Dear Friends and Family,
Thank you so much for your love and support. I count myself as incredibly blessed to have such beautiful people in my life.
In lots of churches these days, there is an emphasis on being your best self….releasing your gifts and offering them back to God. This emphasis can range from overcoming difficult odds to being a champion in everyday life or even living life as a winner. As one nationally known pastor I heard on TV say and I'll paraphrase: 'God loves winners. Jesus was a winner'.
Even in Word Made Flesh we take a number of tests aimed at helping us with our self-awareness (our personality, our work our love languages, our strengths, our spiritual gifts, etc.). These have been great for me and for our community. I can even see the helpfulness of the strengths tests where it encourages us to fertilize the seeds (giftings) God has put in us. By concentrating only on our weakness, the strengths tests' methodology counters that we will work so much on our weaknesses that we might mitigate them but we will also underinvest in our strengths and become average at everything… or mediocre at everything. I can see the wisdom of this methodology in the sense that I think people, when released into their passions and giftings contribute more to the world. And there are Scripture passages that talk about giftings in the church, talents given to servants, and
But self-denial doesn't get much attention. The churches that seem to be growing are the ones that want to release people's potential not the ones that talk about sacrifice.
To put it in theological terms, what does God want from us? Does God want us to be released into our giftings or does God want us to die to ourselves? Or are they not mutually exclusive? There are plenty of Scripture passages that talk about dying: a seed dies to produce fruit, to die is gain, to put to death the misdeeds of the body, if we die with Him we also live with Him. These suggest not just Christians dying a physical death but a death to the worst parts of ourselves, our sin and our selfishness.
If we do what Jesus did, (WWJD), does that necessarily lead to a life of martyrdom?
Thank you to those who have given towards Jose's and my trip to Bolivia (both of us) and Peru (just me) this summer. I don't have an update at this time regarding Jose's permanent visa, so please continue to pray that he receives his visa soon. I will try to send an update and book tickets as soon as I receive word about the visa.
As one of the Associate Directors in Word Made Flesh, I feel some responsibility for the people who work in Administration. Jose has been with Word Made Flesh for three years and has been incredible in his role as Accounting Assistant. He has a number of responsibilities related to WMF expenses, credit card and bank reconciliations, and updating our general ledger. We both want him to work more at Word Made Flesh but funding is an issue.
As you know, full-time Word Made Flesh staff members must raise their own support. Since most of Jose's family is in Mexico, you can imagine that it is incredibly difficult for Jose to raise his own salary. As he's mentioned to me, there is difficulty generally in Hispanic culture to raise support, both because it's so unusual culturally, but also because he is working in the US.
We are trying to be creative about raising support for Jose. If you would consider sending in support for Jose for salary, please designate that for Jose Garcia. We would hope to have several people start giving monthly in order to help.
Thank you for your continuing support for me as well; this helps keep me at WMF.
Lots of love,
Brent