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What moves you to get off your butt and do something?

April 20, 2010 in Mom Matters, VIsion with 0 Comments

What moves you to get off your butt

& do something?

For some disciplined people little things move them to change.

Can you feel my jealous sarcasm already oozing from the screen? Yeah, you know the ones that get on the scale, have gained  1.43 pounds, who suddenly realize they better make a change before it gets any worse!? and then DO IT!!!! This might even be you! I congratulate you  in a confused, envious, what planet were you birthed on, sort of way. :)

That’s not me, in case you didn’t guess. And anyone who knows me would tell you the same (if they had the guts!).

I’m the one that steps on the scale & questions the integrity of the machine. If it says I gained a pound… even 20 pounds, I try to reason it away, “That stupid scale! I knew I should’ve bought a digital one, ‘cuz this one has a mind of its own!” I’m the delusional one that tries on jeans and thinks, “I just know they are making clothes sizes smaller to fit skinny girls with no hips. The cut of the jeans is made for a 12 year old’s body! Darn America’s obsession with a size 2!!!!”  Okay, you get my point. Enough about my self-induced delusions!

What moves YOU to change? Catastrophes? Like Hurricane Katrina or more recently the earthquake in Haiti? To be honest I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t do much to help in these tragedies. I prayed for the people & the volunteers, but it didn’t cause me to make a change or to give in the way that it did many others who sacrificed their time & resources to help.

A few weeks ago, though, something clicked for me, and it wasn’t my mouse. I started researching (keyword: started) topics I’m interested in. I’m interested in all sorts of things like scrapbooking, making money, coming up with lame jokes, cooking, music, movies, planning events, and books. At the moment my favorite fiction books are The Twilight Saga. I know, I know I hear the groans! Can’t help it, it’s an addiction really…

Okay, back to my point. My answer to what moves me is this: Passion. Passion Moves Me. In any form, it stirs my soul when passion is involved, (which actually would explain my Twilight obsession). So, I started researching topics I’m passionate about, not just interested in. That research led me to articles, books, websites, videos of injustice that, in my head I knew was happening, but my heart hadn’t connected. Yet.  I got to a point where my stomach felt sickened and quite frankly I was pissed (yeah, i said it) that I’ve cornered myself into this little bubble of my comfortable life.

Let me stop here & say I really do love my stay-at-home mom life, my family, and I do my best not to take anything for granted. But educating myself on what’s happening in my both my town & across the world brought my life into perspective. I needed to change!!! Not wanted to. I needed to be moved out of my complacency. My heart began to soften & look outward. I need to challenge this Comfortable American Mom {CAM} to do more. I challenge you as well. Here’s the knowledge you NEED to have.

Photo Courtesy of Dan Fellner, www.FellnerTravelInfo.com

We can be a passionate voice for those who can’t speak for themselves – the orphaned children who have been stripped of their families due to the AIDS pandemic in Swaziland.

Swaziland has the highest rate of HIV/AIDS anywhere in the world.

If you are a 15-year-old Swazi, your chance of reaching 30 years old is only 6%.

I read  that by the year 2020, if the death rate continues to soar, there will be

NO ADULTS LEFT in SWAZILAND!!!!

***

We can be a passionate voice for the young women who are being sold, SOLD! into sex trafficking.

In Moldova, a small country in Europe…

There are more than 250 brothels in Chisinau, the capital city.

One of the greatest targets for sex-trafficking are girls

who leave the orphanages.

There are 30,000 women who have literally disappeared in Moldova,

many of them believed to have been captured for the sex trade industry.

Yeah, it’s an industry funded on the

repeated rape

& brutality

of women.

I will be talking about them a lot in this blog. It’s not pretty. It’s ugly. It’s despicable.

Before knowing all this, we could have easily turned aside… NOT NOW!

With knowledge comes a responsibility to make change.

When change comes, chains are broken, and joy abounds!!!!


