Christian

Yemen 🇾🇪

/ Morgan Grace Hart / Leave a comment

Luke 12:33 Sell your possessions and give to the poor. Provide purses for yourselves that will not wear out, a treasure in heaven that will never fail, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys.

https://www.oxfam.org.uk/oxfam-in-action/current-emergencies/yemen/


I don’t usually put much stock in the starving children of the world. There’s too many to ever save them all, they live far away, and frankly, I have my own kids to look after.

This year is different. Because of job loss from Covid-19, funding to humanitarian groups has plummeted. The countries that were already bad off, are now catastrophically bad off.

According to The Guardian, the country of Yemen is currently suffering hunger so badly, that they are in danger of losing an entire generation of children.

Please consider giving. I’m not getting any kickbacks from this; in fact, I don’t care what charity you give to, as long as it’s legitimate. If the currency Listed doesn’t match up with your own, PayPal will automatically convert it for you.

TIA,

Morgan Hart

The Tetragrammaton

/ Morgan Grace Hart / Leave a comment

Verses for thought: Psalm 135:6, Exodus 3:14, Luke 9:24. 

While it may sound like a name for a transformers sequel, the Tetragrammaton is just a fancy name for God. It comes from the Name God speaks to Moses in Exodus 3:14, “I AM WHO I AM” (also translatable as “I WILL BE WHAT I WILL BE”). That name is so holy in Judaism that it is not even spoken, just left as a set of four consonants indicating the word referenced.*

There’s an aspect of God I find very hard to explain, yet feel very affectionate for. I think the closest word I can find for it is stubborn… He WILL be what He will be, He WILL do what He will do. He’s unapologetic, in an age where most people couch their words with apologies and self-deprecation. So many people now open their sentences with phrases like, “with all due respect,” or, “I’m not telling you what to think.” People emphasize that they don’t want to pressure you to feel one way or another, that they want to find a common ground.

God the Father is the opposite. He cares very deeply for you… but He does not give a flip if what He says offends you. He’s not here to nurse your delicate sensibilities or find a way to make His beliefs match your own. In fact, He says that those who do such things are bad for you (2 Tim 4:2-4)

Jesus says we must all carry our cross (Luke 9:23). It’s not a cross thrust on you in punishment, it’s a cross voluntarily accepted in humility, the one we take on our shoulders the day we decide to follow our Savior. I realized a long time ago that, once you decide to become a Christian, the cross you bear every day is exquisitely hand-carved for you by the Person who loves you most in the world. It may not always make sense. But when you understand this, you will never have to fear anything again. 

With Love,

Morgan Hart

*Footnote: Technically this explanation of the Tetragrammaton is an oversimplification, but it would take pages and pages to explain the subtleties of the Hebrew language, why it’s an oversimplification, and more significantly, it wouldn’t change the point being made. 

Social Distancing and the False Narrative of John Allen Chau

/ Morgan Grace Hart / Leave a comment

While we’re in the middle of a plague scare, I want to take a moment to set straight something: John Allen Chau was not the first person to visit the North Sentinel islanders. He was more like the 500th person. People who had interacted with the natives included National Geographic, when they made an entire documentary of them in the 1970’s, or the anthropologists who were photographed exchanging food and gifts with them in the 1990’s, or the government contractor that lived on the island for 18 months and regularly interacted with the natives. Not a conspiracy, the government of India has openly admitted that they discouraged publication of images of peaceful interaction with the natives, over fears that criminals would flee there to avoid prosecution. Chau took extensive measures over the course of a year to vaccinate and self-quarantine — far more, it should be noted, than the government officials who had been visiting the island every year to check on the natives. The press disgraced him post-mortem with lies and exaggerations. Wherever you may stand on Christianity, the man came unarmed, preaching a peaceful message, practiced distancing, and avoided spreading disease. The only life he jeopardized was his own.

This information was gleaned from several sources, but the majority was derived from the Wikipedia entry for the Sentinelese.