Counting People

is not the same as making people count, counting on people or being the kind of person people can count on.

Sameness

God’s highest hope for each of us is to find and stay in an intimate, unique, and completely fulfilling relationship with Him. It’s not His idea for us to walk the path of everyone else. Different is good.

The world is countering God’s plan with sameness. We’re becoming franchise humanity with no tolerance for anyone unlike ourselves and will soon be herded into one of only two crowds; it’ll be them and us. Much of the church today is playing right along with this plan.

Our answer has to be personal. Our intimacy with the Lord will result in an outpouring of love on individuals, persons that are different than we are and our goal can’t be to make them just like us.

Persons

We’re all called to the ministry of persons, individuals, families and small groups of folks we can know intimately, care deeply for and do life with, that’s the great commandment. We really mess things up when we decide to minister to people, large groups that we can plug into the system or run through our programs. Too often the great commission of going into the entire world subverts the commandment to love because we assume the enormity of the world is on our shoulders, so we must do it big, when all God’s asking for, is us to help Him one person at a time.

People Matter

More than anything! God values people above all else, in fact all of creation is for us. So why do we put so many other things ahead of the people in our lives? Let’s not let the day end having neglected the persons around us and if we did then let’s not tomorrow.

Who Matters to Me

“One of the ways I make things matter to me is to move from merely learning about something to finding a way to engage it on my own terms. For example, if someone asks what I think about capital punishment, instead of reciting the party line and parroting someone else’s thoughts, I think of a teenager named Kevin in prison in Uganda who has been accused of a capital crime. If the topic is same-sex attraction, I think of a dear friend of mine who is gay. Now instead of talking about an issue, I’m talking about a person, someone who matters to me. I think that Jesus wired us that way so that we’d remember. And it’s not about just being politically correct; it’s about being actually correct. We need to make our faith our very own love story.” – Bob Goff, Love Does