Adventures WorldRace SethBarnes Sponsorship Giving

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Its June of 2010 and we are now of debt and we are halfway through studying the book of Luke with our friends. It is here that our story really begins to turn into this crazy whirlwind of events, challenging books, and great discussions with friends. Around this time that God really began to draw our attention to that fact that all of our worldly goals were ultimately shallow and hallow. In Luke two passages that I had always written off as not applying to me suddenly seemed extremely relevant. The first passage is Luke 12: 16-21. It is here that Jesus tells the parable of a rich man that finds himself with an abundant harvest. To put this is mathematical terms, abundant harvest = $$$. So this unnamed rich man decides that he will store his wealth and “take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.” Then in the parable God calls out this rich man and tells him that the storing and saving of his earthly excess will do him no good when he dies. I used to think that this verse didn’t apply to me because I regularly gave to my church. Through our Bible study and other readings, which I will mention later, I began to see that God’s issue with the rich man was that he had excess and was storing that excess to save only for himself rather than share it with others. Sure, Amanda and I would give to our church while we drove our BMW’s and lived in a big house in the suburbs, but this verse greatly contradicted that plan. How could we live in such excess while people around the world were dying from not having clean water?

The other passage in Luke that rocked my upper-middle class world was Luke 18:18-30. This was very hotly discussed verse in our study. It is here that Jesus comes across a rich young ruler (I am rich, I am young) and this guy asks what he has to do in order to enter heaven, and he also tells Jesus that he has followed the 10 commandments exactly. Jesus replies by telling the young man that he still needs to do one more thing in order to love Jesus wholly. Jesus tells the young man to sell everything and to follow him, that’s it. The young rich ruler then becomes quite sad because he had quite a lot of possessions. I couldn’t believe how I suddenly related to this verse. Taking this passage and combining its message with that of the previous passage I began to see that God did not desire for Amanda and I to pursue our own personal wealth.

Since it was summer I finally had some time to start reading again and I just finished Don Miller’s book called “A Million Miles in a Thousand Years”. It is here that Miller talks about envisioning our lives as movie. What kind of story do we want to tell, what type of story would be a blockbuster? I concluded that story about a guy who gets married, gets out of debt, acquires a descent amount of wealth, and then retires at age 50 would be a movie that would skip theaters and go straight to DVD if I was lucky. Lame.

I was in search of another good book and began asking friends for some recommendations. Ryan a very well read friend recommended I read Shane Claiborn's book Irresistible Revolution. Wow, what a book. It was in the book that new perspective and attention was brought to Matthew 25:31-36. In this set of verses Jesus calls us to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and care for the alien, stranger. The first thing that I noticed was that no where does Jesus commend anyone for saving up a lot of money, retiring early, driving an expensive car and giving some money to a charitable organization here and there. After reading Irresistible Revolution which invited readers into a new way of life by living more simply I picked up “Crazy Love” by Francis Chan which had been given to me a year earlier by my Grandma. Guess what, Crazy Love, basically hit the same main points that Irresistible Revolution did. Things were starting to get really weird. Did God really want Amanda to truly abandon our American dreams? I still struggled to accept that.