Here's my delimma, and is stupid really, but it is my dilemma nonetheless.
I don't want to be annoying.
Realtalk: we all know that missionary who posts like 7000000 tweets, blogs, Facebook statuses, and the like. They go to anyone and everyone they have ever met and guilt them into giving a few bucks to their cause regardless of the holy spirits movement on the givers heart (because let's talk about how guilt and conviction are different, but let's do it at a later date).
Personally, I can't stand that.
I have a hard time understating that God wants you to be obnoxious and annoying in order to raise your necessary funds.
In my mind, as long as you're following God's calling in your life, other people will see that, catch hold of the vision, and they won't be able to help but desire involvement with their Father's work. Because I believe in clichés like, "If he called you to it, He'll see you through it". Why do I believe in those clichés? Because I believe God is who he says he is in his word.
When his word tells us he is a provider, I believe it.
When his word tells us he's a sustainer, I believe it.
When he says he is the author and the finisher, man oh man do I believe it.
Makes sense right?
But some of the wise and Godly counsel in my life don't seem to agree 100%. These mentor's and leaders believe that many of God's "followers" actually love the American Dream, their comfortability, or their money more than they do the Father.
Yeah, I know it is as crazy to you as it is to me, right?
So these people in my life that provide me with wise and Godly counsel, they say that in order to raise this huge sum of money, $15,500 to be more precise, I will have to get annoying. They say this is my calling and that most American Christians can't be bothered to help support my calling because they are to focused on worldly, not Kingdom things.
I hate that.
I think it's absolute bull. Because I honestly, genuinely believe that God is too big for anyone to be too concerned with this world when they have a chance to get on board with something Elohim himself is doing in the nations!
I believe that it is correct in Hebrews 11 when it says that you are longing not for this country, but for a better one–that you long for the Kingdom. I believe that Christians really live like they're aliens or foreigners in this world; that we live like citizens of the Kingdom. And I believe that as cities of the Kingdom, we Christians know that we are called to live in community, supporting one another, praying together, confessing our sins daily, and giving to one another as they have need, as the Bible demonstrates in Acts.
I believe that is how citizens of the Kingdom act. (They ACT like how Christians did in the work book of ACTS)
I recently was reading a book about ancient samurai wisdom… Because I'm a nerd… and it told this story of a man
who came from a rural village to a large city to become a samurai. When he became a samurai, he went back to his home in the rural village to visit, but he was run out of town for being disgraceful. See, in the few years he spent in the big city studying the way of the samurai, he had lost his rural accent. His fellow villagers saw this as disgraceful because, to them, it meant he was not proud enough of his heritage to persevere in their traditions. The villagers understood it as though that man was sacrificing his true identity in order to become a citizen of the big city. This sort of fakery was considered to be most shameful.
The samurai wisdom derived from this story is to focus twice as much on your heritage when you are away from home.
Christians, this is a challenge, not only to you but also to me, to focus twice as much on our true identity, our Kingdom heritage, while we are away from the Kingdom.
Let's ACT right–according to the customs of our homeland.
