1. Pray.

• To see the names and faces of the bloggers going with us visit http://www.compassionbloggers.com/elsalvador
• Pray for their families they’ll leave behind, their spiritual and physical and mental health/stamina, their ability to take in a lot of information quickly and experience a lot of emotions and find the words to write about it all.

2. Twitter.

• Please send your followers to our trip’s page using this link: http://bit.ly/CBElSalvador
• Please tweet any specific posts you’d like to pass along using the hashtag #cbes
• If you ask your followers to sponsor a child please use this link: http://bit.ly/ESKids

3. Facebook.

• I’ve created a widget for Facebook pages (works on Myspace and blogs too). It displays pictures, videos and posts from our trip as they become available.
• No need to know what the heck a widget is. Just go to http://bit.ly/4euihb and click “Facebook” to add this widget to your Facebook wall.
• Or hit the “share” button below and choose “Facebook” from the options.

Here are a couple more widgets for blogs (may not work on wordpress.com blogs). Just click the “share button”, grab the code, copy and paste:

Thank you.

The serious Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards:

“The appearance of everything was altered; there seemed to be, as it were, a calm, sweet cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost everything. God’s excellency, his divine wisdom, his purity and love, seemed to appear in everything; in sun, moon and stars; in clouds and blue sky; in the grass, flowers and trees; in the water and all nature; which used greatly to fix my mind. And scarce anything, among all the works of nature, was so sweet to me as thunder and lightning; formerly nothing had been so terrible to me. Before, I used to be uncommonly terrified with thunder, and to be struck with terror when I saw a thunderstorm rising; but now, on the contrary, it rejoices me.”

Illiterate evangelist Billy Bray:

“I praised God with my whole heart. I remember this, that everything looked new to me, the people, the fields, the cattle, the trees. I was like a new man in a new world. I can’t help praising the Lord. As I go along the street, I lift up one foot, and it seems to say, ‘Glory’; and I lift up the other, and it seems to say, ‘Amen’; and so they keep up like that all the time I am walking.”

An unknown farmer:

“When I went in the morning into the fields to work, the glory of God appeared in all His visible creation. I well remembered we reaped oats, and how every straw and head of the oats seemed, as it were, arrayed in a kind of rainbow glory, or to glow, if I may express it, in the glory of God.”

Rich Mullins:

The moon is a sliver of silver
That fell on the floor of a carpenter’s shop
Every house must have it’s builder
And I awoke in the house of God

I know when Thomas needed to touch the nail holes to believe, Jesus said it was better to believe without seeing. But I want to see anyway. I need to see. A lot of us down here do, God. Sometimes we think we’ll lose faith entirely if we don’t.

Show yourself.

Right here at my computer, gassing up the minivan, making phone calls, returning e-mails, eating lunch.

So, on November 15th at 6PM Ginny Owens, Randall Goodgame, Cindy Morgan and I are playing a benefit concert at Thompson Station Baptist Church called Sing For Their Supper. There will be concessions and a silent auction too. Tickets are available at the door: $25 for a family, $10 for adults and $5 for children.

Here’s where you come in! Can you spare a few minutes of your time to help us help hundreds of families?

1. If you have Facebook friends in the Nashville area, please invite them to the concert/auction via our event page.

2. If you have Twitter followers in the Nashville area, please invite them using this link: http://bit.ly/Sing4Supper

3. If you’d like to donate to The Well click the “Chip In!” button below and if you’d like to ask others to give, click the “share” button in the bottom right corner to put this widget on your blog, Facebook page, e-mail and dozens of other places.

Thank you.

If you live in the Nashville area, The Well and the story about the GM factory closing will be on News 2 tonight at 6.

And I really had my heart set on being a middle-aged youth minister with a sweet soul patch and skater do.

But Becky had a better idea.

We even got Bagwell, Brian’s dog, involved. You can’t be the Mystery Gang without Scooby right?

Oh, and the kids were there too.

Happy Halloween-sugar-buzz hangover to you all.

Well, enter Penelope, age five.

Today at school, for the we’re-Christians-so-it’s-not-called-a-Halloween-party non-Halloween party, she was supposed to go as what she wants to be when she grows up.

As soon as the teacher made the assignment Penelope knew what she wanted to be.

“I’m going to be myself,” she said.

“You’re supposed to be-”

“I don’t want money when I’m old. I want you and Mommy to buy me everything.”

