Love

   The absense of LOVE in this world amazes me.
   A lonely child that has lost everything, its home, its family, lies in a crib silently, not even daring to cry because it knows that no one will answer if it shouts for love.
   A family in America that has lost nothing and gained everything, choosing to follow God and be everything that God intended them to be for the child, being blessed by taking them home...
   They get QUESTIONS.
   Let me say that again: QUESTIONS.
   I just don't GET that.
   When will you be DONE?
   Is this a HOBBY of yours?
   Don't you think you have had ENOUGH?
   HOW MANY MORE TIMES are you going to adopt?
   Aren't you afraid that you are NEGLECTING your own family to gain another member?
   Why are you doing this? God called you?
   Are you sure?
   People ask these questions out of curiosity, sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes out of judgement. They haven't seen a child that is literally a skeleton, that cannot function properly, that does not cry because they know no one will hear, that feels pain when touched because they are not used to it. They have not seen a child so hungry that the body has begun to eat itself, breaking down the muscles to survive.
   They have not seen or sometimes even heard about it. No, people think we are strange for knowing it.
   My response? Why are you coming to me? Do you think I can answer that? If you want to know soo bad, ask GOD why. Ask GOD.
   Would we ask God why He STILL accepts the broken?
   Would we ask God when He will be DONE forgiving and DONE accepting new children?
   Do we ask God if saving His creation is a HOBBY of His?
   Do we ask God how many more times He is going to save?
   Do we ask God if He thinks He is neglecting His children to bring home another?
   I don't want to sound like I am heaping judgement on people. I am trying to get my point across.
   THIS is what explains love to me.
   I know the love I have for my siblings, four out of seven of which were adopted, plus a sister we are adopting from China. Her legs are so deformed that she cannot wear shoes, that she cannot walk, that we will have to amputate her legs when we finally bring her home.
   I LOVE HER SO MUCH, her PAIN is mine. I am feeling the FEAR for her, I feel SICK knowing what she is about to go through leaving her country to go to a completely different place. I actually had a dream the other night that someone had amputated MY legs during my sleep. I hurt because of it.
   I know that I would do just about anything to bring her home.
   That's how God feels for us.
   He loves us so much, our PAIN is His. He knows the FEAR that we feel, and He feels the PAIN we are about to go through, leaving our own life of sin to go to a completely different place. But He knows that it will come to good in the end. He thinks about us ALL THE TIME, and it is so strange to think that the God that knows all and sees all loves me. Thinks about me. Wants to bring me home.
   Don't understand forgiveness yet?
   God is not DONE forgiving.
   He is never DONE loving.
   He does not "count" the number of his children then sit back and go, "Well, I think that's enough."
   "Let the others suffer." He just doesn't say that.
   We follow a God that looks at us, at US, and says He does not care what we have done. He cares about what we will do, what he can use us for to bring His other children home.
   Love is a wide topic. It can never be covered completely, it is so large it covers everything, it is deeper than the ocean and wider than the sea.
   John 3:16
   "For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish but have eternal life."
   God IS Love.

The Columbine Flower

   Darell Scott got a call one day from a man living in Ohio, about 1,202 miles away from his home in Colorado. The man told him that he had been having reoccurring dreams about his 17 year old daughter Rachel Scott. The stranger had seen tears steaming from her eyes, trickling down her cheeks and falling onto something out of sight. He then proceeded to ask Darell if the dream meant anything to him.
   Darell said it did not.
   A few days after April 20, 1999, he called the man back when he found a drawing in his daughter Rachel's backpack. It was a sketch on a notebook piece of paper, at first glance perhaps looking like some random drawing a high school kid would do while bored in class. But with more thought maybe the realization came immediately for Darell. From two eyes in the upper left hand corner of the paper spilled forth 13 tears, falling onto a Columbine flower.
   His daughter, along with Daniel Rohrbough and 11 other victims, died in the Columbine High School Shooting on April 20, 1999, making the number of victims to die 13.
   The same number of tears she had drawn falling onto a Columbine flower.
   Drawn 30 minutes before the start of the massacre, 30 minutes before her own death.
   Daniel Rohrbough was age 15 when he was killed by a shot in the chest.
   Kyle Velasquez was age 16 when he was killed by a gunshot wound to the head and back.
   Steven Curnrow age 14 killed by a shot to the neck.
   Cassie Bernell age 17 killed by a shot to the head.
   Isaiah Shoels age 18 killed by a shot to the chest.
   Matthew Kechter age 16 killed by a shot to the chest.
   Lauren Townsend age 18 killed by multiple shots to the head, chest, and lower body.
   John Tomlin age 16 killed by a shot to the back.
   Kelly Fleming age 16 killed by a shot to the back.
   Daniel Mauser age 15 killed by a shot to the face.
   Cory DePooter age 17 killed by shots to the chest and neck.
   Rachel Scott was well known for her love of God, and mocked by name in some videos created by Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris before the massacre. It was said that the wounded Richard Castaldo had been eating lunch with her outside the school and told a reporter that Eric Harris had shot Rachel three times before pulling the bleeding girl up by the hair and asking, "Do you believe in God?"
   Her reply had been, "You know I do."
   Richard later denied that any such exchange had ever been made.
   Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris had been friends at school, and though some would say they were the fourteenth and fifteenth victims of the massacre, having shot themselves, but I would disagree. Their deaths had begun a year before, when they started planning the massacre. How do I know this?
   They did it for fame.
   Tell me that anyone truly living and not dead in satan's grip would plan these 13 deaths. Correction; they planned the deaths of hundreds, and only made out with 13. They were dead long before the massacre.
   They had started planning the shooting a year before...maybe even as Rachel wrote these words in her journal on April 20, 1998,
   Exactly a year before her death.

