Julia Whitaker's Blog
jan newsletter (baby it's cold outside!) / 01.14.10, 05:51 PM
Dear Friends,
I hope that the holidays treated you all well and that you are all off to a great start this New Year. While Christmas vacation was a great blessing to me, it’s is really great to be back in Atlanta. The morning that I left Chicago it was -6 degrees, so stepping of the plane in Atlanta into 34 degree weather seemed pleasantly tropical.
However, 34 degrees is still horrible, even deadly, for many friends with no heat and no housing. To be honest, this obvious reality has become poignant only now that I have spent significant time amongst the homeless and in under resourced buildings. I have always been “thankful” for furnaces in wintertime, but I have spent many winters too self-absorbed to help others without it. So where do we go from here? What if we don’t know anyone living these realities? Here, I have been discovering the hard answers that I have always known. Isaiah 58:6-7 speaks of the Lord’s desire for our fasting.
Isaiah 58:6-7 (NIV)
6 “Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen:
to loose the chains of injustice
and untie the cords of the yoke,
to set the oppressed free
and break every yoke?
7 Is it not to share your food with the hungry
and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter—
when you see the naked, to clothe him,
and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood?
This is a call to fasting. This is a way to choose a full life through inconvenience to self. If we choose to fast we must go out of our usual paths. We must seek out the under resourced, not expect them to come to us asking for help in a world separate from theirs.
This is our reality: “No snowflake in an avalanche ever feels responsible.” -George Burns
Thanks you all so much for your support and prayers that enable and challenge me to learn these lessons.
Love, Lulu (with Amanda, Curtis, Nadine, Josh and Kate)
0 Comments
Leave a Comment...
Read more of Julia Whitaker's Blogs.
