LOVE 146 with Guest Speaker Rob Morris

It is my privilege and pleasure to introduce you to our guest speaker this morning.

His name is Rob Morris.

He's the founder and director of Love 146.

He'll share more about that.

But just in general, they are an organization globally trying to work to end child trafficking and exploitation and they have several kind of layers and levels of what they do, whether it's prevention, care, aftercare.

They even have a curriculum, a wonderful curriculum that's been written that they're using all.

How many states?

Was it?

32 states, and one of them is Minnesota, and so it's just wonderful.

They're doing actually in our area here in Minnesota, in the Elk River area, and because that too you know, we, many of you know, we had this capital campaign and we voted to take 10% of that money that was raised for the capital campaign and put aside for any organizations or just our presence really in the area of Elk River and surrounding areas and want to partner with local places doing wonderful work in the area, and so the council voted to give them a nice little chunk of money to kind of help what they're doing with this curriculum and even beyond that.

So thank you for all those who gave the campaign.

I know that your money is going to other wonderful works and things as well.

But I met Rob years ago through my time at YWAM, youth of the Mission, and he was a teacher they had come through and he was just beloved by the students and the staff and just a wonderful man, and then he'll share too.

But he began this ministry to kind of end child.

That's their goal to try to end all human trafficking.

It's a wonderfully audacious goal, as you'll hear him talk about it, but he's been invited to come.

He actually was coming through.

He's like, hey, ryan, I love to come by.

And I'm like, yes, we love it.

He came here two years ago and it was wonderful.

So would you please give a warm applause to Rob Morris this morning.

Good morning.

I was reminded the last time I was here it was snowing, so I appreciate the summer weather that you guys welcomed me with Much appreciated.

Yeah, good to be with you on so many different levels.

Always good to see Ryan and his family again and I'm so appreciative of the level of engagement when I was just listening to you guys that are doing the wellness challenge.

That's beyond just taking care of yourself, but it's this double-edged sort of wellness thing.

You're taking care of yourself, which is a great benefit, but also taking care of children by raising funds to do so.

So, yeah, if you haven't signed up to be part of that tread on trafficking, I want to encourage you to do that.

It's super encouraging and Tiffany, my colleague, who is here with me, will tell you that it's really encouraging for us to be around people who are engaging in creative and meaningful ways to do something about an issue that seems at times insurmountable and so big.

So thank you for your support in funding the work that we do.

It's a big deal to us.

It's a big deal to the kids that we work with.

There's a civil rights leader from way back named WEB DuBois who said there is but one coward on earth and that is the coward who dare not know.

And I think for all of us, instinctively, when we hear about really heartbreaking things that are happening in the world or in our own neighborhoods, in our own communities, there's a part of that of us that wants to turn away.

Right, that it's too painful, it's getting too crazy.

We're inundated now with 24-7 access to news all over the world.

Right, years and years ago, I mean, I remember when I was a kid growing up, there was the 11 o'clock news and after the news was over, the TV literally shut down.

They had the star spangled banner and that was it.

There was no TV after that.

Now it's 24-7 news of all the horrific atrocities that are happening throughout the earth and it can become overwhelming to the point where it's just like I just need to turn away.

So I love when I heard this statement you know that there's but one coward on earth it's the coward that dare not know.

I think about you who are engaging with an issue that is as heartbreaking as the trafficking and exploitation of vulnerable children, and saying we want to know is an act of courage.

So thank you for your courage this morning of wanting to know, but then taking it up a notch from just wanting to know to now what is the big question?

Right, and there's a Jewish historian named Yehuda Bauer, and he was talking about the Holocaust, but I think it's applicable to this as well.

He said this he goes I think we should add three new commandments to the existing 10.

And those three new commandments look like one one thou shall not be a victim.

Secondly, thou shall not be a perpetrator.

And then he said thirdly, which is probably the most important of all, thou shalt never, ever be a bystander.

And so it's not enough just to have the courage to know, but then a determination of like I need to do something about this now.

And so that's what this is about.

That's what you practically funding this work, is actually doing something meaningful about it.

