by both drug dealers and traffickers within 48 hours. That gives us, the church, less than 2 days to find these kids and intervene.

You may be asking yourself how any of this relates to biscuits with sausage gravy. Victims of human trafficking are, this moment, being moved across America in tractor-trailers. Commonly referred to as 'lot-lizards' these women and children are traded between truckers, moved from state to state, and often kept drugged to prevent escape or detection. (Please don't misunderstand me; I'm not claiming that every trucker is a trafficker; simply stating that's one of the methods used by the industry to transport victims.)

We want to be a healing place for a hurting world. Sometimes that means we feed the orphans, pray with the sick or visit widows. Sometimes it means we eat greasy biscuits at 10pm and pray for the opportunity to talk to a waitress, a cashier, or a trucker so that we can educate them and help make a difference in somebody's life.

We did get to talk to the waitress Saturday night and we hung posters in the bathrooms with a national hotline number that helps victims. We didn't talk to any victims, but I believe God will honor our efforts. I believe that one day, one girl will read that poster or talk to that waitress, and God will make a way of escape for her.

Please join me in praying for the people entangled in human trafficking; the victims and the perpetrators. Jesus went to the cross for all of us, and He wants all of us to make it to heaven. All glory to God!

ponderings...

As most of you know, I work at a self-storage business. That means I have a fair bit of free time (approximately 40 of the 50 hrs I work every week) to think, read, write and ponder. I don't read much when I'm writing books, simply because I don't want to accidently pirate someone else's idea and magically make it my own. I've recently finished another draft of my latest book but I'm not completely done so I can't start reading yet. That means, much of my time is spent pondering. Say it with me: uh oh...

As mentioned in previous blogs, Donna spending time in her own thoughts can be dangerous. Odd happenings occur, like Donna referring to herself in the third party. I watched "A Beautiful Mind" last week...that didn't help much either.

What do you ponder?

Seriously, please tell me...I need something fresh to ponder.

Comment and lemmino, maybe your ponderings will inspire me!

Just me and Donkey

I'm sitting in my office spending time with my friend Donkey. For anyone who hasn't worked in the self-storage business, it's hard to grasp the value of having a friend to share your day with. I usually arrive at work about 8:45am and depart shortly after 6pm. Yep, that nine full hours to spend alone in my head. Occasionally customers come to visit me. Perhaps they're just being friendly for the nine seconds it takes for me to process their payments, but I consider it a visit. In self-storage, you take what you can get. Donkey sits in my window sill and keeps me on track. He's about three inches tall, has a red bandana, and if you flip his head back a chalky tablet that resembles candy pops out. Some would think that he's just a Pez dispenser, but I know better.

I used to work at an inner-city outreach facility that serves as one of our Healing Place Church campuses. The Baton Rouge Dream Center has all types of programs, activities, services and some of the coolest people you'll ever meet. The choice to leave there and come here was difficult, but I knew God was moving me. The reason I mention the Dream Center is because that's where Donkey and I met. My friend Emily knows that I love donkeys. (That's right, donkeys. You wanna make something of it? Sorry...I digress.) So, because of my affinity for these precious beasts of burdens, one day she presented my with my very own furry, Pez dispensing donkey. I was immediately in love. I kept Donkey on my desk along with another friend, Sheep. Sheep is much bigger than donkey but also furry. Sorry folks, no Pez with Sheep, which is probably good because they'd be the size of matchbox cars; that's a lot of chalk.

(A sad story about Sheep: one Sunday afternoon one of our DC kids got hurt on the playground and had to go to the hospital. While we were waiting for parents to arrive, I allowed said child to hold Sheep until Momma got there. Both child and Sheep left. Only the child came back [Cue sad music]. I now have a picture of a sheep in my office but its just not the same.)

The reason I've taken you down this rambling road is to tell you why I have to spend my time with Donkey. The reason Sheep and Donkey lived on my desk is because they were visual reminders of my nature. Sheep are fluffy and lovable and quietly kind. They're submissive, gentle and they follow the shepherd without question. That's how I would like to be.

Donkeys, on the other hand, are unruly, stubborn and hard to train. They are more apt to do their own thing than whatever their master wants, and they're frequently making noise when everyone around them wishes they'd be quiet. That's more like me than I care to admit.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to be a sheep instead of a donkey. I try to hang out with sheep and emulate them, I read books and listen to podcasts and go to church and pray that God changes me. Still, more often than not, I'm a donkey.

With Sheep gone, it's just me and Donkey left. I wonder if God's trying to tell me something.

Any thoughts? I'd love for you to share your own inner-donkey story...if only to make me feel better. Be blessed and be free, in Jesus' name. All glory to God!

A good, solid throat-punch

Have you ever just wanted to throat-punch the devil? That's a pretty regular thought for me so, as often as I can, I just go ahead and do it. I love that the prayers of the righteous availeth much. I feel like we should all just availeth today! (That's right, I'm goin King James on ya now, baby!)

Every day this week I have something going on. I'm not complaining; I love it when life is stacked up. I had the opportunity yesterday to sit on a panel at church (Baton Rouge Dream Center) and talk about how God set me free from addictions. It was a wonderful, humbling experience. On Thursday evening Anne Jackson is coming in to speak at the Hub and I'm so pumped I can hardly wait. (I've only really met Anne one time but because I read her blog almost everyday I think of us as internet buddies. The time I did meet her I gave her MRE's and ostrich jerky from the warehouse...in hind-sight, maybe not the best gift to give a mostly-vegetarian.)

My week looks like this: writing group, accounting meeting, life coach meeting, counseling session, street outreach, Anne at the Hub and then a double-header of softball on Friday night. So what's the problem?

I'M ON CRUTCHES!!! Oh yeah, I feel a giant throat-punch coming on!

I don't know what happened but sometime in the past few weeks my hip decided to quit working for me. I've been to the doctor's, had x-rays, taken medicine (pills and {yikes!} needles) and I'm currently waiting for an MRI. I know that we should consider it all joy... seriously?

I'm a terrible patient and I don't suffer well. Will you please be praying that God will heal my body quickly? I think, praying in one accord, we can collectively throat-punch the devil hard enough to get him off of us. And I love kicking his tail :)

All glory to God!

PS
If the devil has been giving you trouble send me your prayer request and I'll put it on my list. I love praying for people and watching God move!