So this week, go about your days with this new knowledge. IF you let these words & truths pierce your heart, you’ll find yourself thinking about them through this week in some random way. Please take time to pray for these orphans & slaves. And think about how you can get off your butt & do something. And I mean that in the nicest way.

Keep Lovin’ Moms!

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Bloggish? Huh?

April 18, 2010 in Mom Matters, VIsion with 1 Comment

Do you speak Bloggish?


The language of blogging is definitely foreign to me. Not really the writing part. I’ve been journaling for years sometimes with a keyboard but mostly with a pen & paper. It’s the techy part of blogging that feels like a foreign language! Really, I’m supposed to know what  it means to put an RSS feeder on my dashboard (not the car kind) or register a domain name? That kind of mumbo-jumbo has been what’s held me back for a while now from taking the leap in blogdome.

I began to think of avenues in which I could use my voice, my knowledge, as small as it might be. I knew if I could get over the fear of the Bloggish language, blogging could be a lifeline of communicating the needs, within my sphere of influence. Out of this is born the blog, but also a movement.

The Moms4Change Movement.

Four areas of passionate change is what I’ll be encouraging you through.

1. Across Our Hearts - it all starts here, y’all. If my heart doesn’t change, neither will my actions.

2. Across Our Table – from our hearts to our dining table, let your active compassion stir your family as well. Ever seen a kid who humbly serves? I have, and let me tell you, it’s amazing!

3. Across Our Street - as you & your family’s hearts begin to serve each other, your eyes will be opened to real needs that you can meet in your neighborhoods & local schools.

4. Across Our World – this is the movement. A wave of changed hearts, serving one another in communities, begins to flow to other communities, reaching as far as we can to make a difference in someone who’s hope for their very life has been shattered.

Okay, Moms! I know many of you are creating change for your community & world. I wanna hear about it!

You are an inspiration!

Please take a minute or two to tell us what you’re doing.

Let’s spread hope and tangible CHANGE across our hearts to across our world!

Keep Lovin’ Moms!

ps. I’m conquering my fear of Bloggish & it feels wonderful!!! It’s not impossible, after all!

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An Orphan Spirit, Part Two

April 16, 2010 in Across My Heart, Across Our Table, Across Our World, Swaziland with 0 Comments

If you haven’t read my last post, please do so. It is Part One of the story.

For those that have them, this is a typical Swazi home

Redemption. Deliverance. Rescue. Don’t we long for it? God brought redemption to me, a little girl missing her Daddy, in a form I didn’t expect.

My Mom remarried an incredible man, whom I’ll refer to as Lee. Lee, I don’t think could’ve loved me more if I had been his biological daughter.

Seriously. He never once called me his step-daughter. I was his. He was mine. And nobody better say differently! His tender heart softened mine so that I let him into my world and heart. In fact, it was with Lee that I first saw the Save The Children Infomercials on Sunday afternoons.

I kid you not, every single week, every single show he could not keep from crying when he stared into those little black African eyes. His compassion astounded me. He made me realize these are REAL kids. They need food! They need parents! He & my mom gave their support to Save The Children whenever they could. Redemption.

So yeah, I identify with the Orphan Spirit, but even more so I identify with REDEMPTION. I’ve experienced both & I can tell you that through the years, my void of loneliness & fear was replaced by ONE man letting Jesus soften his heart to children – both to me and to children he’d never met.

I want to tell you that I did find & contact Steele when I was in my mid-twenties. Honestly, I can’t even remember how I found him. I wanted him to know I forgave him & I had lived a good life. Ultimately, there was no redemption for me personally. Hopefully there was for him.

It is because I identify with this Orphan Spirit and experienced redemption in my own life that I feel so passionately for the children in Swaziland whom I know have been abandoned and left to themselves. I sense a small measure of their heartache.

And I know there are other moms that can make a difference, whose hearts have been broken, who are willing to be the voice crying out on their behalf, who want to reach across our world to help a child in need of love.

