{"id":382,"date":"2008-01-11T12:35:06","date_gmt":"2008-01-11T12:35:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/redletters\/2008\/01\/real-life-red-l.html"},"modified":"2008-01-11T12:35:06","modified_gmt":"2008-01-11T12:35:06","slug":"real-life-red-l","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/redletters\/2008\/01\/real-life-red-l.html","title":{"rendered":"Real Life Red Letters"},"content":{"rendered":"

A good friend of mine, Amanda Clark, with America World Adoption Agency<\/a>, just sent this to her staff. It’s an incredible story of how God interrupted her Christmas and brought the Red Letters of Jesus to life. Enjoy!<\/p>\n

I wanted to share a story with you and how Tom Davis\u2019 book really spoke to me recently. I pray you are getting a chance to read it. Tom writes with a lot of authority and can be confrontational in some ways, but so was Jesus, huh? J<\/p>\n

Okay, so over the Christmas holidays I went home with my boyfriend to Missouri. We left on Christmas Eve day and it was a 7 hour trip and I was eager to get there in time to make the Christmas Eve service and hopefully share dinner with his family. Our trip this day was also taking longer than usual as we\u2019d stopped to run last minute errands on the way out of town. So, about an hour before we arrived to our destination, we saw a homeless man riding his bike on the side of the highway. Kevin, my boyfriend, suggested we pick him up and give him a ride\u2026which I was not keen on doing AT ALL. For all the below reasons:<\/p>\n

1. He\u2019s probably really dirty and smells.
\n2. If he\u2019s riding his bike on Christmas Eve, then he must know what he is doing\u2026seems like a pretty intentional decision to me.
\n3. It is dangerous to pick up a man and put him in the car, with me, a woman and my two \u201cferocious\u201d dogs.
\n4. We will miss Christmas Eve service, which you know is a wonderful tradition. You get to get dressed up and hold candles and sing pretty songs in a nice warm church with family.
\n5. I\u2019ll miss eating Christmas Eve dinner with family.
\n6. It\u2019s his fault he\u2019s homeless anyway, there are plenty of opportunities here in America. This is not our responsibility.<\/p>\n

\nThankfully Kevin did not have these same thoughts. Funny, now, had it had been an orphan, I think my thoughts would have been DRASTICALLY different. Funny how we can have a heart for one people group and not the other.
\nAnyway, we end up picking the guy up and through a series of events we took him and paid for a cheap hotel room for him for the night. And to be honest, I was a little upset at Kevin for inconveniencing me like this. After all, I had all the above reasons to be mad and this thought pattern continued until mid afternoon on Christmas day as I was cozying up to the fire and reading Tom\u2019s book. On page 38 of his book he spells out that poverty is lacking shelter and later says that we are doing unto Him when we give someone lacking shelter a room. And then earlier in his book he says, \u201cLiving out the gospel is hard work. It\u2019s easy to talk about it. Any of us can sit in church and sing warm, happy worship songs that make us feel good. ..But it\u2019s not so easy to actually go and do what Jesus said to do.\u201d OUCH! <\/p>\n

So, I had to eat humble pie and show Kevin what I had read and digest the truth of His word. And as I sit here drinking my non-fat caf\u00e9 mocha from Starbucks that an adoptive family blessed me with, I have to be honest, I\u2019m still not happy hearing this truth in my comfortable world here in cozy Nashville. Thankfully, God still extends grace to me and is continuing to work on my heart. I challenge you all as well to read Tom\u2019s book and allow it to change your heart and perspective. Hey, I didn\u2019t even think I needed any changing in that area, b\/c after all, I work for an orphan ministry. So, be warned, you may be transformed by it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A good friend of mine, Amanda Clark, with America World Adoption Agency, just sent this to her staff. It’s an incredible story of how God interrupted her Christmas and brought the Red Letters of Jesus to life. Enjoy! I wanted to share a story with you and how Tom Davis\u2019 book really spoke to me…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":87,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-swaziland"],"yoast_head":"\nReal Life Red Letters - Red Letters<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/redletters\/2008\/01\/real-life-red-l.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Real Life Red Letters - Red Letters\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A good friend of mine, Amanda Clark, with America World Adoption Agency, just sent this to her staff. 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A tireless advocate for fatherless children, Davis has spent most of his adult life calling U.S. believers to become the hands and feet of Jesus Christ to the 143 million orphans living around the world. Through those connections, thousands of orphans now have the bright and hopeful future--one that is filled with opportunities and the love of the one true Father. Davis speaks hundreds of times each year at churches and conferences, mobilizing the church to action on behalf of the poor. He is the author of four books. His most recent novel, SCARED is a fictionalized account of his first-hand experiencing living and working with orphans in Swaziland, Africa. Davis' blog is the premier resource for the latest developments in Christian orphan ministry. Davis also currently teaches courses as adjunct professor at George Fox University in Newberg, OR. When not traveling the globe, Davis resides in the mountains of Colorado in the small community of Palmer Lake. He and his wife Emily have seven children, including two adopted daughters from Russia.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/redletters\/author\/tdavis"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/redletters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/redletters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/redletters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/redletters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/87"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/redletters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=382"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/redletters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/redletters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/redletters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/redletters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}