I have a heart friend named David Arcos. Every time we’re together, this one-of-a-kind worshipper of God makes my heart sing. He helps me to celebrate the creative spirit, and he inspires me with his passion to serve orphans in Zambia. David is attempting to do the impossible. He lives with a God-sized dream of rebuilding a village for orphans whose lives have been decimated. As David talks about these children, his soul is alive with hope. As you read, allow your heart to be drawn into what he sees …
Running to Stand On Mountains
By David Arcos
The shouting. I think I’m gonna miss that the most. The desperate, heart-felt, thankful shouting to God coming from the throats of orphans. They remember what life was like. Rachel said it best when she compared her life in the partly built children’s village with her living hell just a year ago, “We were the parents and now we are the babies.” Children were handed children to care for while their parents died.
Peddling sex was the only way for many of these girls to make an existence. Now they sing about being rescued … home-spun poetic tunes call to memory their stories of redemption. They are still children, and yet have endured more than a lifetimes worth of pain. Challenge and struggle has aged them. Crying is a luxury they are learning to experience again.
A young boy named Joseph described to me how his grandfather, a family shaman, would “drown him in his dreams” before Bishop and Busa Ted stopped the shaman with the power of prayer.
Joseph shouts to heaven with the passion for life. He runs with no shoes on the rugged earth. These orphans, together, trained to run a race that we hoped would gain them the completion of their village with a school, clinic, church, and a future.
And why not?
Why couldn’t 30 orphans who had already been immersed in hell stand up, turn around and prove to the nations that with the power of God pulsing in their veins, nothing can hinder them from running, sprinting, lasting, pursuing, seeking, struggling, rising, and soaring into an impossible future. Their shouts are heard. They drift across the Atlantic. Their strength makes us believe. In the middle of all that darkness, Africa is being stirred by a shout of the fury of faith. This shout fills the sky. It is a declaration of victory, an assertion that they know where they’ve come from and who they are. May our soft prayers turn to shouting too! Why not?
“Sing to Him a new song; play skillfully, and shout for joy!” Psalm 33:3
To help support orphans in Zambia, please contact David Arcos.
Today I sifted through some nostalgic papers and photos my mom kept when she was still alive on this earth. I came across this ode to the Creator, written by my uncle Dave, who also wrote the hit song “Wildflower.” This is one of those rare poems that deserves to be relished; ever so slowly, like a hot drink on a windy night as rain batters the window.
The Beneficiary
By Dave Richardson
Will I ever be entitled to the knowledge that you hold?
For I thirst and I am starving in my mind,
And though I am secure within the future of my soul,
There are histories my heart has yet to find.
How did it all begin, from the void you live within?
Through eternities where none but you exist,
From an endless parallel You joined the lines of Cause and Will,
Creating life from out of the abyss.
You alone have been where time itself cannot survive,
And I long to see beyond the edge of space,
I’d like to look at Heaven through the vision in your eyes,
Or look upon the wisdom on your face.
When did you decide that it was time to cut the key,
That unlocked all the darkness to the light?
Did you breathe upon some spark floating through infinity,
To set the skies on fire in the night?
There are birds with eyes of fire lighting diamonds in the sky,
As the blaze above continues to expand,
With ever changing hues in reds and greens and blues,
In perfection from the Artist’s gentle hand.
I am mortal. Life will end, but I shall live to live again,
If I am favored whatsoever in your sight,
Give me time enough to live to enjoy the gifts you give,
And finally, let me shine within your light.
Let my shadow fly through your vast and endless sky,
That I might see the future and the past,
And when this captive life is through, I will come to realize
That my spirit and my soul are free at last.
By David Arcos
GUEST CONTRIBUTER to FaithActivators
We are eternal ripples of hope. We are road signs for the wanderer. We are those that weapon ourselves with brush and baton with bow and camera. We are the poets that splash images of beauty and breath. Like rescue workers we carve through fallen mines, dispelling glory so that darkness will not consume our friends.
