give hope to the hopeless?

i have been struggling with this whole concept of giving away hope… i am surrounded by a nation that is completely hopeless. a nation that is slowly disappearing. it is one of the most beautiful places, full of mountains and nature, yet the people are dying. they have no hope for today let alone for the future.

it is easy to give hope to one person. to bring joy into someone’s life for one day, one moment. but how do you change an entire nation? how do you turn things around so that they can have a hope and a future; when the future doesn’t even look like it will exist? when people don’t expect to live until they are thirty. they are living only for today. how do you do that? how do you change a nation?

there can really be only one answer ~ a relationship with the one and only God, Jesus Christ. nothing else has worked, and nothing else will. it’s not about my ‘religion’ or my culture, because those things havn’t worked, people have tried. it is only people truely coming into a relationship with the Lord, where they know His word and can hear His voice. we need to stop telling people and start showing people. it’s not about converts, it’s about true disciples – brothers and sisters. it’s about helping meet their needs of today, giving them the tools and knowledge to be able to provide for themselves so that they can live the kind of full and happy life that God wants for them for eternity, not just today.

it’s time to start changing our own cultures. it’s time to pick up the good from what we’ve learned from our cultures, and leave behind the rest. it is time to have a ‘Kingdom Culture’. to have a culture that is worthy of the name that we carry. . . for we are to be the living example of Christ.