God

Four Steps That Can Change Your Life – Permanently.

/ Erin Kirk / 1 Comment

When I began reading The Bible, I knew parts of it would fly in the face of my personal ideology.

Ocean and sky

(Photo credit: FnJBnN)

But since I’d exhausted every strategy for manifesting a happy and successful life, and was crying on my bed every day, I didn’t have much to lose. So, I opened my mind, committed to reading it and doing as it says. I promised myself if, after a careful reading, I just couldn’t believe it was the inspired Word of God, I wouldn’t.

Less than a week after that decision, I read this:

And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to His own eternal glory in Christ Jesus, will Himself complete and make you what you ought to be, establish and ground you securely and strengthen and settle you. IPeter 5:10 AMP

Wait…God will make me what I ought to be? Like, it’s not my job? Whoa. If that’s not good news, what is?

That scripture was such a precise response to my problem, I kept reading but I had to do it on my own terms. So, initially, I shut out all the commentary, at church, on tv and from well-meaning Christians; then Jesus and I began a vigorous wrestling match, which two years later, I have completely and decidedly lost. “Whoever loses his life on my account, will find it,” Jesus said.

So that’s the why, here’s the how – at least as it worked for me:

1. I bought a new Bible – The Amplified version, but the NIV, NLT and Message translations are all good for comprehension.

2. I found 30 minutes in my day without interruptions – invariably before Sam got up. Ugh. I bit the bullet and set my alarm.

3. I opened the Gospel of John. Starting there, rather than the beginning with Genesis, kept me awake and engaged. Later John, Peter, Luke and Paul piqued my curiosity about David, Isaiah and Moses. But for the first four months, I bounced around the New Testament looking for things that surprised me, challenged me or just made me happy, and I wrote them in my journal.

4. I did it daily. This is where the rubber meets the road, and I talk a lot about the value of showing up in Going to the Sea.

Skipping Stones

(Photo credit: Exolucere)Sea. 

For years, even my churchy ones, the gospel skipped across my life, like a flat stone on water. Somehow, it would always make it to the other side and never sink in. That’s because I didn’t really think I needed Jesus. Then I found out I did.

Sometimes, the key to availing ourselves of the grace and mercy of God is having the humility to admit we need it.

An Evening On Skid Row

/ Erin Kirk / 2 Comments

Skid Row is a twelve-block section of downtown Los Angeles with the highest concentration of violent crime on the West Coast. It is home to an estimated 5,000 people who ball up under cardboard boxes and plastic tarps at night. Sirens echo off the buildings, and the streets smell like weed and urine.

I’d show you pictures of it, but I can’t. It was too dark. Literally. I spent Friday night there with about 60 people from the LA Dream Center.

I can’t begin to tell you what a bad idea I thought that was.

But Dream Center teams have been showing up on Skid Row, day after day and every Friday night for years. They have so much street cred with the community, the game is entirely changed – even in the dark with sirens and crack smoke.

“Hey where’d all these white people come from?” I heard someone yell as we milled through the crowd.

“‘Dude, it’s the Dream Center,” somebody yelled back.

“Oh, ok cool.”

The residents of Skid Row trust the Dream Center, so they tell their stories and break your heart. When I finally pushed through the fear of going, I got to look in the eyes of a Vietnamese man who asked if I could get him a new tent, because his was broken. I prayed for a babbling woman in a wheelchair and found some Doritos for a 90-lb woman sleeping under clear plastic on the sidewalk.

Yes, many of them were extremely high and about as broken as a human can be, but they all have eyes and you can look into them; and that changes everything. Then, when they thank you for coming and treating them like humans, well…

But the question looms:

Aren’t we enabling people to be addicts and homeless by feeding them on Skid Row?

It’s a hard question. But many in the Dream Center’s army, who have escaped the cycle of poverty and addiction, will tell you – Jesus can fix this. He does it all the time. Furthermore, as the Apostle Paul told the Romans:

But how can people call for help if they don’t know who to trust? And how can they know who to trust if they haven’t heard of the One who can be trusted? And how can they hear if nobody tells them? And how is anyone going to tell them, unless someone is sent to do it? Rom 10:14-16 The Message

The Dream Center volunteers, who sit on dirty sidewalks and pray for crack smoking homeless people, do it because Christ died to rescue all of us messed-up sinners, and it doesn’t matter how messed up. And if by offering food to a junk-sick homeless woman, The Dream Center can convince her there is a God who loves her and wants to fix her mess, they’ll keep doing it.

After all, to catch fish, you must go fishing.

To support the work of The Los Angeles Dream Center click here.

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is.

/ Erin Kirk / Leave a comment

I think God sometimes uses the completely inexplicable events in our lives to point us toward Him. – Bob Goff, Love Does.

I blog in a time warp.

The book I’m finishing, Going to The Sea – A Sassy Liberal Wades In With Jesus, follows a cynical, selfish but well-intentioned Left Coast girl, who submits to Jesus on a West Texas gravel road.

But Going to the Sea – The Blog lives three years down that road, where the inexplicable things of God happen all the time, in present tense.

Inexplicable things, like my decision to fly to LA next week to embed with the Los Angeles Dream Center‘s missionary teams.

Me, a Christian missionary? Come on. Yah, I don’t really get it either.

Photo Credit: Wikipedia

I’ve blogged about The Dream Center before, but on Monday, I’ll put some actual skin in the game, in Watts, South Central, Compton, Imperial Courts, Crenshaw and Downtown L.A. This is inexplicable apart from God. This is what happens when you follow Jesus like you mean it. He messes with who you think you are and has you doing things you cannot imagine.

Here’s how the Dream Center explains what I’ll be up to next week:

If you made a mission trip to the LA Dream Center, playing with
neglected and abused kids in gang infested neighborhoods, busing
people to church from crack houses and cardboard boxes, handing
out warm plates of food to homeless people living on Skid Row,
would be a few evangelistic opportunities your team would take
part in…

With us you would be working hard, praying loud and returning
home exhausted. With us, you would be an important part of the
miracle for which we ourselves can take absolutely no credit.

Pay close attention, The Dream Center deals in the inexplicable things of God, like banks deal in money. God willing, I’m going to show you some of them, right here in real time.

Oh, and if you’re the praying kind, let ‘er rip, I need all the help I can get.