In Christ alone, my hope is found. . .

A few years ago Eric Moe was leading contemporary worship at Wellshire, as well as leading the youth praise band that lead worship with the youth group every Sunday night. He started rotating "In Christ Alone" through the song list. I loved this song as we sang it each week. Then this Sunday, the handbell choir at Wellshire played an amazing arrangement of the hymn "In Christ Alone." The music was glorious, and it got me thinking about the lyrics too.

I did some research, thinking that this was an old hymn set to a more modern score. As it turns out it was written in 2002 by a guy named Stuart Townend: "Stuart Townend is a British Christian worship leader and writer of hymns and contemporary worship music. His songs include "In Christ Alone" (2002, cowritten with Keith Getty[1]), "

A common and sometimes accurate criticism of contemporary worship songs is that they are very repetitive and not very profound. That is true many times, but not in this case. These guys really knocked it out of the park with this song, rivaling any old hymn in depth of message.

The lyrics for this hymn are below and below that is a video of the Newsboys version of the song. I encourage you to read through the lyrics as a prayer of hope and thanksgiving. Stop and pause as you read, really reflect on them. Then if you want, listen to the song and continue to meditate on the lyrics. This is some powerful stuff!

In Christ alone my hope is found
He is my light, my strength, my song
This Cornerstone, this solid ground
Firm through the fiercest drought and storm
What heights of love, what depths of peace
When fears are stilled, when strivings cease
My Comforter, my All in All
Here in the love of Christ I stand

In Christ alone, who took on flesh
Fullness of God in helpless babe
This gift of love and righteousness
Scorned by the ones He came to save
‘Til on that cross as Jesus died
The wrath of God was satisfied
For every sin on Him was laid
Here in the death of Christ I live

There in the ground His body lay
Light of the world by darkness slain
Then bursting forth in glorious Day
Up from the grave He rose again
And as He stands in victory
Sin’s curse has lost its grip on me
For I am His and He is mine
Bought with the precious blood of Christ

No guilt in life, no fear in death
This is the power of Christ in me
From life’s first cry to final breath
Jesus commands my destiny
No power of hell, no scheme of man
Can ever pluck me from His hand
‘til He returns or calls me home
Here in the power of Christ I’ll stand

Another great water org with a very similar message

Yesterday I posted about not getting paralyzed by the scope of the problems we are facing in the world. Today I got an e-mail and a video from another water org that had a very similar message. I really like what they have to say, just at the end, kick over to Healing Waters website instead of the one that they suggest. :)

Enjoy!

"I've been reading a lot lately about the psychology of enormous problems. About how people will always rush to save one child but disconnect when faced with helping thousands of children. "One death is a tragedy, a million - a statistic," we're told.

Non-profits like ours that are addressing enormous problems (a billion people without clean water) are told to make sure we don't scare people off by communicating how big the whole problem is.

Author Seth Godin recently wrote that the problem with enormity in marketing is that it doesn't work. He said "Enormity should pull at our heartstrings, but it usually shuts us down. Show us too many sick kids, unfair imprisonments or burned bodies, and you won't get a bigger donation, you'll just get averted eyes."

While all this may be true, it just seems rather boring. Visionless. I believe people want to sign up for something bigger than just one. I did.

There's a proverb in the Bible that says, "Where there is no vision, the people perish." People are certainly dying all around us, but could that be because we're terrified to tackle the enormous? Because we don't have the faith to see the entire problem solved?

I can't quite see to a billion people yet, but I'm getting closer.

So in the spirit of solving enormous problems, we want to step it up this September, and serve more people. Then keep going until every single person on the planet has clean and safe drinking water.

We shot a video that explains how we want to do that through the 2009 September campaign. Please watch it, share it and act."

Overwhelmed, paralyzed, what can I do?

The title of this post captures the sentiment that I have felt at times about issues of social justice, global poverty, starvation, the water crisis and other tough stuff that tugs at my heart strings.