Oftentimes, we're asked that question of like well, what else can we do?

We do have a table out back that, if you want to talk with us afterwards, myself and my colleague Tiffany will be there to answer any questions you have.

There's all sorts of ways to get involved.

Our website is a plethora boy I think that's maybe the second time I've ever used that word in my life of resources for you of how to identify issues of trafficking, because it's not always what you think or what the movies portray it to look like.

Oftentimes it's happening in plain sight and we just don't know what to look for.

It's not necessarily the white van and the duct tape type scenario.

Oftentimes it's a gym teacher in a school, or a family member or an older boyfriend or whatever it might look like.

There's a lot of different ways, but being able to identify what it looks like and then what to do about it.

We have resources online safety guides.

Some of you that are parents are concerned.

My kid is spending a lot of time Like what does that look like?

And we have online safety guides also for kids too, of how to stay safe online, because kids put everything out there now and their own vulnerabilities are put out there.

There are those that look for those vulnerabilities and prey on those vulnerabilities.

How many of you are old enough to remember a show and I'm totally giving my age away here A show called Wild Kingdom.

Does anybody remember Wild Kingdom?

Oh my gosh, there's a lot of old people in here.

So when I was a kid growing up, that was the thing.

On Sunday nights we would watch Wild Kingdom and it was followed by Disney.

And I remember as a kid watching Wild Kingdom and I loved that show.

But I remember being terrified at one particular kind of theme that you would see oftentimes on Wild Kingdom where the host, marlon Perkins, in his little safari outfit, would be showing, like this beautiful African plains where you saw these antelope or some sort of deer type creature just peacefully grazing in the plains, and he's like calling attention to, like look at the beautiful antelope grazing in the fields and everything.

And he says, but look closer in the tall grass surrounding the plains.

Right, and I can, even now as I'm saying it, I can remember my little heart started pounding because I knew what was coming right.

And he'd say look closer and you'd see the grass starting to move and, sure enough, there's a predator, a lion, creeping through the grass so slowly so that he wouldn't be noticed, right up to the edge of the clearing where the deer would be grazing.

And then, sure enough, and at Marlon Perkins almost beckon, the lion would bolt out of the grass and go after and the herd.

And here's what's interesting.

And I remember as a kid when I would see that happening like I wanted to yell through the TV to the animal run there's a lion in the grass.

You wanted to warn them because you saw it happening right, and they didn't see what was happening.

They were unaware of the predator that was coming for them.

And here's what's so interesting and I remember this even now that the lion, the predator, would never go after the strongest or the fastest in the herd.

It would always be able to identify the most vulnerable.

It would go after the young who couldn't keep up with the rest of the herd as they bolted off.

It would go after the elderly or the infirm, those that could not.

It was able to identify vulnerability in order to find easy prey.

And the crazy thing in the work that we do, it's the same sort of scenario being able to recognize vulnerability and going after that vulnerability.

The most vulnerable and oftentimes the most vulnerable amongst us are children, and then there's a lot of other vulnerabilities that create more vulnerabilities for children, and so this is the kind of thing, and so if there's an awareness, first, that there are lions in the grass, there are those that are looking for vulnerabilities, and then what to do about it, is absolutely crucial.

So please visit our website.

You can get resources there.

We have some things out on the table.

Get educated we have this thing now that we didn't when we first started the organization called Google that you can get information.

You can learn about the issue now and there's so much information out there.

Then, after getting educated, educate others.

Obviously, give your generosity.

Keeps this work going on a regular basis.

Vocationally, find a way to connect your vocation to the issue.

There's all sorts of ideas that you can explore on that, but engage in some way that's meaningful and we can see this thing change.

So, those of you that are not familiar, we started the organization about 21 years ago as a result of an encounter with the issue.

And here's the reality for most of us, we don't engage with something until somehow it affects our lives.

I remember being really convicted many years ago, as I had this thought when I thought about man is it?

Do we have to have a personal encounter with injustice to really engage?

And I sort of proved the reality of that with my own life.

I didn't care about this and I didn't until I was aware of it and had a personal encounter with it.

