Quote of the Week

We must be global Christians with a global vision because our God is a global God.
- John Stott

I just came back from spending a weekend volunteering at a Rotary Youth Exchange conference. Rotary International, the largest volunteer organization in the world, seeks to bring community leaders together in order to better their communities and the world. Nearly all towns around the world have a Rotary club, and they serve many worthy causes. They have a youth exchange program which allows teens ages 15-19 to spend a year studying abroad to learn another language and culture. The goal is that these teens will develop an awareness of the world and be able to think globally for the rest of their lives. I was a Rotary exchange student to Finland in 2003-04 and to Brazil in 2005-06.

This year the Rotary slogan is "Peace Through Service." As I listened to the speakers at this weekend's conference talking about what it means to promote peace, they were quoting the the song "Let there be peace on Earth, and let it begin with me". At first I thought "there will be no peace on Earth so long as there is good and evil, God vs. Satan. So I thought it was a bit naive for them to speak of the topic.

Then from the corner of my brain, I felt God whisper to me a verse  (Matthew 5:9) Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.  

I think that many Christians abandon the idea of peace, because they are resigned to the fact that this world is full of sin and nothing will change that besides the coming of Christ. While this may be true, this does not relieve us of the obligation to be agents of peace  in this world. So as you go through your life, remember to be reaching out into the world around you and to think in terms of peace, because the ENTIRE world is God's.