I struggled over this title. To Christians these four words conjure up a scene, a song, a promise so deep that there can be only one meaning. Yet I learned about something new last week that brings another beautiful color to its significance.
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I recently came across shoeboxes of letters from summer weeks long ago full of thoughts and stories and photos for keepsake. These particular notes were from Russian and Ukrainian orphans, my teenage peers at the time, anticipating the beginning of the school year, or First Bell as they call it in Russia.
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There's a big, a big hard sun Beating on the big people In the big hard world
— Eddie Vedder, Big Hard Sun (Originally by Indio), Into the Wild Soundtrack
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“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Matthew 22:37–39 Have you ever been blessed with the gift of good neighbors?
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“What are we going to do?” It was the first question I asked Doug Patterson when I met with him a little over a year ago to discuss joining the Orphan’s Tree team he was leading to Ivanovo in May 2013.I thought it was a perfectly natural question. After all, weren’t “mission trips” all about doing something? Weren’t we supposed to build things, fix things, provide things to help the people we were going to see?
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Pure and faultless religion is defined as looking out for widows and orphans in their time of distress. The orphans we meet in Russia need to see human love modeled for them, in personal and practical ways, to comprehend the vast love God has for them.
Read MoreIf there was one overriding thing I took out of the experience, it was a deeper appreciation for the idea that people are people, no matter where they are.
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