There are so many issues out there, that we can be paralyzed into inaction because we are so overwhelmed by the amount of saddness and suffering around us.

But know that you can make a difference, even little you. In your tiny corner of the world, you can make a difference. I use the starfish parable a lot to describe this:

One morning an elderly man was walking on a beach. A high tide the night before had washed thousands of starfish up on the beach. Now that the tide was back out and the sun was coming up, the starfish were dying in the sun. He came upon a boy surrounded by thousands and thousands of starfish. As eagerly as he could, the youngster was picking them up one at a time and throwing them back into the ocean.

Puzzled, the older man looked at the young boy and asked, "Little boy, what are you doing?"

The youth responded without looking up, "I'm trying to save these starfish, sir."

The old man chuckled aloud, and queried, "Son, there are thousands of starfish and only one of you. What difference can you make?"

Holding a starfish in his hand, the boy turned to the man and, gently tossing the starfish into the water, said, "It will make a difference to that one!"

Find your starfish in your own little corner of the world. For me, it is safe drinking water in Latin America. For my wife, it is teaching in urban schools. For a friend of mine, it is working in soup kitchens and homeless shelters on her time off. Each one of us knows we can't fix all the world's problems, but we each work in our own corner of the world "making a difference to that one."

The video below has a cool spin on this too (and is also pretty critical of "reality TV" which is one of my pet peeves):

Great ministry in Guatemala

This is a photo of me, Mario (Healing Waters

Regional Director for Guatemala and Mexico)

Brock and Kerrie of Deepstream Guatemala

ministries and Claro, a Guatemalan who is having

a house built for him by Brock and Kerrie's ministry.

When I was in Guatemala back in October I met a family that had just moved there to work as missionaries. They have an amazing story and I have mentioned them in my blog before. You can read a little bit about them here:

The Johnson's are Brock, Kerrie, Madi (11), Brooke (10), and Jake (7). God called us to Guatemala to help those whose needs are far greater than our own.

Our eyes have been opened to true poverty, suffering children, and desperate need - which has changed us to the core.

Living in Guatemala has been a wild faith journey thus far. Arriving here without a "ministry plan", we have simply been zeroed in on following the voice of Jesus.

You can read a brief summary about our calling to Guatemala, or a series of blog postings where we have shared our last year or so.

When I returned to Guatemala in March with a group from Wellshire Presbyterian church, I visited the family again, this time with my whole group, and saw some of the projects they are working on. I continue to be impressed with their ministry, not a typical "missionary" model, really trying to get in to the community where they work and meet the most basic needs of the people, letting the love of Christ shine through their actions.

This is a photo of the group from Wellshire church

praying with Brock and his family in the community

of Buena Vista where they work building houses and

changing lives.

They have put together a short video that highlights their work and I want to share it with you:

Jumping on the Susan Boyle Bandwagon

Ok, so I know I am a little bit behind the times here, finally blogging about Susan Boyle. I had actually bookmarked the video on YouTube more than two weeks ago, but just didn't feel inspired to write a blog post about it. For those of you who don't know what I am talking about, watch the video above.

At the most basic level, I love the musical Les Miserables and enjoy the music from it when it is sung well. So I enjoyed the peformance for that reason, but that certainly wasn't enough to insipire a blog post and it wasn't what everyone else was talking about either.

There was the surface level analysis of the performance "the ultimate don't judge a book by its cover" statement that I could have made. But that seemed a little trite and cliché, more CNN.com stuff than bloga de gregorio stuff.

So I sat on the video and thought about it some more, looking for inspiration. As it turned out, the pastors at my church have incorporated the Susan Boyle story in to their sermons for the past three weeks. On Sunday morning, pastor Pattie Kitchen talked about it again and even showed the video for those who hadn't seen it. It was her sermon and analysis that finally inspired me to post something about this.

So much in this world and in our lives centers around striving for acceptance. We don't want to be laughed at, made fun of, mocked, or disrespected. We want to be accepted and feel loved.