Gleams of light, flickers of promise.
We are image makers, window washers, we are storytellers whose riddle and moral triumphs death itself. We are prophets speaking color and shade, language of divinity. We tickle, prod and pull through eyes of needles. We woo a planet of pain with mirrors and play. We dance on tears and tongues until they cry mercy! Crowd, audience, mob we trap them all by spirit and prop. In defiance the human heart like a stallion stands untouched and untamed. Emotion is his name and we, masters of the ride, approach undaunted, resolved to meet our calling. We are the few that ride him, for we were created to. And with harnessed strength we steer him into the invisible land of hope.
We create and tape heaven to earth. We frame our reels for the blind watchers and waiters. We make sense, awaken souls with peep holes, and mysteries. We are seers. Who Xerox originals from the very dreams of God. We live for the seeker, the looker, the peeker.
We bleed and our paint can is full.
We cry and our songs illuminate old screams and memorized yearnings. We are life amplified and questioned. We are faith on canvas. We bind up wounds with pictures and pull drowners with black notes. We are fierce with imagination. Hunting souls like hidden treasure chests. We travel worlds to find just the right key. We are the reminder to this earth that God plays. We are ARTISTs and we are eternal ripples of hope.
Apostle Paul stood in the Areopagus and said that God arranges our lives so that we will seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being. I have good news for you. The One who created you is within reach. Perhaps God has even been gently tapping on the front door of your soul. Today his voice is heard. He says, “My child, I have imagined your beautiful face and loved you since before creation. I have created you to live and move and have your being in ME.”
Come along with us into the Kingdom of Light. Wander through the halls of Hebrews eleven. We will reach out to the God of Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, and Daniel. Their God was unconfined. He was in their faces. He was their Creator God, and he was intimately infused into every aspect of their consciousness. He was their strength, their vision, their hope, and their reason for getting out of bed every morning. Because they lived with an activated faith rather than a passive acknowledgment of a distant God, their lives were characterized by movement, courage, compassion, a willingness to suffer, and a radical obedience to the lover of their souls.
Faith activators are people whose intimacy with God surges into every aspect of their lives. Because God lives in them, they find the courage to create something beautiful where there was once darkness, fear, and confusion. Faith activators are those rare and remarkable people who build, shape, innovate, color, design and compose the music of life out of the silence around them. In the place of darkness, they build a city on a hill. In the echoes of despair, they rise up with hope. Where there is illiteracy, the faith activators design solutions and people learn how to read. When thirsty people call out for water, faith activators find a way for them to drink. Where there are gangs killing each other in the streets, faith activators are peace creators. Like a heat seeking missile, the faith activator searches out ways to carry the hope of Jesus to their world.
The faith activator is a woman who one day wakes up and realizes that fifteen years ago she made the biggest mistake of her life when she said I do to the laziest, most insensitive and selfish slouch on the face of the earth. She acknowledges that her marriage is so pathetic and miserable that she would almost die if it weren’t for their beautiful children. Then, instead of retreating into her own passive dream world, or having an affair, she creates a strategy. She finds a way to take action. She discovers that she has an imagination that is capable of designing 99 paths toward hope. She ventures deep into the world of belief. She digs down deep to find the courage and faith to become the wife that her Creator had in mind.
Faith activators sleep peacefully. They wake up to their dreams rather than from them. The faith activator is the leader who is entrusted with a dying organization. Four years later that organization has been recreated into a fountain of hope, an alliance of united people who trample injustice. The faith activator is the executive who returns home from an exhausting day at work and notices that the trash needs to be taken out. He walks to the trash, picks it up, and carries it outside without even blinking. The faith activator is the couple who is told by their fertilization specialist that they are incapable of having children. Twenty one months later they are holding their precious and beautiful Korean daughter in their arms.
All of these people share more in common than most of us realize. They don’t shrink back in the face of resistance. They each acknowledge their challenges and respond to them with courage, using their magnificent minds that their Creator planted within them to strategize and implement solutions.
