Quit Staring At Your Muffin Tops

December 31, 2013December 31, 2013 / Erin Kirk / 1 Comment

Let’s just get this out of the way, shall we? It’s New Year’s Eve, and I suspect, by the new muffin tops spilling over the edge of my yoga pants, I may have eaten too much again this year.

Shocking!

Last night, I made my yoga students hold Warrior II foreverrrrrrrr, while telling them to leave the self-loathing over holiday gluttony on the mat. “It’s a waste of our time, ladies! You’re strong and beautiful, and you’re here getting stronger and more beautiful. So good! Three more breaths.”

Warrior II. Photo Credit Tim Cigleske

A teacher of mine is fond of saying: You cannot be selfish and happy, and that’s why I think New Year’s resolutions, particularly those surrounding weight loss, slip off us like soap in the shower.

We want to get in shape, because we think it will make us happy, and to a degree it’s does, but I’ve been at my “goal weight” and seen all the muscles in my arms, and guess what? I just found something else that needed fixing. Relentless discontent dogs me when it’s all about me. In other words:

I OBSESS ABOUT MY MUFFIN TOPS WHEN I STARE AT MYSELF IN THE MIRROR.

So in 2014, I’m going to quit staring at myself and stare at somebody else instead.

Like the couple in church who, despite having at least three, sometimes five, kids, just swooped into CPS-land and got four more. It is a proven fact that helping them makes me happier than losing ten pounds.

Or perhaps I will stare at another family I know that’s a little short right now, and run to Sam’s Club for them. That plan bubbled up at Love Dinner Saturday night because there is a need, we know what it is and we can meet it – simple.

The Love Dinner gals have been cooking this in their own kitchens for months now. One of them used a Macy’s gift card she got for her birthday to buy new clothes for a Hispanic woman living with her three kids at the crisis center. Another helped an older woman clean up her child’s vomit in Taco Bell. Another gave a young mother pushing a stroller in the dark, a ride to the grocery store and back home.

See, the LD gals know that the Love of God must be attached to hands and feet. This country is drowning in theology while the world dies of hunger. How can that be when the Bible says, “In the same way, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead.” James 2:26

BTW – Muffin Tops Cannot Survive this Pose! Photo Credit: Flashflood

The good news about love and service is that it feels good. When somebody’s life is demonstrably better because you showed up, it’s exhilarating and holy because you sense there’s something larger at work. Though you can’t see it yet, you are building great amphitheaters and skyways and rose gardens in the eternal Kingdom of God.

And it’s easy. Look around.

Does some kid in your neighborhood need a trusted adult? Is there an elderly widow who needs a cup of tea? AIDS orphans surely need a sponsor, and Mercy Ships needs a lot more doctors, nurses and dollars for the new ship.

So go ahead lose the ten pounds here’s a tool I like, and come to yoga in Mineola; then unhand the muffin tops and go get happy helping someone else. Let me know how it goes.

Happy 2014!

On Finally Boarding.

November 10, 2013November 10, 2013 / Erin Kirk / 4 Comments

After two weeks of radio silence, our newest team of Mercy Ships volunteers has finally joined the Africa Mercy.

I’ve seen 100 pictures of the ship, but it is SO MUCH BETTER when people you’ve grown to love are standing in front of it. There’s Ally from the UK and Lewanna from BC with Stefan our Field Service Director.

Photo Credit: Amy Jones

Prior to boarding, the team spent two weeks working in a local orphanage in Pointe Noire, Congo. Since there was no internet connection (nor running water or power evidently) I’ve been jumping out of my skin in Texas to hear how it’s going, because someday I’ll get to go too.

KJ from Seattle wrote a fun post about it here. Ally and Amy, husband and wife team from the UK photographed it here and wrote about it here. Katie and Jordan from Ohio talk about it here. If you’d like to see missionary work in action, complete with its myriad heartbreak and surprise, take a moment and check out these blogs.

Photo Credit: Amy Jones

All of these people have committed to living on the Africa Mercy for at least 10 months. Some are planning to be there for years. They raise their own money and actually pay Mercy Ships to do this, committing their lives and finances to deliver healthcare to the poorest of the world’s poor.

The money part used to seem weird to me, but it doesn’t anymore. It’s just another example of how life works in the beautiful, radical, upside down Kingdom of God.

**As ever, the views expressed herein are my own and not of that of Mercy Ships International.

On Life Dismantled.

October 22, 2013October 23, 2013 / Erin Kirk / 2 Comments

Four years ago, it was impossible that I would sob in a bathroom, at work, flanked by three women praying to Jesus on my behalf. There was exactly zero chance I could be that humble, that submitted to any authority but my own. It was a point of pride for me to reject a biblical worldview and everything I thought that meant.

But dangling from the end of your rope, is a REAL. DANGEROUS. PLACE. And deciding to read the Bible and follow Jesus like I mean it, is the smartest thing I ever did. It has rearranged my furniture so thoroughly, in such dramatic and interesting ways, I regret not doing it sooner.

Photos: Kristin Jack

My new life at Mercy Ships is a good example of the massive remodel God has in mind.

Based on Youth With a Mission’s five-month Discipleship Training School, “Gateway” is the Mercy Ships training program I will soon help lead. I’ve been a student of it for the last five weeks, and it has proven a wonderful place to be dismantled by God, in public.

And maybe that sounds horrifying, which it is, until you realize everyone else is doing it too – Parsing messy childhoods and sticky father images, jettisoning baggage, and getting down to the way things are. Tomorrow, somebody will surely throw open a long-chained closet door that conceals the terrible-awful and let the light shine in. Then they will cry in the bathroom.

This is some of the hardest evidence I can offer for the value of following Jesus.

When I was working the American dream like a boss, making a bunch of money and waking up each day in a dead panic, my life felt like a carnival game. The objective seemed to be, learn the rules, avoid the rigged ones and play better than everyone else. That’s it. Without eternity, who really cares what you do here? Of course, sometimes I’d win a stuffed banana, and that was nice, but who wants one of those anyway?

What I wanted was joy. I wanted to feel the love of God move from me, to someone else and back again; to know I am so thoroughly loved that all I really must do is manifest, to see people around me for the weary travelers they are, thirsty for love.

I have that now in ever-increasing measure. It’s my new American Dream. And the only thing I did to get it, was humble myself and surrender to a brand new worldview, one wherein Jesus is the center of everything.

I’m living proof. It works.

The Gateway Gang. Fighting Fires. Photo: Kristin Jack

And so on Thursday morning, this group of people, who’ve held my hand as God threw open my broom closets, will board a plane for Point Noire, Congo. Many of them will spend the next several years there following Jesus right into the beating heart of Africa, where his beloved poor live.

My prayer for them is this:

And so, from the day we heard, we have not ceased to pray for you, asking that you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding,so as to walk in a manner worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing to him, bearing fruit in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. May you be strengthened with all power, according to his glorious might, for all endurance and patience with joy, giving thanksto the Father, who has qualified youto share in the inheritance of the saints in light. Colossians 1:9-12