One year ago

A year ago, I experienced something that changed my life and I would not be here in Albania today if I did not experience it. I went to Serbia on a week long outreach with my sing team and a few others. Taylor Remington wrote something about the experience after and it is a magnificent piece of writing that put into words something that I could not do myself. Here is it:

So this past week I was in Serbia doing an outreach for Gypsy kids. They are awesome kids who don’t know anything about other people in the world other than rejection. They are the most looked down upon race in the world. They are given no opportunity to go to school. Many of them do no know how to read or write. And if they do go to school, their parents pull them out when they are 10, to help them with their work. Many of the young girls at the camp, spend their days begging on the street. Going up to cars asking for money. They don’t beg because they want to, they are begging for their lives. For life. Some of the boys get up at 4 in the morning everyday and work all day, bringing produce to and from places. They wont get hired because they are Gypsy, they are kicked to the curb and are cursed by all society. But they are humans too. They get treatment that should disgust us all. Its one thing if a people are poor because of the lack of a stable government. But they live in the worst conditions because they are blamed for everything bad and were stomped down upon to poverty. Through the week at the camp we just communicated through love to all the kids. And on Wednesday 5 young men became believers. Then we went into Belgrade and saw where they lived. And what shocked me wasn’t the conditions, which were terrible, what shocked me was they were forced their to the place they live and they are the most overlooked race in the world. They have become completely forgotten. It’s disgusting.

In all sense of the reality of life, some things are more prevalent than others, some are good and some are bad. And in the scope of it’s meaning you try to detect what is the feeling you have received or gained, and though the sense of sight I believe we use cheaply. Through sight we seem to be ignoring the dark things in life even though they are screaming in front of our faces. Selfishness seeps through our bones without any thought of it, it goes unnoticed. It is not regarded and we desire to block out the reality of things we try hard to forget. Things all of us have heard about, but we blow it off and we worry about our own lives because we feel they are much more important, We think that reaching for money doesn’t come with a price tag in our own lives. And in its sense maybe it doesn’t, but it does have a price tag for those unseen. For those everyday who beg for money and scream for love. What is wrong with us? Our flesh takes over our Holy Spirit and consciousness. The ignorance is vaster than we can imagine. It fills the empty holes of the universe. And what will cause us to change? Maybe through a personal experience or something else. But it must involve the true love and testimony of Jesus. How can we say we are Christians if we forget those who are living in conditions worse than unimaginable? In a sense, we spit in their faces and don’t give them any chance to change who they are, or who they will become. Obama says our government needs to change in order to save America. But that is not where the change is needed. The change is needed in our hearts. We need to lift our selfish blinding shades and look to the poor and needy. Our failure to accept others as a body needs to change. No more judging and casting out those who we think are unworthy. We must reach out to the hurting in every way. Americans have everything to be thankful for, but we don’t do a thing. We moan and complain, we worry about or next meal, we worry about the next meeting, the next shorts/pants we want to buy. We all worry about our own selfish desires and we are all slaves to it. We are bound down by it like gravity and we don’t see it. And maybe that is why we have so many non following or weak Christians. The faith they learn is fake which makes them fake. We have no love, no Christ, no vision for helping others. It does not exist in the Church as a whole. We have shot the Church and have lost our beacon of light to the world. No doubt the Church of Jesus Christ should be different. The excuse that all religions are the same should not exist. Through love we should be separate. It should be as distinct as black and white. But our faith has just become salvation insurance. And that is not what God had in mind. He didn’t want it to be all about our own individual selves. Of course he wants us to be saved, but that should just be the beginning. We should be then acting upon it and loving others. In our group we had no verbal communication with the Gypsies, we could not understand each other. But through the love of Jesus Christ we were able to reach their hearts. When the kids had come home from the camp, they cried. They didn’t cry because they were coming home to awful conditions or cry because they were back to their old horrible lives. They cried because for the first time in their life they had been loved. Loved for just being alive and with us. They missed us.That generation of young men in that Gypsy community are going to start something new for the people their. Nothing can ever change who they are or why they lack so much motivation. They have been a defeated people for years and only God can change that. The young men are going to bring the love of Jesus there and they will change that community through Jesus. I have had a deep burning feeling the Church needs to change, unfortunately denominations, and non-denominations that are denominations within themselves exist. We are not bound together by Jesus as a whole, which we should be. We have to start loving and doing more through love. It begins and ends with love. For God so loved the world…. I know Jesus was smiling when he saw the smiles on the faces of the community of Gypsies. The Church in this present time is either going to go one-way or another. We are at a cross-roads yet nobody sees it. It will either spiral down into a sinful abyss that will present no hope for revival or change, Or we could revive now, people are hungry for love of Jesus and the understanding and meaning of life. We waste so much time trying to prove God through science or debate when we should be serving. As believers we should know that God created science and there is no need for that. Out reality of life is so simple we will never be able to understand the vastness and the complexity of all things in the universe. We have restrictions that are needed. We are held back in understanding just like gravity holds us down on earth. The only way people can believe now is the example of love and the power of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit dwells in all of those who believe, and we need to start using it. The Word is of course is extremely important because God speak to our hearts through the word. And we can learn and grow from the Word. It is extremely vital to all parts of the Christian walk. But that doesn’t mean we should forget about the power of the Holy Spirit and love. The Holy Sprit shows the world something is out there we can’t see or control. And it shouldn’t be used for ourselves, to strengthen our own faith, but it should produce through our faith. God gives us gifts and we use them through the Spirit. We should always be using our gifts for expanding Jesus’ kingdom. But the church is dry. We shouldn’t be bickering and arguing about doctrine, about Revelation, predestination, mega churches, certain pastors. It doesn’t matter. God will control what is needed. We should be standing together in unity through Jesus, and then and only then will see true change. The movement of Jesus’ love can be so powerful. Enough to rock the middle east, enough for Muslims, Jews, Mormons, Hindus or whatever to start seeing there is a true living God. We don’t know the possibility it has. But why not strive for the impossible. God is on our side and He is here to help us. For me personally I don’t know where to start. Maybe going to Serbia was the beginning, and then from there to start serving and loving. Serving and loving are a start because words aren’t everything. Words are extremely shallow in every sense when communicating with others. The only things that they touch are our minds and maybe sometimes our soul. But love encompasses all, it binds everything together. Jesus came to the world to serve, and to save us because He loves us. All through love. He rebuked the knowledge of the Pharisees because they did not act upon what they knew. They did not serve at all. Jesus is screaming inside all of us to start acting upon our faith. Not to ourselves, or to the community of our own Church, but to the world, the people living in darkness all around us. Jesus wasn’t just talking about Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, when he said, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God,” He was talking about us. How many us would give up everything we own to do what God wanted? We love possessions because we think we need them. But we don’t. We have Jesus and that’s all we need. For the believers we have conquered death, and now we must begin to save others. We need to unify the Church through love, the Holy Spirit and the Word.