This is a nearly universal human desire, to feel accepted and loved. And we have all struggled with it, some more than others. I have no doubt that Susan Boyle has had her share of struggle wanting to feel accepted or loved.

Seeing the way the crowd initially reacts to her when she comes on stage made me sick to my stomach. It brought back flashbacks of awkward and painful moments in high school. Somehow I was relating to a 48 year old woman in Britain on a very basic level. Susan Boyle and I had something in common, we had both been treated unfairly by people who didn't even know us. People made assumptions about us based on appearance or on one or two things we had said without caring enough to get to know who we really are.

And then, the glorious redemption! As soon as she opens her mouth and begins singing, the crowd cheers for her and is brought to tears. A standing ovation follows! But why did it take an angelic voice for people to treat Susan Boyle with basic respect and dignity?

Dig deep here, think about yourself, the way that you treat and interact with people, strangers, or people who you have only exchanged a few words with. Now reflect on your faith and what accepting the love of Jesus calls you to do and defines how you should treat people.

I hope and pray that the Susan Boyle example can impact the way that you treat people. Be the person that God created you to be and let the love of Jesus shine through you, especially in how you treat other people.

Short Healing Waters International video - Powerful Message

I have used this quote in a previous posting, and found that someone had incorporated it into a cool video for Healing Waters:

"Preach the gospel at all times, and when necessary use words." -St. Francis of Assisi

This really exemplifies the work that Healing Waters does. We set up most of our water projects in churches in developing countries. We then empower the church to run the water project. They use the tool of safe drinking water to affect physical, social and spiritual transformation in their communities, without saying a word. That is the most powerful way for the church to impact lives, by providing a basic need to the people. Check out the video:

One more video. . . a little racy but good message about water

This is the last video in the series about the global drinking water crisis. . . for now. If I stumble across some more I will post them too. Enjoy!

Another great water video - Brought to you by Compassion International

I don't know how many of you are familiar with Compassion International. It is one of the "child sponsorship" organizations. For $32 per month, you can help provide a child education, health, personal development and spiritual growth.

As an organization, Compassion focuses on the "spiritual growth" piece of their mission directly, and they do it well. They outsource the education and health pieces to organizations that can help them with those parts of their mission. That is where the relationship between Compassion International and Healing Waters International comes in.

One of the key aspects of providing health care and education to children is a source of safe drinking water. Without safe drinking water, kids become sick (health) and miss school due to their illness (education.) Compassion partners with Healing Waters to install water purification systems in the Compassion Childhood Development centers. 18 of our 68 systems are installed in Compassion centers, providing a free source of safe drinking water to the kids while they are at the center and a source of safe drinking water to their families while the kids are at home!

Healing Waters loves its partnership with Compassion International, and we hope to continue to grow and build that partnership over time. In fact, the next water system that we install in Mexico will be at a Compassion center and will actually serve four additional Compassion centers in the area through a system of safe drinking water deposits. Really cool stuff!

Compassion put together the video below to illustrate the drinking water problem. . . enjoy!

Another fun water related video - THE STINK GOES ON!

I have started collecting these videos about the global water crisis and its impact, so I am going to keep sharing them with you!

Another fun video about Safe Drinking Water!

Anyone remember the "Slip 'n Slide" and the "Crocodile Mile" lawn toys? We had a lot of fun with these when I was growing up on the few summer days in Flagstaff when the temperature would go higher than 80 degrees!

The video below uses the old "Crocodile Mile" commercial to illustrate an important issue about safe drinking water and the 1.1 BILLION people that lack access to safe drinking water in the world.

"Hey mate, what do you do when you see a crocodile. . . you run, you slide, you hit the bump and take a dive BUT WATCH OUT FOR THOSE CROCS!" Watch out for unsafe drinking water too!

Fun and Informative Videos about the global drinking water crisis

I am going to post some videos over the next few days/weeks that deal with the global drinking water crisis. (I apologize to those of you who are viewing the blog over a dial-up internet connection.)