Then, all of a sudden, I'm all in and I really felt like God was actually for you to not have a personal encounter with injustice means that you've spent a good deal of your time insulating and isolating yourself against the pain of your neighbors.

Because the reality is that injustice happens all around us day in and day out, and we are sometimes on this path of just trying to insulate ourselves from that kind of pain and God is saying actually, that's not what I want you to do.

I want you to be immersed in it.

I want you to feel what I feel when it comes to oppression and injustice.

But for me it took hearing about this thing happening back to in 2002, not a lot of people were talking about human trafficking then and very quickly.

In a matter of a couple of decades it's become the human rights issue of our time, but back then not a lot of people were.

So I was like what is this?

Me and my friends started learning about it.

We connected with an organization made up of criminal investigators.

They go into these places where children are being sold like commodities and abused.

They basically pose as customers.

They go into places like brothels and everything.

They have undercover surveillance equipment on.

They gather evidence.

They have to do a separate investigation of local law enforcement to weed out those that might be corrupt Because oftentimes you'll find that in this sort of realm and then, once they gather enough evidence, they bring it to local law enforcement that are sympathetic to getting kids out of these situations.

There's a recovery operation.

These kids are brought out of those situations and then they begin their long road of recovery and hopefully back home again to their families.

If their families were not complicit in them being trafficked to begin with because that's often the case Now I just oversimplified for the sake of time an incredibly complex and long process.

But we connected with this organization.

They had at one point they said, if you really want to do something about this and talk about it and you need to see it firsthand and understand it firsthand they invited us to one of their operating centers in a Southeast Asian country.

We got there the particular night that we were there they were actually going in on an investigation operation and they invited us to come with them and we would never recommend an organization do this.

But because of the trust that we had built with them, we were like, yeah, that would be, we'll go in with you.

And I remember that night when they gave us these brief instructions on how to pose as a customer.

By far it was the most disturbing experience of my life, having to pretend to be the very thing in me that is completely repulsed by Right.

And I remember the last thing they told us before we went in.

They said look, if you don't think you can do this, if you don't think you can hold it together, do not come in with us, because if you break character or whatever, you could destroy this investigation.

That had been taking weeks or however long to happen, and we were like no worries until we got in there and we walked into this place.

We found ourselves standing in a room looking through these glass windows.

On the other side of the glass were these girls sitting there in rows of chairs with matching red dresses on it, even having the dignity of a name stripped from them.

They just had numbers pinned to their dresses.

And on this side of the glass, these brothel workers were handing us menus with the numbers of the kids and the services that they could provide.

It was horrific and I remember in that moment I'm standing in a room shoulder to shoulder with predators who were about to purchase some of these children, and I remember the words of that investigator in my head if you don't think, you can hold it together, because everything in me as a father, as a man, as a human being, was struggling to hold it together.

But we could not break character and remember.

The thing that so took my breath away was the looks in the eyes of these kids.

And I don't know if you've ever seen that look of trauma, and perhaps you've experienced trauma yourself, so you understand it.

But these kids were sitting there and they were watching children's cartoons on these little crackling television sets and they just had this motionless gaze just staring into these TV sets waiting literally to be purchased and abused.

And they all had that sort of look, except for one girl.

She was the only one not watching the children's cartoons.

She was staring at us through the glass and I will never forget the look in her eyes.

I don't know what it was, I don't know what, if I was seeing trauma, if I was seeing that fight or flight look in a person's eyes.

I don't know if it was fight or defiance or whatever, but I'll never forget that face.

I'll never forget her number.

Her number was 146.

And so that's sort of like, began our journey and you guys, I think for so many of us.

When we hear about issues, we sometimes dehumanize people by putting them under issues or categories of people.

We talk about the homeless, the poor, the refugees or whatever these big groups that we put people under.

We forget we're talking about human beings here.

In this case, we're talking about somebody's child, somebody's daughter, somebody's son, and even naming the organization.

When we eventually start the organization, naming the organization is to remind us daily that this is not about issues or causes.

This is about human beings, real live people.

The investigation was not complete that night and then, several weeks later, when they went back for more evidence, somebody had already tipped off the brothel managers and the girls had already been removed to another place.