Here at FaithActivators.com, Mike and I are two neophytes in a quest to live a real faith, a faith that unites us with a real God who lives and breathes and moves and works his miracles in real time. No question about it, we are a couple of freshmen in this course of faith. But come, Lord, breathe in us. Give us the aroma of Christ. We desire to be your voices of hope, life, and light in our generation. And we simply want to invite anyone to join us in this quest. Spirit of God, breathe eternal wind into our souls; awaken our minds. Ignite our lives with your blazing fire.
Let’s embark on a journey that brings us face to face with choices. How will we choose to think? What will we choose to believe? How will we respond? This journey will demand our rebirth, transformation, and awakening, as God gently confronts some widely held mind habits that religious people tend to cling to. They are mind habits that render us pathetic, spoiled children without nuance, depth or imagination. We will increasingly grasp the correlation between our Pharisaical strongholds and the scarcity of creativity in the cavernous echo chambers of religion. These strongholds are safety handles that impede us from rising into God’s creativity to propel hope and life into a lost and desperate world.
Along the way we will taste of a moving love story. That is, the story of our Creator and His immeasurable love for his masterpieces. We have always heard that God is Love. It is time to step forward into this dizzying dimension. We are going to reach out into the universe of the Creator’s love, sinking down to the roots of our souls. My prayer is that you and I become rooted and established in love, that we will have the power to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge, that we may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God! (Eph.3:17-19)
When Cyndi and I arrived in Southeast Asia eleven years ago, our family was battered by a relentless wave of medical difficulties, especially with our children. Ten month old Josiah was the hardest hit. After the first few months we stopped counting the times his fevers would soar to 105F while we were up through the night trying to cool his body with cold towels.
Two year old Katie Skye’s eye problem started quietly. It seeped into our lives like the early signs of a flood. She was having difficulty seeing straight. Cyndi and I remember her saying “I see two mommies.” We felt powerless to help her as her sparkling eyes grew increasingly crossed. Her condition was known as “bilateral strabismus.” I imagined our little daughter moving through a lifelong journey of enduring pity or of people looking quickly away.
Katie’s need became more urgent with each passing week. Cyndi and I tried to find help. We knocked on every door that might possibly lead to a solution. We searched throughout our city for an eye doctor. Then we went for help to the bigger coastal city of Surabaya, then on to the capital city of Jakarta. For months we struggled to locate a solution. Every Indonesian doctor prescribed the same meaningless eye exercises that we had long since realized were useless. She urgently needed surgery.
One day everything changed. Cyndi’s uncle, who was a practicing eye doctor in Afghanistan, found a listing of international ophthalmologists and recommended a Dr. Cheong in Singapore who might be able to help. Cyndi and Katie flew to Singapore and went to see Dr. Cheong.
After a quick examination she spoke the most beautiful seven words, “I can do the surgery tomorrow morning.” The next day she snipped two muscles between Katie’s eyes. Immediately her eyes turned outwards. Cyndi later said it was a terrifying moment. Yet within a few hours Katie’s eyes had corrected themselves to perfection. If you look at her now, you would never suspect that she had severely crossed eyes as a little girl.
I was in awe of Dr. Cheong, and I realized something I had never thought about before regarding physicians. These are unique people who walk among us. How much money would it take to equal the price they must endure to make it through medical school and residency? The answer is obvious. You just can’t put a price on something like that.
Every single moment since Katie’s surgery, our family’s life has been quietly changed. We live in a different reality than the reality we would have lived without a physician. Since then, doctors have helped me recover from malaria and dengue fever. A doctor repaired my collar bone that had been broken into five pieces. Our family and countless others owe these men and women a debt that can never be paid back. While so many people drift through life passively ignoring others in desperate circumstances around us, people like Dr. Cheong are swimming upstream, blazing a trail of hope, and living with the strength and resolve to dedicate themselves on behalf of others.