There are a lot of phenomenal organizations out there doing work with safe drinking water in developing countries, including Healing Waters International, the organization that I work for. So I am going to start the video collection with a Healing Waters video.

This was a fun promotional video we put together a few years back for a conference we were attending. We built an outhouse and put a video screen in the toilet. So imagine yourself opening the door to an outhouse and peering down in to the toilet and seeing this video playing back at you. Enjoy!



The text/script for the video is below. You can watch the video a few times to get the message, or just check out the text below:
Something you probably didn’t know:

If a community has access to tap water it is considered to have an improved water supply, making these communities overlooked for aid because they already have an “improved” water supply; but the water is all too often contaminated.

According to UNICEF and the World Health Organization, Over 3 million people (mostly children) die each year from water related illness.

Bottled water is too expensive for the poorest people so they drink bad water.

Healing Waters doesn’t just provide a source of water, we make it clean.

We work with churches to help them serve their communities to make water affordable for everyone.

So now that you know, what can you do?

Take the H2Oath:
Learn about the Issue
Do something to help
Tell others about it

Powerful Video

My mother-in-law sent me this video today. It moved me to tears. If you have 7 minutes, take a look. Here is a synopsis of the video:
This film is about the hunger and poverty brought about by Globalization. There are 10,000 people dying everyday due to hunger and malnutrition. This short film shows a forgotten portion of the society. The people who lives on the refuse of men to survive. What is inspiring is the hope and spirituality that never left these people.

Food insecurity, malnutrition and starvation go hand in hand with lack of access to safe drinking water. Let's all work together to try and solve these problems.

View this movie at cultureunplugged.com

Healing Waters International on 9News last week, Welcome back Wellshire and some light-hearted stuff

Greetings to everyone! The whole group from Wellshire made it back safely on Saturday and Sunday after an incredibly fulfilling trip to Guatemala.

If you want to read about our trip, all the blog posts are below. If you want to do it chronologically, scroll down to the post from Sunday March 22 entitled: Wellshire Group In Guatemala! Post 1 from Saturday, 3/21. Then you can read up from there:
Wellshire group in Guatemala: Post 2 from 3/22/09
Wellshire Group in Guatemala: Post 3 from 3/23/09
Wellshire Group in Guatemala: Post 4 from 3/24/09
Wellshire Group in Guatemala: Post 5 from 3/25/09
Wellshire Group in Guatemala: Post 6 from 3/26 and 3/27

Or you can just read straight down and learn about the trip from the last day to the first, totally up to you. Trying to appease both linear and non-linear thinkers. :)

While we were in Guatemala, the UN celebrated World Water Day, which is a day designed to raise awareness around the issues of the 1.1 Billion people that lack access to safe drinking water. We got some very positive news coverage from a few local TV stations here in Denver including 9News, our NBC affiliate. Below is the video:



If the video doesn't come up in the blog, you can also access it and an article on the 9News website here:
http://www.9news.com/life/programming/shows/mornings/article.aspx?storyid=112223&catid=229

We also were interviewed by 7 News, and I will post that video when I get it.

If you are passionate about the cause of safe drinking water and believe that Healing Waters International is doing good work to address it, please consider becoming a monthly donor. Every little bit helps, and every $50 that is donated provides a person access to safe drinking water FOR LIFE! That's right, not just for a year or five years, $50 provides access to water for LIFE! You can click on the button below to donate, it will take you straight to our eTapestry donation page.



If you still have more questions about Healing Waters before you are ready to make that commitment, feel free to e-mail me: Greg Allen-Pickett or visit our website at http://www.healingwatersintl.org/

Finally, I wanted to share a fun, light-hearted video with everyone after all this serious water stuff. On our trip we had various levels of Spanish speakers, and it was a real joy watching people speaking in Spanish, trying the phrases they knew, and building relationships with Guatemalans.