So to this day, it haunts us that we don't know whatever happened to her.

So when we talk about these kinds of things, they're hard, hard things.

And when you think about what all is happening in the world and what we're inundated with day in and day out, what is our responsibility and the mess of all of that, and when you deal with the complexities of injustices, what do we do?

We could feel so easily overwhelmed.

I've had to in the last, I don't know how many years sort of bring my life down to two sort of purposes.

And as I've gotten older, my life has become more and more simplified to the point where literally at night, I have two questions I ask myself every night and the two questions are this did I love well today, and was I about things that matter?

And it's been so freeing to bring my life down to that sort of simplified version.

And when I think about what our requirement is Jesus sort of simplified the whole thing too, and I know we get all into like all the facets of the Christian life and all the facets of God and the theologies and all of that and everything and Jesus is basically everything can be summed up into two things love God and love people, and one thing affects the other thing, right, if we love God, then the outflow of that should be reflected in how we love people, and that's what I wanted to talk about this morning.

You know there's I saw a book years ago at Barnes Noble and it was called Famous Last Words and it was literally the famous last words of famous people before they passed away, the last thing they said on their deathbed, and some of them.

Some of the things were actually very funny.

I and I don't know if you have planned in your head what your famous last words will be.

Most of us don't get that opportunity to plan ahead like that, but there's some of them that were very funny.

Some of them were very poignant, very powerful or whatever, and I had.

I just lost my brother about a little over two months ago or so almost three months now and I remember vividly our last conversation.

I remember vividly his last words.

There's something about those last words a person says before they breathe their last that stick with you.

And what we just read this morning, that text where Jesus is famous last words.

Picture that scene you guys at the last supper.

We call this this is the last time I'm gonna be with you guys and think about all the things.

Jesus knows enough that, whatever I say tonight, these guys are gonna remember forever and will shape the future.

What is he going to pull from?

Here?

You have God in the flesh.

Of all the things that God could leave, that man.

This will be the thing that will stick with them because they will be my last words to them.

What is he gonna come up with?

I mean God, who knows all the mysteries of the universe, who every theology that we've ever created to try to understand knows it all.

He didn't pull from any of that stuff.

Instead of the last thing, what am I going to leave?

That will imprint something on them forever.

He basically says this you guys love each other.

That's it.

That was your last word, because that will be the thing that will stick with you.

And what's interesting is he says this is actually a new commandment.

Talk about getting their attention multiple times.

Hey, this is my last time with you guys.

Okay, you've got our attention right.

If you sat down with your family member and they said, just so, you know, this is the last time I'm gonna be with you, you'd be like attentive, right.

So he's already got their attention with that.

But then he goes and is so bold saying you know the 10 commandments, I'm gonna add one more here.

And so they're like what?

And he's like here, it is Love each other.

Not a suggestion, a commandment Love each other.

So I ask you, are we known by that, especially in America, the American church?

Are we marked by the thing that Jesus said would mark us?

He said he followed up with saying this is what I want you to do with.

This is actually how people will know that you belong to me.

This is going to be the evidence of this faith.

This is going to be the evidence of you being a follower of me.

The evidence would be one thing not the uniform that you wear, not your correct theology, not how you dress or the places you go or don't go, or anything.

He says.

This is going to be the mark, the only people group that would be marked by this.

Followers of Jesus, you will be marked by love, what marks us as the American church.

I think we've become distracted.

I think there's something that has caught our attention, or things that have caught our attention from the main thing being the main thing.

You know, I was with a friend recently and she was just lamenting about the polarization in our culture right now the division, digging trenches, drawing enemy lines and all of that and deciding who's our enemy, who are we going to demonize, who are we going, you know, and all of the stuff that's happened, and the church has joined right into that stuff, and I think we've just become distracted.

And you know, what I think has distracted us is what we call oftentimes the culture wars.

It's one of the things that's distracted us.

We've just become part of this whole thing.

Instead of going with this command and this mandate, we've joined into this whole situation.

And I want to think about distraction.

