…Or How an Unemployed, Fat Guy Thought It’d be a Good Idea to Bike Cross-Country for Kenya
Joe’s right. Words are not enough.
Once, long ago, words bore the power to inspire change. Now, inspiration is a category of greeting cards and change is a campaign mantra.
We have a need to feel empathy and we fulfill that need in 2 hour increments with movies like The Blind Side or Blood Diamond. We throw away our popcorn and go back to our homes with no intent of living any differently.
In Blood Diamond, Solomon Vandy asks the reporter (regarding her article), ”So when people in your country read it, they will come help, yes?” She says, “Probably not.”
Words are not enough and yet I believe in stories. Sometimes, I think our response to stories is what makes them true. A true story is so even without our proper reaction except that no argument will persuade us to believe a thing we’ve determined to ignore.
The world is wrecked but is that the whole story? I don’t think so.
In the past, I’ve been so overwhelmed by the devastation that I averted my eyes. In doing so, I missed the point. Hope grew distant but I am tired of being hopeless.
My hope is in Christ. My prayer is the same one that He taught His first disciples, “Our Father in heaven hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as in heaven.”
But words are not enough. To pray that and not be moved in some tangible way to benefit Jesus’ least of these is to pray in vain. It offends the heart of God.
Realizing this has motivated me to sign-on for a crazy adventure. This summer I, along with 17 others, will bike 3,100 miles from San Diego to Myrtle Beach to raise money to build water wells, latrines, and clinics in Marsabit, Kenya.
I’m a lazy 250 pound guy who gets lost in Wal-Mart and has been unemployed for a year now. Why am I doing this? Because words are not enough.
For more information and to give go to http://www.ridewelltour.org.
A note from Joe: I’ve never met Chase Livingston, but we’ve got some mutual friends. He is a native of Alabama and graduate of the Baptist College of Florida where he met my future New Orleans Seminary next-door neighbor, Jeff Watkins. Since he is raising funds for the Ride:Well Tour, I asked Chase to contribute a guest post to Words Are Not Enough. You can donate at the link above or by clicking here. Chase lives in Jackson, Tennessee and you can find him on Twitter or at his blog.
A note from Joe: I’ve known Amy Nicholson since our first class together at NOBTS in January 2005. She’s one of my most trusted friends, and I was thrilled when she was appointed as a missionary in Vienna, Austria. As part of a series of guest posts my friends are writing for Words Are Not Enough, Amy offers new lessons from the last year in Vienna. She writes on her blog 
Today 
Drowsy poet would be DPCC…any connection???
“Perhaps the contrast between spiritual and human reality can be made most clear in the following observation: within the spiritual community there is never, nor in any way, any “immediate” of one to another, whereas human community expresses a profound, elemental, human desire for community, for immediate contact with other human souls, just as in the flesh there is the urge for physical merger with other flesh. Such desire of the human soul seeks a complete fusion of I and Thou, whether this occur in the union of love or, what after all is the same thing, in the forcing of another person into one’s sphere of power and influence. Here is where the humanly strong person is in his element, securing for himself the admiration, the love, or the fear of the weak. Here human ties, suggestions, and bonds are everything, and in the immediate community of souls we have reflected the distorted image of everything that is originally and solely peculiar to community mediated through Christ.
by Joe Kennedy
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