As a part-time Spanish professor, I tried to share my insight, knowledge and tips. One of the people on the trip told me about this video, which is absolutely hilarious. For anyone who has ever taken a foreign language class and remembers their experience and the vocabulary from that class, this video perfectly captures it. The video is called "The one semester of Spanish - Spanish love song." It uses all the phrases that you learn in your first semester of Spanish to try to win over the heart of a lovely lady. . . ENJOY!

Wellshire Group in Guatemala: Post 4 from 3/24/09

Tuesday was another day full of service and ministry for the Wellshire group. Our purpose here is two-fold: to do some projects that help the community through Habitat for Humanity and Healing Waters International and to build relationships and solidarity with the people of Guatemala. Today we had the opportunity to do a lot of both!

We started out the morning going to one of the Healing Waters International systems in Chimaltenango to learn how the water systems work. To learn more about our water systems, how they work, and the work of Healing Waters International, you can view this video.



We took a photo of the whole group in front of the system before splitting in to our two work teams to go to our worksites.

One team returned to the public high school where we had been working and painting the day before. We started off the morning with a basketball game between some members of our group and some Guatemalan high school students and teachers. This was an opportunity to not only play some hoops, but also build relationships with the Guatemalan people. We were able to break down some of the cultural barriers between the two groups through basketball, shattering our own stereotypes of Latinos and Hispanics, and hopefully changing the Guatemalans’ stereotypes of Americans.

Basketball game photos

This is a photo of Brian Lays taking a break from painting to interact with some kids at the school, building relationships.

Once the game was over we went right back to work painting. The church in Chimaltenango that has the Healing Waters system helped coordinate this community service opportunity for our group. The great thing was that they also worked side by side with us as you can see in this photo. Members of the church came along side members of the Wellshire group and worked together to repaint the school.

Terri Kipple painting with two "hermanos de la iglesia" (Brothers from the church)

The team that was on the Habitat site was also hard at work building a house and building authentic relationships with the Guatemalan people. As I said in an earlier post, the recipient of the house is Esther, and today she was at the worksite with her family. You can see her daughters and granddaughter in the photos below.

Hannah Johnson blowing bubbles for the grandaugther of Esther, the person receiving the Habitat house

A group photo of the Wellshire work team with Esther and her family

Intergenerational ministry with our youngest and oldest team members working on the Habitat build site.

Our fearless Guatemalan based leaders, Daniela Rosales from Healing Waters and Casey Leo from Habitat for Humanity

Lunch today was a very special experience. We had the opportunity to eat in the home of a family that is a beneficiary of the Healing Waters system. We got to see them prepare a traditional Guatemalan meal and then they served us in their home. We left lunch with full bellies and warm hearts after such a delicious meal and such a unique opportunity to eat in the home of a Guatemalan family.

The family serving lunch to our group

The family preparing fresh tortillas for the group

Making Tortillas and smiling!

The group eating lunch at the house

As we left the home and were getting ready to load in to the vans, we had some visitors:

I also took this photo of a girl hiding inside the front door to her house. I saw her and asked her mother if it would be ok to take her photo. She said yes, so I did. . . The people here are so beautiful, outside and in. We have been so warmly received as a group by all of the people we have met. They have opened their homes and their hearts to us, and we will forever be grateful for that experience and for the relationships we are building here.

This is a poignant example of the blend between urban and rural when you see a man walking his cows down the middle of a city street.

After leaving lunch we all went back to the Habitat worksite so that the work team who had been on the site for 2 days could get train the other work team, as we will be switching worksites for the second half of the week.

After that we returned to Antigua, exhausted but happy! Daniela Rosales, the communications coordinator for Healing Waters International in Guatemala taught a salsa lesson in the lobby of our hotel before leaving for dinner. I didn’t post any photos of that at the request of those who were dancing.

It was another great day for the Wellshire group. We have two more days of work. Stay tuned, thanks for following our trip and LET THE CLEAN WATERS FLOW!