You're very familiar with Paul, the apostle who wrote to the Galatians about them being distracted, right, he starts the book off and it's about another issue.

But he says you guys, who has distracted you?

Who has bewitched you?

Who has misdirected you?

Back in the day, when I was much younger, I used to do magic shows amateur, like magician type stuff, right, and I used to love doing magic shows for kids way more than doing magic shows for adults, because kids just loved wonder.

Right, kids are kids, are so easily misdirected so that they're just surprised.

They like to be surprised where you.

You know, I've got a dog, I've got my youngest daughter.

I pull quarters out of her ears, right, she's absolutely.

Every time I do it she's still like.

You know, I fear for the day when she goes to try to buy candy at the store or something.

It doesn't howl.

Wait a second and she's.

It's not there.

I don't know what, but I love that sort of like wonder that she just embraces so easily, whereas adults, when you go to a magic show, you go for one purpose to try to figure it out.

You're not there to be mystified or embracing wonder.

You're there like what's he got?

I'm not going to let him misdirect me, because I know how these magicians work.

They're going to do something over here real flashy, but over here they're doing a thing that's going to actually trace this into your.

You're figuring it out, in fact, if you go.

I actually looked it up.

I looked up the word misdirection, because I remember that word being used in magic circles, and it says this misdirection refers to the magician's ability to manipulate people's attention.

I mean, this is intense the magician's ability to manipulate people's attention, thoughts and memory.

What is manipulating our attention, our thoughts and our memory as followers of Jesus?

If Paul were to write a letter, like he did to all of these churches that we have these epistles, these others, what would his letter to the American church look like right now if he were to approach it?

The same thing, saying you guys, who's misdirected you, who has distracted you, who is bewitched you?

I think we've been pulled into something that maybe we need to be really careful of being pulled into.

I think my theory is that I feel like, in oftentimes, if we don't have an enemy to fight, we don't feel a sense of purpose.

When we get up in the morning, but boy, if I have an enemy to fight, I've got it.

It's like all of our movies, all of our books always have the good guy and the bad guy and we've just bought right into that.

And you know what we end up doing.

We end up fighting flesh and blood, which we were warned about right.

Saying man, this is not about fighting flesh and blood.

There are principalities and powers you got to worry about, but flesh and blood, no, no, no.

I'm calling you to love flesh and blood, that's what I'm calling you to, but we end up making flesh and blood our enemy.

Are we more identified by things like anger, fear, cynicism, hate, a need to be right, our political affiliations?

What is our identity?

It's supposed to be love.

Matthew 7, verse 12, says this is what our scriptures come to teach In everything and in every circumstance due to others, as you would have them do to you, and I love that.

Matthew 7:12

He uses the word every and everything here, not in some circumstances or the circumstances that you feel comfortable with.

He's saying in everything.

This is how you should be living your life In every circumstance.

You know it goes on in Romans 12, verse 20 says if your enemy is hungry, boycott him.

Romans 12:20

No, if your enemy is hungry, feed him.

If he's thirsty, give him something to drink.

What would happen if we started treating those that we perceive as other or enemies, those that we have a tendency to demonize?

What if we started to love those people?

What could potentially be transformed in us and in them?

What would happen if we put the same time energy, tenacity and enthusiasm that we invest into fighting culture wars and the enemy and instead invested in loving our neighbor, who we often see as enemy?

I think we would find maybe, some enemies becoming friends.

I love what.

There's a pastor named Rich Volodas who pastors a church in New York City and he said this he goes this is how you know if you're a Christian that's been trapped in culture wars, and he gives five pieces of evidence.

And so we could sort of.

So let's look at ourselves internally here and this is how you'll know.

If you could, could you be like I'm not buying into the whole culture war thing?

So thank you that you're not, but this is what Rich Volodas says.

This is how you can sort of take a litmus test here.

Number one we carry a God is with us, but not with them.

Impulse.

God is with us but not with them.

Impulse.

We no longer see image bearers to be engaged, but threats to be eliminated.

We believe that we are fighting for truth, so our hatred is justified.

We believe political power is necessary to make the most of the gospel.