These are  the children who have been orphaned because disease and famine have stolen their parents. Can you imagine being that parent, knowing you are dying, having to leave your little kids to fend for themselves? This happens everyday across our world. Swaziland’s population is currently around 900,000. Of that 900.000, over 150,000 are ORPHANS!

These kids in Swaziland need someone – a Mom – to give them some hope of being loved, adored & cared for. To let them know they ARE worth being loved & they do belong to someone who cares about them. We all may not be able to go to them physically but we can sponsor them, send notes of love and pray for them to know God’s love. One person choosing to love, made all the difference in my life.

God is in the redemption business… and so am I!!!!

Orphans being fed at one of the CarePoints

If you wish to find out more about sponsoring an orphaned child in Swaziland, please email me at danielle.moms4change@gmail.com, or leave me a comment saying you want to help and we’ll find a way!  I know specifically of 3 children who had previously had sponsors who now are in need again.

Keep lovin’ Moms!

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An Orphan Spirit, Part One

April 15, 2010 in Across My Heart, Across Our Table, Mom Matters with 8 Comments

I’ll admit right off that this is a difficult post for me to write. I’m having to dig up some deep emotions

that took root in my heart when I was just a little girl.

What brought this to the forefront is a live streaming webcast of a Colorado Pastor’s sermon I listened to this past Sunday. The crux of his message was answering the question, “Why do people feel like they don’t belong?” This sermon could have went any number of ways and most of us would relate in some fashion or another. His first answer to that question hit me like a ton of bricks. The Orphan Spirit.

The Orphan Spirit is one of the leading reasons people feel like they don’t belong or  ’fit’. I don’t believe it’s literally a ‘spirit’, but a type of individual who struggles as if they were orphaned. There are kids that grew up literally without parents, and are the definition of orphan. Of course, we readily see why an orphan would feel haunted with the thought that they don’t belong or aren’t wanted, after facing the ultimate rejection by the very people who birthed them.

But there’s another kind of orphan, those with the Orphan Spirit. These kids may have had parents physically present at one point, but absent emotionally, never really connecting with their kids. I think it would shock us all if we knew how many kids’ parents never said “I love you”.

I can imagine both sides of this Orphan Spirit. One I don’t have to imagine.

You see, when I was 5 or 6 (details aren’t clear), my birth father (whom I’ll refer to as Steele) & mother divorced because of their volatile and violent relationship. My mother did her best to take care of me and my older brother, while trying to keep food on the table, after Steele left. He left her and us with nothing. He took everything, including the heart of his little girl who could not figure out why on earth Daddy would forget all about her. He never called. He never contacted me. All the birthdays & holidays came & went without anything. Honestly, as far as I knew, he could be dead. And to help myself cope with it, I often pretended he was dead.

Most of what I knew of him could be found on my birth certificate.

Today, as I’m writing this, is Steele’s birthday. It brought up some emotions in me that I thought I’d dealt with. The truth is at my core I’ve always had a fear that everyone else in my life that said they cared would eventually leave too – my mom, my husband, my friends. This has been the deep struggle of my life – that I’m not worth anyone’s time.

I know what it’s like to be rejected by a person that helped give you life. There are many children, like me, who’ve had one or more parents walk away and never look back. We spend our lives overcoming that “Orphan Spirit” of fear & abandonment. Moms ~ maybe you know exactly what I’m talking about. This could be your story. You now are a parent who feels so much love for your child you could never imagine doing to them what was done to you.

Yeah, I know that as a kid I couldn’t have seen all that was going on in my parent’s marriage or the real reason Steele left. But that’s just it, kids don’t know. So what do they do? They think it’s because they did something wrong. They weren’t good enough. They didn’t love Daddy/Mommy enough. They were in the way. They spend their life trying to measure up.

