Engage Your Faith and Do Stuff

March 8, 2013March 8, 2013 / Erin Kirk / 4 Comments

If you’ve been around here long, you may recall my meeting last fall with NYT Bestselling Author Bob Goff.

I didn’t write much about it because it was a visit, not an interview. I was really moved by his book Love Does (if you haven’t read it, run to your Kindle and buy it) and I wanted to tell him that. Since he put his phone number in the back of the book and he answers it, that wasn’t as hard as it sounds.

One night in LA, Bob squeezed me, a stranger, in into his impossibly tight schedule and we chatted for about 45 minutes. Here are two things I learned about Bob:

1. In person, he’s just like he is in the book.

2. He is a funny and refreshing example of gospel-centered Christianity in action.

For example, when negotiating the contract for Love Does, Bob told the publisher he wanted a big enough advance to build a school in Uganda. They gave it to him and now there’s a school in Uganda. Here it is under construction:

Bob, who is a lawyer, took a bunch of law students along to beat back the tangled bush of the Ugandan legal system, providing due process to dozens of kids languishing untried in jail.

Then they began prosecuting witch doctors for child sacrifice/mutilation and educating, with kindness and creativity, other witch doctors about Uganda’s laws regarding the practice.

Bob’s example is one reason I am going to Zambia. I can’t do what Bob does in Africa but God isn’t asking me to be Bob. He is asking me to engage my faith to create something sweet that doesn’t currently exist. As Jesus said,

When you produce much fruit, you are my true disciples. This brings great glory to my Father. John 15:18

In other words: Love Does.

Bob guest posted over at Donald Miller’s Storyline blog yesterday and here’s what he said:

“I have often wondered why the things that are talked about at Bible studies I’ve been at never really stuck with me…I wanted what was said to matter, but like Taylor’s song, it didn’t – at least not enough. But that all changed when I started engaging my faith; when I started doing stuff. It was then that I stopped humming along to someone else’s song and started writing my own.”

I love both of these guys and if you read Miller’s A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, you can hear how they met. Both them have inspired me to write a better story with of my life, to get out of the boat, into the world and do stuff.

What are you supposed to get out and do?

Keep Working and Be Awesome.

March 2, 2013 / Erin Kirk / 5 Comments

Today, I stumbled on The Art of Non-Conformity: Unconventional Strategies for Life, Work and Travel, a blog written by writer/entrepreneur Chris Guillebeau. This guy writes 1,000 words a day, six days a week and plans to stand in the dirt of every country on the planet. He’s got 150 down.

He’s awesome and he wants you to be awesome too. So he’s published a few e-books that you can download free here!

Chris’ philosophy is this:

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

1. You don’t have to live your life the way other people expect you to.

2. You can do good things for yourself and help other people at the same time.

3. If you don’t decide for yourself what you want to get out of life, someone else will probably end up deciding for you.

4. There is usually more than one way to accomplish something.

I just finished 279 Days to Overnight Success which you can get here. It’s chock full of practical life advice for creative types and entrepreneurs. A Brief Guide to World Domination: How to Live a Remarkable Life in a Conventional World is next.

I need people like Chris. As I grope my way into a new creative life, the shape of which I can’t quite fathom, it’s nice to hear from explorers deep in the territory. And rather than guard their trade secrets, people like Chris are wrapping them up in lovely internet packages and handing them out for free.

That trend feels Christ-like and I support it. So I’m spreading the goodness.

Happy Saturday.

How Do I Defend An Orphan?

February 11, 2013March 4, 2013 / Erin Kirk / 7 Comments

Before the industrial revolution, the average income per person in the wealthiest nations was only about four times higher than that of the poorest nations. Today, the average American lives on $90+ per day and 2.6 billion people, 40% of the world, live on less than $2.

That data came from When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor and Yourself, which I’m reading because I have the chance to go to Zambia this summer, and I’m scared of my very white, very rich, very good intentions.

But I’m more scared of doing nothing.

Right now in Chongwe, Zambia there are four women and one man running a school/orphanage in the bush, with jacked up plumbing and 100 variously malnourished kids – and they do it for free. Tim and Holly from Scrubs Medical Mission came to cowboy church looking for a few contractors, plumbers and farmers to go help. I’ll go in a heartbeat, but I’m learning to ask God about these things before running out for typhoid shots.

Here’s what the Bible says about orphans:

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress. James 1:27

Learn to do good; seek justice, reprove the ruthless, Defend the orphan, plead for the widow. Isaiah 1:17

Whoever receives a child in My name, receives Me. Matthew 18:5

If anyone has material possession and sees his brother in need but has no pity on him, how can the love of God be in him? IJohn 3:17

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

Authors Steve Corbett and Dr. Brian Fikkert put it this way: “If God’s people in both the Old and New Testaments were to have a concern for the poor during eras of relative economic equality, what are we to conclude about God’s desire for the North American church today?”

But we have to be smart because we know development solutions formulated in a rectory in Cleveland, don’t always translate in Africa, but that hardly relieves us from the duty. The God I say I believe commands me take care of the widow, the poor, the immigrant and the orphan, just like he commanded the Nation of Israel. They failed at it too.

Do not merely listen to the Word and so deceive yourselves, do what it says. James 1:22

So I’m praying and surrendering my assumptions and educating myself about these exact people, in this exact location, so I don’t hurt them with my ignorance. God knows I’m ignorant, obese with blessing and unequal to the task, but he also knows I can build simple irrigation systems in arid places.