Hopefully, most of us are coming to a place realizing that, no, that's not gonna work and that hasn't worked and it's not working anytime soon.

Fear is the primary lens through which we see the world, and another pastor from Missouri, brian Zahn, said if we're more known as culture work crusaders than as agents of healing, something is drastically wrong.

I'm gonna share just a personal story here, because my question is like what sort of transformative power does love have in me?

And then to those that I encounter day in and day out?

I attended the sentencing of the first time ever that I've actually been able to be go to the sentencing of a perpetrator who harmed a child in our care.

This happened last year, and this is a person in the US that traveled over to another country that we work in and had done horrific things to other children, but particularly a child that is in our care and she's very young.

And I went to the sentencing of this person.

He was apprehended, he was caught and the sentencing was really intense and honestly, I'm gonna be straight with you, I didn't know how I was going to feel or react in that courtroom, because I haven't had a lot of mercy toward people who have done these things, because I'm around the results of people's horrific actions all the time, and so my guess was I've only felt in the past rage toward those people and I was expecting to feel that same thing in that courtroom because I knew I'm literally gonna be like five feet away for the first time ever from one of those people, the first time ever from one of the perpetrators.

And sure enough, they walked this person in and I was so apprehensive in the courtroom as they walk him in, they walk him over to his seat and the proceedings start to go on and I could hardly look at him and then every once in a while I would look over him and then at one point in the proceedings they had a victim impact statement that the girl who's in our care gave.

I mean, it was a videotaped victim impact statement.

She didn't need to be there in the courtroom, so they had videotaped it.

It was 17 minutes long and I watched as they put that video on and this guy was five feet from the video screen and this young girl started sharing the impact of what his actions had on her.

And I'm looking at him, watching her, and a strangest thing happened in that I did not feel what I had expected to feel.

I thought I was gonna feel rage and instead I felt this deep, deep sadness because I'm looking at him and I'm thinking man, there was at one point where he had a mother that held him, as he was an infant, in her arms, maybe having hopes and dreams for him.

What happened to you?

There was a point that he sat in a kindergarten class with his buddies drawing with crayons pictures just like any other five-year-old kid.

But some things have happened in this person's life to bring him to commit atrocious things to other human beings.

And I just felt this deep sadness and, honestly, I went internally.

I was like God, what is this?

This is not what I had expected to feel, and it was a touch, a moment where I felt the heart of God in a way that I had never felt the heart of God, because for a moment, I saw him not as a monster, but as an image bearer of God as well.

That's hard to do, isn't it?

But it's what God has called us to do and to be a part of it, what he meant.

This is what I'm gonna leave with you Love each other, go deep, go where no one dares to go.

It's so easy to hate your enemy, way harder to love them.

But when we can see, seeing people because it's so easy to hate a monster, way more difficult a human being and an image bearer of God.

So we put these sort of titles on people that we hate.

You know, we're like, oh that's a, what a monster.

It's like now I've just dehumanized this person Now.

So now I can hate him.

Now I can feel rage, rightly so.

Challenging stuff, hard stuff.

So how long is it going to take for love to win?

We have these like love wins love.

How long is it going to take for love to actually transform us and transform the world?

You know, over the years I've struggled with that question of how long.

How long, you know, will I see, until we see justice happen for these kids.

I was recently in the Dominican Republic at a conference, an anti-slavery conference, and there was a woman there who interrupted the proceedings.

She's in her 50s, she says she mentioned her age and she says I was exploited in traffic when I was a teenager.

And she says how long is it going to be till I don't feel this trauma anymore?

How long is?

And you just she just poured this out of this heartache and you can hear that ache of the human heart of how long, how long, how long.

I think about kids in our care who wait for justice to take place.

How long until justice actually happens, that refrain in response to the horrific news that hits us day in and day out, even over the last week, with what's happening in the in the Middle East.

How long, yeah, it's that in response to the news that's coming to hard and horrific things happening in the world, and that question's not new.

It's a question that the prophets raged about, the Psalmists raged about over and over and over again.

You see this lament of like how long, god, are you going to hide your face from me?