I like to end my posts on a positive note… and I will. This is Part One of the post. In Part Two I share the redemptive side of the story. No, Steele never came back to make our family complete. This redemption story is so much bigger than that…

An Orphan Spirit, Part Two

 

Keep lovin’ Moms!

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Repairer of the Broken Walls

April 13, 2010 in Across My Heart, Across Our Street, Across Our Table, Across Our World, VIsion with 0 Comments

If you spend yourself on behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed…..then the Lord will guide you always, and satisfy your needs…..You will be called Repairer of Broken Walls, and Restorer of Streets with Dwellings. Isaiah 59: 10-12

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Jesus in Disguise

April 12, 2010 in Across My Heart, Across Our Street, Across Our Table, Across Our World, Mom Matters with 8 Comments

Who do you surround yourself with?

Matthew 25:40 says, ‘And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’ Jesus surrounded Himself with ‘the least of these’. He gave them hope, He esteemed them highly, He even HUNG OUT with them – the beggars, the drunkards, the prostitutes, the tax collectors! But he didn’t just hang out with them, He served them!

Who is the ‘least of these’ in your life? He didn’t have to find out their life history to see if they deserved his time & efforts. No, he just served them as if they were kings.

So did Mother Teresa.

“The dying, the crippled, the mentally ill, the unwanted, the unloved — they are Jesus in disguise… Through the poor people I have an opportunity to be 24 hours a day with Jesus. Every AIDS victim is Jesus in a pitiful disguise; Jesus is in everyone… [AIDS sufferers are] children of God [who] have been created for greater things.”

This was startling to me. What a revelation of truth.

That filthy mess of a man dressed in ragged clothing that stands on the side of the exit ramp, holding a sign “WILL WORK FOR FOOD”. He is Jesus in disguise.

That little 10-year-old Swazi girl who has lost her entire family to AIDS, who has no one to care for her, who has little hope of living past her 30th birthday, she is Jesus in disguise.

Let’s bring this closer to home.

Your beautiful newborn baby girl, fresh from heaven, is Jesus in disguise. Serve her with joy.

Your teenage son’s friend who hangs around WAY too much & could be a much better influence on your son, is Jesus in disguise. Serve him with kindness.

That little old lady, who can barely see over the steering wheel, driving 38 miles per hour in a 55mph speed zone, is Jesus in disguise. Serve her with patience.

Serve your baby girl, that teenage boy, that little old white-haired lady with fresh eyes today. They just might be – no – they ARE Jesus in disguise. Serve them with joy, patience, and love. Jesus will thank you!

Look for Jesus today. He’s all around you!

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Making a Difference

April 8, 2010 in Across My Heart, Across Our Street, Across Our Table, Across Our World, VIsion with 0 Comments

Needs.

Everywhere we look, both inward & outward, there are needs.

Answers.com has several definitons of the word ‘need’ that I’d like to share with you. Stay with me, I have a profound point!

  1. a condition or situation in which something is required or wanted: crops in need for affection.
  2. something required or wanted; a requisite: “Those of us who led the charge for these women’s issues… shared a common vision in the needs of women” (Olympia Snowe)
  3. Necessity; obligation: There is no need for you to go.
  4. A condition of poverty or misfortune: The family is in dire need.


To get to my point, the fourth definition is the need I’m referring to. While the first three are true, let’s discuss what I feel is the deepest definition of the word ‘need’.

For me, blogging is born out of need. My own, but more importantly my awareness of others’ needs. Do I need to make a difference? Not for my own self-righteousness. But do others need me to make a difference? Yes. Those that are in the condition of poverty or misfortune NEED someone to speak on their behalf. They NEED a voice to bring awareness to their NEED.

Ultimately I believe this is why Jesus came, because He knew we NEEDed a Savior to bridge the deep cavern that separated us from God. He sacrificed His own desires, His own needs of comfort, His own needs of security and well being to meet the NEEDS of the poor & brokenhearted that have no hope.

