Go!

I’ve recently watched the movie “Freedom Writers”. Excellent bit of cinema! Highly recommend you check it out in the near future. It’s based on a true story about an optimistic, naïve, inexperienced teacher who takes on her first teaching assignment that includes kids who see more devastation in a few weeks than perhaps she has in her entire life. Very much a classic story, but very relevant.

Several obvious things struck me throughout this movie. For one thing, I was blown away by the bravery of the students in their everyday lives. Each of them have such devastating accounts of things they have seen and done. Pain, physical and emotional, inflicted by fellow and opposing gang members, pain inflicted by their own mothers and fathers, by random acts not intended for them. Mind-blowing. Not only were these students having to tap into a necessary element of bravery and strength, but of courage and loss of innocence, loss of hope and faith in an ideal of something better.

This was not intended to be a “spiritual” film. But, I would be remiss to not have gotten the correlations. It is amazing to me the boundaries that the love of God can cross, the depths He can reach, the magnitude of hurt that He can heal. It is amazing to me how I can testify to how hopeless I felt prior to knowing and accepting Him, and the transformation having Him in my life has been. It is amazing to me how my heart cries out in joy over the salvation I have received, and how my mouth is so silent in sharing this road of salvation to another.

We do a lot of things “right”. We do a lot of things wrong. God always speaks to us, and He always speaks the “right”. On average, how many times am I actively listening and proceeding in the direction given? We aren’t all called to go and reach the inner cities, the third world countries, the cults, the “I’m a good person” population. This is true. God plants us specifically.

Have you felt an urge to send a card to someone a bit down? Have you felt the urge to buy a few bags of groceries for a struggling co-worker and their family? Have you felt the urge to ask a cashier in return “I’m well. How are you?” Have you felt the urge keep acting in kindness to the one who keeps ridiculing you? Have you felt the urge to share the gospel? Have you ever audibly proclaimed how God has transformed you? Have you taken the time to stop trying to have it all together, and just focus on the One who puts it all together?

There is a world of hurt, devastation, hopelessness, untruths, addictions and chains out there. We possess the truth that sets all mankind free from those things. We would want this for our friends and family. Why not for our fellow man? …You say “But I do want it for my fellow man!!!” OK. What about your life proves that?

That question has challenged me today.

Matthew 28:19, 20 – “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

Go. Make. Baptize. Teach. I am with you ALWAYS.