How long are you going to refrain from justice taking place for those that are oppressed.

Martin Luther King Jr, when he was on the Capitol steps in Montgomery, preached one of his most famous sermons after their march from Selma, where he kept asking the question how long, how long?

And then he answers his own question with a lot more hope than even I have, when he said not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it does bend toward justice.

You too, bono, sings the famous words in the song Sunday, bloody Sundays, is I can't believe the news today.

Oh, I can't close my eyes and make it go away.

How long, how long must we sing this song?

How long, how long?

It just feels like too long, doesn't it?

Most of the time?

It feels like too long.

How long until justice rolls down like waters?

How long will the vulnerable be victimized and the innocent suffer?

How long are we going to put up with violence and oppression?

How long until love actually does win?

Here's what I've come to the conclusion of.

It'll take as long as it takes for us to begin to act.

It'll take as long as it takes for us to take the last words, the famous words of Jesus, seriously enough to actually act in love, as long as we're immobilized by the question well, what can one person do?

Or what can I possibly do?

It's going to take a long time.

It'll take as long as we allow ourselves to continue to be distracted and misdirected by other things.

We had a dream 20-something years ago the end of child trafficking and exploitation.

And people have said that's idealistic, isn't it?

It's a bit naive to think that's ever going to happen.

I don't think it's idealistic or naive at all.

I think it's audacious and, at the end of the day, it's only people of audacity that ever change the world.

And how audacious is it to love in the face of calamity?

How audacious is it to love our enemies?

What began as a dream and a vision continue to evolve.

In the last 20 years 21 years now we've been able to reach through our prevention and survivor care programs.

We've been able to reach a little over 70,000 kids globally.

That's what you make possible by your generosity and your engagement.

So, in closing, in case you haven't been paying attention, we're living in some crazy times, you know.

Some might even call them or describe them as dark times, and I'm reminded if you're a Tolkien fan, you'll recognize this in Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring Haldir of Lorien described the dark times that they were experiencing throughout the kingdoms of Middle Earth, and he said it this way the world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places, but still there's much that is fair.

And though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, love still grows, perhaps the greater.

I love that.

How long?

How long?

As long as it takes for us to act.

A survivor in our care young girl that I'll call Ann Marie, she sums it up and she says I will never lose hope because of the people around who love me, who love me.

So she interprets everything that's being poured into her life as people loving her.

I want to close with this prayer by Brian Doyle, and I love that he gives a title to the prayers become one of my favorite little prayer books.

It's called A Book of Uncommon Prayer, and the title of this prayer, I think, is kind of funny.

It's called the Furious Prayer for the Church that I love and have always loved, but which drives me insane with its fussy, fidgety, prim, tin-eared thirst for control and rules and power and money, rather than the one simple thing that the founder insisted on.

That's a great title of a prayer.

Right, did you just sense the smile of God over that?

It's like, yeah, okay, I'm good with that kind of prayer and this is.

This is the prayer Granted.

It's a tough assignment.

The original assignment I get that.

Love Lord, help us.

Could we not have been assigned something easier, like astrophysics or quantum mechanics?

But no, love those you cannot love.

Love those who are poor and broken and fouled and dirty and sick with sores.

Love those who wish to strike you on both cheeks.

Love the blowhard, the pompous ass, the arrogant liar.

Find the Christ in each heart, even those.

Preach the gospel and only if necessary talk about it.

Be the word.

It is easy to advise and pronounce and counsel and suggest and lecture.

It is not so easy to do what must be done without sometimes shrieking Bring love like a bright weapon against the dark.

The rabbi did not say build churches or retreat houses or secure a fleet of cars for general use or convene conferences or issue position papers.

He was pretty blunt about the hungry and the naked and the sick.

He was not reasonable.

We forget this.

The church is definitely not a reasonable idea.

The church should be a verb.

When it is only a noun, it is not what the founder asked of us.

Let us pray that we are ever after dissolving the formal, arrogant thing that wants to rise and ever fomenting the contradictory, revolutionary, counter-cultural thing that could actually change life on this planet.

It could, you know.

Let's try again today, and so amen.