I really don’t want to over spiritualize this, but I do think it’s worth stating that Jesus is still meeting the needs of the poor & destitute. How is He doing this? Through us. Through people willing to tell the truth of what is happening to others in our world. Awareness is my goal. I believe awareness is the conduit towards change & fulfillment of needs.

I want (and dare say I have a need!) to be the change & inspire change in four main areas.

Across my Heart

Some days, I’ll be honest, I feel as though I’m just taking up space, just the shadow that follows my family around cleaning up after them & getting them to school on time. Do you ever feel that way? I keep thinking, wasn’t I created for more than this? Of course being a Mom is my highest calling & I’ll never want otherwise. I’m just saying that I can do more locally & globally to make an impact. Not only can I DO more, I can BE more. I want my heart & my children’s hearts not only to feel sympathy for those in need, but to break, to truly empathize with such active compassion that no amount of self-interest will stop us from helping them. My heart longs to bless & pour hope into the world - my world. I encourage you to keep serving your family, and perhaps serve them even more diligently by showing them a greater world with needs that we can meet. When we leave this world, let’s pass the legacy torch of pro-active, joy-filled servitude to our children’s generation.

Across our Table

As a Mom, I am keenly aware of my boys need for a mom to take care of them. Not just their physical needs like cooking & cleaning & clothing, but also their need to be nurtured. I’ll admit that it feels like 95% of my time is spent on their physical needs being met, but this doesn’t make their need for love & acceptance any less important. God has put an innate desire in children to be loved & nurtured, to be wanted. I’m so glad I’m a Mom!

Have you ever had the thought or even said, “If my kids only knew how good they have it…” I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve said that to my boys, “You do NOT know how good you have it!” If that is the case, then let’s show them what to do with all that good they have! Let’s teach our kids to be GIVERS!!!! Yeah, kids are selfish by nature, but they have tender hearts (somewhere along the road to adulthood, our hearts can lose their tenderness, if not cultivated). Yes, let US cultivate our children’s hearts by showing them that there are needs all around us & all over the world. Let’s bring them on this journey with us, allowing other people to speak into their lives, let them SEE the needs & BE APART of serving the needs.

Across our Street

Do your kids know that there are very likely students in their class that go to bed without dinner on a regular basis, simply because their parents can not afford it? Do they also know that they can make a difference & bring about change for that classmate? One great way to do this I believe is to inspire the older kids, junior & senior high to help out in their local elementary schools. And once you see these pre-teens & teens in action, you can’t help but be inspired yourself. In February, our local 5th graders put together a Food Drive for the entire Elementary School. They worked so hard & inspired over 1,700 pounds of food to be donated by CHILDREN for our local Food Shelf. Amazing! Let’s find out the needs in our neighborhoods, our kids schools & inspire our kids to bring about change across the street & in our community.

Across our World

I’ll say it again. God has put an innate desire in children to be loved & nurtured, to be wanted. This statement rings just as true when it comes to children that you & I have never met who live several thousand miles away from us. These children are in the condition of poverty & misfortune. They have physical needs that I want to bring awareness to, but also need to be loved, to know someone cares about them. As a Mom, I’m sure your heart aches to know any child is alone in this world. Many have lost both parents and siblings to AIDS and other preventable diseases. What are these kids to do when there is no one to take care of them, to show them how to survive, to provide food and clothing, to hug & kiss them? They still need MOMMIES!!! Fortunately there are ministries in Africa who are working day & night to meet the needs of these children, some with whom I’ll be connecting with on my blog. But more Moms Making a Difference are needed, more funding is needed, more awareness NEEDs to be brought. So lets start to do our part!

Passion ignites passion. I’m determined to make a passionate difference in the world & inspire Moms who read this blog to make a passionate difference in the lives you touch as well. Moms – I’m sounding a Call to Active Compassion! Let’s begin the journey!

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