In our thank you note to Dr. Cheong, Cyndi and I expressed our gratitude to her, for her willingness to endure thousands of hours of disciplined study so that she might someday work miracles for other peoples’ children. For my family, anyone who serves in the medical field is a hero, and this is one reason that at our school we have a special track for students who want to become doctors, nurses or scientists who work in medical research.
“Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the Kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness.” (Matthew 9:35)
READING IN TODAY’S NEWS, One of the 29 people trapped in a New Zealand coal mine is a teenage boy who’d only been on the job for an hour when an explosion rocked the mine.
Joseph Dunbar had celebrated his 17th birthday last Thursday, according to news reports from New Zealand.
His mother, Philippa Timms, told the New Zealand Harold that she and her son had recently moved to the area on New Zealand’s southern island to get a fresh start in life.
"We moved here for Joseph, to give him a different life, a better life," the Herald quoted her as saying. Her son’s top goal soon became getting a job at the mine, she said.
Can you imagine? The boy moves to a new place to get a fresh start, and after ONE HOUR on the job, he gets trapped in a mine?
Over the last year, while speaking to various audiences, I have often shared a prayer God has given me to say over my family every morning. Although it is very simple, something about this prayer has resonated in many people’s hearts. It is inevitable that someone will ask me to repeat it after almost every time I mention it.
PRAYER FOR MY FAMILY
Lord, we don’t know what’s going to happen to us today.
Today might be a beautiful, restful day.
Or today might hold some challenges.
Someone might criticize us today. Someone may gossip about us. We may face an accident or an unexpected loss.
Yet, regardless of what happens today, we commit ourselves to trusting you in all circumstances.
And we simply ask for your help, that you would:
Give us your eyes to see the world around us as you see it.
Strengthen our hands to serve others.
Infuse our hearts with your passionate love.
And open our souls to listen to your voice,
So that we might speak your words.
My friend, Pastor Gary Bowman in Chula Vista, sent me this beautiful prayer from Thomas Merton:
THE DESIRE TO PLEASE GOD
I have no idea where I am going.
I do not see the road ahead of me.
I cannot know for certain where it will end.
Nor do I really know myself.
And the fact that I think I am following Your will
does not mean that I am actually doing so.
But I believe that the desire to please you
does in fact please you.
And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing.
I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire,
the desire to please you.
And I know that if I do this,
you will lead me by the right road,
though I may know nothing about it.
Therefore I will trust you all-ways.
Though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death,
I will not fear.
For you are forever with me.
And you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
Mount Merapi, a volcano located in Central Java, erupted Tuesday and has killed at least 39 people in the last week. Another 74 have been injured and 71,000 have been evacuated.
I want to ask for your prayers on behalf of Mike, who is my partner blogger here on FaithActivators. Mike is a part of a group of responders who have left for Mount Merapi. The team includes medical personnel as well as others who will serve kids in IDP camps. They have amassed supplies to take to those who have been displaced. The place where they plan to stay for the next three nights has 4 inches of volcanic ash on the ground. Mike writes, “Pray for health and for us to be a superb blessing for whoever is in front of us, as well as making connections with other organizations.”
FLAGSTAFF, AZ. Someday when my hands are trembling so that I can’t even manage to wipe the drool off my chin, and I am left alone with nothing but my memories, I will know that my life moved no further than the summation of my dreams.
My life’s work has given me a chance to look into the eyes of thousands of people, to consider their expressions, to notice their choices, and to listen to their worldviews. I am a voyager on a quest to figure out how and why certain people break through the emptiness and confusion of their circumstances into a thriving life replete with creative freedom. I pray to understand the prime activators of creative freedom, the internal thinking processes that are owned by those who catalyze their dreams from their imaginations into existence.
