A Year in Review
The body is a whole of many parts and I continue to seek out everything hidden in that truth - thank you for being the hands, the feet, the eyes, ears and breath. Here is what we exercised with that shared body in 2021…
Dry Bones Rise
At the end of October, a select group of leaders who have graduated from our Full Armor Leaders Course gathered in Southern California as the core fitness leadership team for a Beautifully Flawed Foundation event. “Gym Day” was a culmination of a 5-day experience for young men and women with physical disabilities of limb loss or limb differences as a call to action in living out the purpose of their testimony - learning to exercise the power of their confidence and capabilities not despite of, but because of their stories.
A Giving Challenge
Giving Tuesday usually sits at the tail end of the post-thanksgiving campaign craze as a philanthropic effort to inspire "global generosity...unleashing the power of people and organizations to transform their communities and the world," as Wikipedia puts it. Unfortunately by the time we get there, most of us are spent in more ways than one and I think that this is a relevant analogy to many of our lives.
It's Not About Me
My feet are firmly set upon the foundations of this ministry to see a kingdom-vision through. Sometimes it means fixing the leaking pipes, painting the walls or washing the windows. Other times it means bringing in new furniture or adding a mural at the end of the hall. Once in a while it means adding another room or building a mantel.
When (Not) Helping Hurts
I’d recently come back from my first trip to Uganda, Africa and was desperately seeking ways to reconcile the shock I experienced in the contrast of cultures upon my return home. Africa wasn’t the first place I had ever experienced third-world poverty, but it would become my last.
Friends of Bethany
The Friends of Bethany annual retreat is about a union and reunion of young women with amputations or limb differences who are made whole in their identity, bonded by faith and made strong in community, fitness and surf.
GIVE Aloha: The Keala Foundation
The Keala Foundation in Kauai, Hawaii are doing something. And they’re doing something... big.
The locals may not be especially keen to tourists, but that's because they're used to having more taken from them than given. And yet even as a guest, the positive vibes of the community are hard to miss. Life is a little slower, interaction and connection are respected and the honor of aloha is more a sensation of the waves than a postcard greeting. You learn that if you give aloha, you'll get aloha.
And yet...
Kauai has a major drug problem.
The Sandbag Advantage: Why Training with a Sandbag is Good for Your Soul
Lifting, carrying and moving with odd-objects is natural to our human nature. For most of human history we have carried logs, stones and the fruit of our labor and have evolved thus far. Yet somehow in this evolution, we have also become so far separated from even ourselves - we have made so efficient the manners of forward progress that we've stopped doing the hard things ourselves. Doing hard things is not easy, but it is simple.