For more insight into Advent Conspiracy listen to the podcast HERE.

This Christmas I’m joining a movement with Christianity called Advent Conspiracy.  Advent Conspiracy is a new way to engage the season of Advent and Christmas itself.  Rather than getting caught up in a consumer-driven mindset for Christmas that is fueled by captialism Christians all over the world are rethinking Christmas and the way we celebrate it.  We are choosing to honor the birth of Jesus by spending less money on gifts (and asking for less in return) and instead of buying motorized tie-racks that will quickly be forgotten we are putting money into clean water projects throughout the world.

Just under 4,000 people die every single day because they do not have access to clean drinking water.  Experts say that it would take 10 billion dollars to solve this crisis and make sure that everyone had access to clean safe drinking water.  And every year Americans spend 450 billion dollars on Christmas.  We feel like there’s something just not right about that.

So I encourage you to spend less on Christmas this year, give more money to clean water projects (like Living Water International), and give more presence to your loved ones this year.  Celebrate the birth of Jesus by saving someone’s life this year.

For years I’ve wanted to travel to Africa.  It probably began towards the end of high school and beginning of college.  That was right around the time that I began to open up to God’s call for me to the ministry.  It was also about the time that my cousin Tiffani graduated from college and promptly moved from Chicago to Nairobi, Kenya to work as a librarian.  Her stories over the years of life in Africa, the adventures she had and the closeness to God she experienced there all deepened my desire to go to Africa.

In college I began to read books like Richard J. Foster’s Freedom of Simplicity and a number of Henri Nouwen’s books that were challenging the culture of busyness and consumption that I was (and remain) immersed in.  For some reason Africa became the place in my mind where a Christian could finally be free of the over-scheduled life of busyness and by necessity would have to live simply rather than by greed and consumerism.  Both then and now I longed for more stillness in my life, for a life of sustainability rather than one full of cool stuff.  Africa was a beacon, it was there I thought, that I would finally learn these lessons and following Jesus in these radical ways would just become easier.

In my later years in college I began to discover Jesus’ heart for the poor, and God’s call for his people to stand for justice in this world.  This compounded the mythical power of Africa in my imagination.  Africa was a place where God would be more present simply because of the poverty and injustice there.  And so I longed to visit Africa so that I might meet God in a new and more powerful way than is possible for a privileged kid with a Masters degree in America.

But when I went to Africa God was the same.

And that made me think.  It made me think that instead of internalizing God’s heart for the poor, I might have used it as justification for feeling distant from God.  And if that was the case then feeling distant from God probably had a lot more to do with me not paying attention and not spending enough time in prayer than it did with my surroundings.  I still wish I could embrace a life with more simplicity, I still long for more silence and prayer in my life and less scheduling and busyness.  But right now I’m thankful that God helped me to deconstruct yet another mythical place where being a Christian is somehow easier and reminded me that it’s not about where you are, it’s about who you’re becoming, whose voice you’re listening to.  Because even in Africa, God still speaks in the still small whisper and even in Africa following Jesus still takes a lot of faith.

This is the video I put together talking a little bit about our trip to Malawi and what we were trying to do in our visit.