Last night our family had dinner with Ginny, who spent the summer of 2009 with us in Indonesia. I wrote about Ginny in my book A Certain Risk. This 20 year old represents to me the hope of her generation. She’s had a rough year, but she is faithful. She reminds me that all great dreams are challenged by an impossible obstruction, and this is where many dreams wither up and die. The rarest of dreamers finds the courage to turn inward, where from the depths of the soul, she cries out to God for help.
This is precisely where my little sister Ginny is today.
Ginny will discover that without fail, God knows and hears the cry of her soul. God is transforming her into a storm chaser. Through the thunderous squall, she is learning to thrive in a crystalline awareness of the quiet presence of the Spirit. Faith is becoming her steadfast new reality even as clouds burst over the rampaging, turbulence of her life. In every direction she turns, grace will abound. Her experience of prayer will never be the same. She will find herself exulting in an intrepid journey that leads from one miracle to another.
We are now finally seeing signs that the movement of Jesus is crouching and poised to unleash the most powerful generation of visionary dreamers into human history. There is a longing in their eyes for something deeper. All over this nation, I hear them talking about audacious dreams. This gets me jazzed up for the future. We are being purified. I wonder if Christianity has ever been so poised to rise up and soar.
It is hard for me to fathom why we hear so many pessimistic comments about young people these days. Granted, we have chided them for the panic in their eyes during any moment they are stranded between hotspots. But to their astonishing credit, many of them have shaken off the slumber and are rising from the fog. Their greatest challenge will be to master the art of activating their dreams. They will need to shift their beautiful imaginations into gear and find the will to infuse their dreams into the world beyond cyberspace; the real world where cynical hearts and unbelieving minds wait anxiously to wage war against them. They will need to forge the mind patterns and heart attitudes that will help them dream for the impossible, then chase down those dreams and exist within them. They must live with increasing clarity. Life is a day shorter every night. They must desire to seize the divinely appointed moments God places before them, and to redeem whatever time they have left. The stakes are much too high for us to waste opportunities perpetuating the cycles of irrelevance. We must focus our efforts on what counts, learning to “discern what is best.” (Philippians 1:10)
Ginny, you inspire me. You will know what it is like to experience the creative power of the Spirit of Christ rising from within you, awakening dreams within you, advancing through your life and changing the world you live in. Your dreams will persist, even on the winds of resistance, advancing boldly and effectively into defiant zones of oppression. Rise up today, filled with hope and certainty that God is unleashing his kingdom through you.
BEYOND DESPERATE, SHE WAS FOUND BY HOPE
Earlier today, I walked with my ten year old son Stephen through the National Gallery of Art here in Washington DC. I was amazed at Stephen's ability to feel the art, and to easily identify which pieces touched him and why. Both of us were mesmerized by a certain painting by Andrew Wyth. It is called "Wind From the Sea." (Your computer screen does not do this masterpiece justice.) This work of art swept us away to another place, and made us feel as if the salty breeze were actually fluttering the curtain. The painting portrays a fresh wind, and this imagery reminded me of my friend Maizah, whose husband Eldat is pastoring a church in the Meratus Mountains of Borneo. She tells one of the most amazing stories I've ever ever heard.
WHEN MAIZAH WAS twenty-one years old, she couldn’t tolerate her boyfriend’s jealous tantrums any longer. She worked up the courage to sever the relationship. Heartbroken, he melted into tears on her doorstep, incessantly begging for her to change her mind. Eventually he dried his eyes and shrank away from her front door. Within days, his internal darkness rose up and replaced his pain with furious rage. After threatening her life in a hot rage, he eventually calmed down and settled for cold revenge. He went to the village shaman and paid him to invoke a demonic spell against her.
Maizah was defenseless against the invasion. The horde slithered into her soul, infecting every aspect of her consciousness. The demons carried her down through the shadow layers of cynicism into unimaginable despair. Her soul felt asthmatic, as if it were wheezing for oxygen. Days and nights were filled with thoughts of suicide. Maizah languished under this cloud of depression for three years. She repeatedly went to her religious leader for help. His only answer was that she should wash herself with the ceremonial water in the basement of the mosque, then turn in the direction of a distant city and pray five times every day. Maizah discovered that the rituals of religion were useless to her.