   "I am not going to apologize for speaking the Name of Jesus, I am not going to justify my faith to them, and I am not going to hide the light that God has put into me. If I have to sacrifice everything...

I will."

   If asked what the opposite of a wedding was, I would have said a funeral. But recently God has been teaching me something I never thought of.

   Girls spend practically our whole lives before our marriage planning our wedding. Rachel prepared for her death. Just as the wedding is not the end of happiness though we plan for that moment, it is the same for death. They are both the beginning of a long lasting unity.
   During my life, I want to be found looking inward and always ready for my funeral.
   I hope to be like Rachel Scott, found preparing myself for death.
   Because my death will definitely not be the end of me, just as it was not the end for Rachel. It was the beginning of a long lasting unity with the Savior, and with fellow Christians that have been granted the joy of Heaven.
   One last thing I think should be known. When looking up the Columbia High Shooting on YouTube, a found a comment that stated, "Why would God let something terrible like that happen to someone that believed in him?"
   Isaiah 57:1
   "The righteous perish, and no one takes it to heart; the devout are taken away, and no one understands that the righteous are taken away to be spared from evil. Those who walk uprightly enter into peace; they find rest as they lie in death."
  

Thirst

   We act as if no one is watching. We speak like we will never be accountable.We live like tomorrow is a promise.We compromise, pretend, lie, and believe like the world does, the seed of God's Word planted in our hearts dormant for the time being. We tell other Christians God is our every breath, but our actions, our words, and our lives show differently. And that's when we hear that little voice so often suppressed saying quietly, "There is something wrong."
   But the most watched shows on tv, the popular music of today, the famous books everyone has read, the celebrities with perfect forms and faces, and the way the people follow them with empty minds and outstretched hands hit us repeatedly with deafening screams. They say that we are sheltered and preventing ourselves from enjoying life. From under their burdens they moan that we ought to be like them, with bleeding hands they gesture that we follow them, they scream they are completely satisfied as if the louder their voices are the more like truth it will seem. They dip their cup into the well and pull it back out and drink then dip it back in, always thirsty for more, knowing what they have isn't enough. But just as the Israelites shouted, "We want a king!" because the people around them had kings, so do we shout that, like everyone else, we wish to walk down the path that leads to death. That leads to never enough.
   God tells us what He offers is enough.
   Isaiah 55:2
   "Why spend money on what is not bread, and labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to Me, and eat what is good, and your soul will delight in the richest of fare."
   Jeremiah 31:25
   "I will refresh the weary and satisfy the faint."
   Revelation 21:6
   He said to me: "It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End. To him that is thirsty I will give to drink without cost from the spring of the water of life."
   He warns us what they offer will never be.
   Isaiah 65:13
   Therefore this is what the Sovereign Lord says: "My servants will eat, but you will go hungry; My servants will drink, but you will go thirsty; My servants will rejoice, but you will be put to shame."
   "Give ear and come to Me; hear Me, that your soul may live."
   That was Isaiah 55:3.
   What is our response? Naturally we feel confused, everything we know has always been never enough we cannot quite grasp the concept that something can be enough.
   But something can. Something IS.
   For the slightest moment hope springs up, and then goes dry again as we stop and think. Wait. But we are not enough. We cannot deserve this. We are too far gone. We want to believe it. But it is too good to be true. Not for me, it can't be true. They have no idea what I have done. You don't know where I've come from.
   No, I don't. But He does. And He wants you still. It doesn't matter to Him. You are forgiven.
   No, you do not know the amount, the greatness of my sin.
   'Jesus answered him, "Simon, I have something to tell you."
   "Tell me teacher," he said.
   "Two men owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred denarii, and the other fifty. Neither of them had the money to pay him back, so he canceled the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?"
   Simon replied, "I suppose the one who had the bigger debt canceled. "
   "You have judged correctly," Jesus said.
   Then He turned toward the woman and said to Simon, "Do you see this woman? I came into your house. You did not give me any water for my feet, but she wet my feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not give me a kiss, but this woman, from the time I entered, has not stopped kissing my feet. You did not put oil on my head, but she has poured perfume on my feet. Therefore, I tell you, her many sins have been forgiven - for she loved much. But he who has been forgiven little loves little."
   Then Jesus said to her, "Your sins are forgiven."' Luke 7:40-48