“OK, but you’re supposed to-”

“I LIKE BEING MYSELF!”

OK then.

Myself it is.

I wanna be myself.

Mom? Dad? Wanna buy me stuff?

1. Tell us a story.

The best arguments and the greatest passion in the world are forgotten sooner than a story. Every bit of advice here can be carried out in a story.

2. Don’t lie.

Exaggerating is lying.

3. Why do you care?

You’re not in it for the money right? No, you saw something, felt something, learned something once that changed your heart and mind. You were captivated, fell in love, got angry. Tell us a story that shows us why you care and we’ll probably care too.

4. No statistics.

Instead of saying “X number of kids die of malaria each year in Africa,” for instance, you could say, “Daniel’s mother sat on the end of his bed smiling, proudly showing off the mosquito net that covers Daniel so he won’t die like so many African children do.” Does the number matter? Not to your audience. But Daniel does.

5. Don’t be a pamphlet.

Stay away from too many program specifics, technical jargon, numbers, marketing slogans. Those are great for web sites but you’re a person. Compassion International, for instance, meets four kinds of needs: physical, economic, spiritual, social. I aim to show how they’re met without naming them. Instead of “physical” I can say, “We had a hamburger together and she told me her favorite meal is chocolate cake!” Instead of “economic” I can say “Her mother is learning how to turn her knack for cooking into a business so one day she won’t need my help to care for her daughter.” Instead of “spiritual” I can say, “Susan asked if she could pray for us before we left her home.”

6. Keep it simple. (Seemingly.)

You can communicate a lot of info and the audience will never realize it, be overwhelmed by it, or get confused if it’s all contained in one simple story. One. Only one. One. With what happened before X and what happened after X and why it matters to you now. With just enough detail to get our mind’s eye going, but not so much that we wish you would get on with it.

7. Be positive.

Yes, you can get a lot of support for your cause by being a bully, motivating with guilt and shame, or showing pictures of skeletal children covered in flies. I can’t deny these tactics work. They must; a lot of people use them. But I choose instead to show a little of the problem and a lot of solution, to major on the hope. A success story, a picture of a child eating or smiling, a thank you letter from someone helped – I believe those motivated by hope stay motivated.

8. Your cause is not your goal.

My goal is not to get kids sponsored. My goal is to teach Christians about God’s love for them and the world and to remind them to show that same love. I routinely ask the audience to express their love for God and the world in ways that do not benefit the cause of Compassion at all. Compassion is one way to love. This perspective shift allows me to treat “competitors” like allies and stop measuring success only by the numbers.

9. Forgive them.

I know you care deeply about your cause because you love pandas or single moms or kids. But if we don’t love it too that doesn’t mean we don’t love something of equal importance with equal depth.  And it doesn’t mean we don’t love you. Remember, your cause is not your goal, so please forgive us. Otherwise, and I’ve done this, your anger will make you a bully. (See #7)

10. You’re not the persuader.

I believe God is in control. Of everything. But I also know that a brochure on a table or a banner ad on a website don’t get kids sponsored. So, I speak as if the lives of kids depend on me, but I rest well remembering we all depend on God. Sometimes I do everything right and very few kids get sponsored. Other nights I trip over my words and confuse the crowd and lots of kids get sponsored. And I imagine God smiling as He reminds me once again that I can’t make anyone do anything. That’s oddly freeing.

11. Results may vary.

Because of #10, none of this stuff may work for you. It may not work for me some nights either. It’s not likely, but it’s possible. So, most nights before I speak, I pray and ask God to change my plans. Then I shut up and listen. Sometimes – most of the time – God’s silent. But other times a new idea that shouldn’t work floats into my head. Sometimes I try that new idea and discover it came from the burrito in catering and not from God at all! Other times I ignore it and kick myself for a few days because my perfect plan flops. But sometimes I don’t ignore it and the near-miraculous happens.

So, pray. Listen. Be flexible, willing to ignore any and all of these tips if you have good reason.

And no burritos before the big speech.

I remember being nineteen, sitting on my Aunt’s porch in Bridge City, Texas praying that God would miraculously pull the cancer from my grandmother’s body like a magnet over iron filings.

She was just inside, down the hall on the left, in a hospital bed.

My aunts and uncles and cousins and I went in and out of her room for a few days. Sometimes praying. Sometimes singing. Sometimes telling stories that made us all laugh.

