My wife and I spent New Year’s Eve somewhere above the Atlantic Ocean en route to London. Our tickets were for Seats 51F and 51G, directly next to the lavatory in the last row of the plane. We were prepared for a long, cramped, potentially unpleasant smelling flight. But just as we were about […]Continue Reading →
For the past several weeks, my wife and I have found ourselves unexpectedly homeless. By the time this blog posts, we’ll be on a month-long vacation to East Africa, and since our apartment was going to be sitting empty for so long anyway, we offered it to a family from our church in need […]Continue Reading →
Last week, Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole wrote a compelling, provocative article in The Atlantic critiquing what he calls the “white savior industrial complex.” Specifically mentioning the viral KONY 2012 video from Invisible Children, the New York Times’ Nicholas Kristof and the popular TED talks (each of which, I should note, I’ve […]Continue Reading →
Tabitha defies a lot of the most common stereotypes about undocumented immigrants: she didn’t enter the country illegally, she’s not from Mexico, she speaks English fluently—and she’s certainly not a menace to be feared. To the contrary: she’s teaching the rest of us how to faithfully extend hospitality, even to strangers. She reminds me of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan in Luke 10: Jesus could have made the Samaritan the guy beat up on the side of the road to Jericho and the Israelite the noble neighbor who models love and compassion, but Jesus challenged his listeners’ assumptions. It was the Samaritan, a member of a despised group of outsiders, whom Jesus puts in the role of a neighbor. And he calls us to “go and do likewise” (Luke 10:37).Continue Reading →