One day, a man walked into the salon where Maizah was working as a stylist. As her scissors snipped his hair, he talked excitedly about something going on at his church later that night. Then he turned around to face her and invited her to come. Maizah had never been inside a church. When she spent time with joyful, smiling friends she almost always found her heart seething with hatred—and she detested those who called themselves Christians. She had walked past churches and found herself loathing the singing that she heard. Their freedom of spirit was nauseous. Around Christians, Maizah felt like the walking dead.
Now she was desperate. That evening, Maizah went straight from work to the address the man had written down. Trying not to be noticed, she gingerly walked in and found an empty chair in the back row. As she watched the people in front of her, her heart swung back and forth. One moment she was sure it was all fake and this was just another empty religion that was powerless to help her. The next minute she felt mysteriously drawn in.
Suddenly she saw a man walking down the center aisle of the church directly toward her. She looked around nervously and tried not to panic. She felt the urge to get up and run out of the door. Before she could decide what to do he was standing next to her. He said, “For over three years now you have been under the spell of a shaman. Christ will set you free tonight.” Suddenly she felt as if she were the only person in the room.
“I don’t believe you.”
He spoke gently, “Let me pray for you. Christ will set you free.”
She answered again, “I don’t believe you.”
“He invites you to believe in him. He wants to wash your soul clean and set you free. He wants you to follow him and him only.” By then the man’s wife was standing next to Maizah and she reached out her right hand and touched Maizah’s head. She folded her left hand around Maizah’s shoulder and gave her a gentle hug. The woman then began to pray that the Spirit of God would enter Maizah’s soul and set her free.
Maizah’s thoughts swam. Everything around her was spinning. After a few minutes, she groaned, “God, please help me!” Then she suddenly gasped. The gates of her heart were swinging wide open, letting in a refreshing breeze. The breath of life swept through her soul. She blacked out and began falling, then moments later she opened her eyes. The man and his wife were helping her up. Maizah began to weep loudly.
All the way home, she wept. Even as she collapsed into her bed, she continued weeping until she cried herself to sleep. The next morning when Maizah woke up, she could see beauty for the first time. The world around her was filled with joyful, radiant colors. She could hardly open her eyes without weeping. Every few minutes, Maizah broke down into tears, and this continued for three more days. At her salon, the four other stylists Maizah worked with were taken by surprise. Amazed by the sudden changes in her life, each of them surrendered her soul to Christ within the week.
The sparkling tears in Maizah’s eyes as she shared her story with me was a refreshing reminder that the Creator lives! To this day, Maizah’s life is undeniably and miraculously transformed. The same Spirit who once hovered over the primordial abyss spoke words of life into the void in her soul, filling her with light and transforming her into a new creation. Maizah avows that she is a completely new person today, thanks to our Creator who is passionate about making all things new. His compassions are new every morning. (Lamentations 3:23) He puts a new song in our mouths. (Psalm 40:3) He has made a new covenant and written a New Testament. He offers us a new birth and he calls us into a new hope. (I Peter 1:3) He is the maker of a new and living way. (Hebrews 10:20) “The old has gone; the new has come!” (II Cor. 5:17) In the new Heavens and the new Earth, Jesus will sit on his throne and still proclaim, “I am making everything new!” (Rev. 21:5)
Our family has been part of a conference at Faith Bible Church in Cincinnati. Yesterday, we drove up to Goshen, Indiana. I had the most amazing run through a path in the forest. The leaves are turning all kinds of amazing colors, and it felt like the beauty of Autumn was carrying me along. Today, I drove over to South Bend and spent a few minutes being interviewed on the Harvest Show. http://www.harvest-tv.com/video/dsp_playshow.cfm?showid=810 It takes a few minutes before I show up on the set. I bet you can tell I was nervous!
Blessings,
Paul