I had just realized I didn’t like Becky; I loved her. I had just been accepted to a college to study music.

I remember wishing Becky had met Geemommy. I still wish she had. The two are a lot alike. Big laughers. Feminine but not dainty. Stubborn yet likable. Friendly and extroverted but not the least bit fake. Worshipful listeners but willing to interrupt when someone needs a good interrupting.

I’m a musician because my grandmother interrupted a pity party of mine held just before I started high school. I was whining about how much I was afraid to make music. I was afraid because my sister told me only nerds were in the band in high school. And because that made my mom afraid. Nerds don’t get dates. So nerds don’t get married. So nerds don’t make grandkids. And sometimes nerds who play the saxophone grow up to still be nerds or, worse, unemployed. I guess that could have been her logic. Not sure. But, now that I have kids, I get all of that.

So there I was torn between a respectable life and a musical one. That’s when she told me to ignore my mom. And I did.

I don’t know my mom’s mom. I know my grandmother. I don’t know what kind of parent, friend, coworker or neighbor she was. But she was an inspiring grandmother, if for no other reason than that moment. But I suspect that moment was characteristic of how she always lived life, at least after my grandfather died.

She studied floral arranging, opened her own shop, and got herself a cigar-tokin’ cursin’ cowboy boyfriend named George – the only grandfather I ever knew on that side of the family tree. All of this gave skeptics and critics reason to balk. People were scared she’d fail, scared she’d not make enough to support herself, scared of what other people would think when they saw her galavanting around town holding hands with George.

But she never seemed scared. Not around me.

I didn’t inherit that fearlessness (or the ability to fake it, if that’s what she did). I’m my mother’s child. I worry about failing, about not failing, about what total strangers think of me, about what tomorrow holds…and the next day…and the next twenty years.

So, at this time of year, I buck my nature, sober up and try to remember. I remember to ignore the fearful and the fears. I remember how to live by remembering how she died: fearlessly.

We stood around her bed and sang hymns she’d hummed while rocking babies and grandbabies to sleep. She stared up at the ceiling with a faint exhausted smile on her face, as if she was seeing something or someone the rest of us couldn’t. She held on for a few days after that, making time to tell each of us goodbye. “Make me proud,” she told me.

Then, when she saw her chance, the rare moment alone, she left us.

My Uncle Joel found a poem just before the very end that we think she wrote when she was a young woman. In it she predicted that one Fall day, when the last notes of Summer had been sung, God would close her book of hours and she would leave this garden, look to the hills where her help comes from, and be with her God forever. Without fear.

I can hear the cool winds chasing leaves on the sidewalk outside while I write. I want to cry. Just a little. But they hush me and ask me to remember instead.

Mankind is in need of rescuing – his heart is broken: he doesn’t think or feel like God. He doesn’t love God or people unselfishly.

When we don’t think or feel or love like God – and we all do it – we deserve to be punished, to be separated from God, from all that’s good. Forever.

But God loves me. He loves you too. He knows what we’ll think and feel and do on our worst day and still He loves us.

God doesn’t want us to be separated from Him.

God wants us to know Him, to love Him and love like Him.

So, one day, God put on skin and moved to our neighborhood. He was born in the Middle East to a girl named Mary about 2000 years ago.

She named him Yeshua, which means “God saves.” We call Him Jesus.

Jesus was a man, sure, but not like any other man. He was also God. He lived a perfect life: always thinking, feeling and loving perfectly. Like God.

Because of how Jesus lived and spoke, mankind got a chance to see what thinking, feeling and loving perfectly looks like. We got to see what God was like. And to see how unlike Him we really are.

After about 33 years, Jesus was executed. The Romans found him guilty of treason. But He was perfect by God’s standard.

He was punished. He died. He was separated from God and all that is good for three days.

But on the third day he breathed air into his lungs again.  He stood, walked out of his tomb. When He did He beat our death, our punishment and our separation from God forever. He experienced it all so we don’t have to.

The bible says if I believe this is true then I’m saved from the punishment, separation and death I deserve. If I don’t, then I’m not.

Jesus was punished in my place. He was separated so I wouldn’t have to be. He died so I can live with God forever.

There are things that matter. A lot.

And too many things I’m willing to argue about aren’t those things.

One negative review said the Wild Things were bad examples to kids, citing that the monsters hurt each other but never said they were sorry.

“That sounds like a good example,” Gresham, age seven, said. “Maybe they weren’t sorry.”