Do You Know Joseph Kony?
He is the Adolf Hitler of our day and yet you don’t even know who he is.
There are two reasons Uganda has an orphan crisis. One is AIDS and other health related issues. The other is Joseph Kony. In the Northern part of Uganda, southern Sudan, and north-eastern Congo Joseph Kony has been kidnapping children and forcing them to kill their parents and then join his army. If you are a girl your role may be to provide sex. If you are a boy you will be called upon to intimidate, mutilate, and kill in the name of Joseph Kony. 30,000 children have been kidnapped in Uganda alone. His behavior has led to him being listed as the #1 most dangerous man on the planet according to the Interantional Criminal Court at The Hague in The Netherlands. Muammar Gaddafi, recently deposed dictator of Libya was #22.
Governements supported the overthrow of Gaddafi’s government simply because of oil. Joseph Kony doesn’t have any oil, but he has hands stained by the blood of thousands of innocent people. In 2012 the agency Invisible Children has made the capture of Joseph Kony an absolute must.
I encourage you to watch the following video, share it with anyone and everyone, talk about it with your children and friends, and churches and then join me to make Joseph Kony famous.
The Dream Come True
On Monday, as long as we find favor with the judge, three children will officially become Smiths. Over four years we have been on this journey, and there have been many significant moments in the midst of those four years as we have celebrated life and mourned death. We have expanded in some areas and retracted in others. We have simply become new, different, transformed people. We went from possibility to actuality.
In order to put in perspective what happens in four years here’s a short list:
I completed work on two Masters degrees.
We went from having four in elementary school to still having four in elementary school along with one in middle school and one in high school.
My 11 year old became a teenager, and my five year old became nine (lots of change there), and Kristi and I turned 40 (ouch).
My mother was diagnosed and the lost her battle with cancer, yet left us with a legacy of faith that will be impossible to forget.
Kristi’s grandfather lost his battle with age.
We went from adopting a boy and only a boy to a boy and two girls, from one to three.
We went from private Christian school to public school.
We went from three jobs to two, a working mom to a stay at home mom.
We went from four bedrooms to five, and from a minivan to a Suburban.
We went from none in diapers to one at night.
We went from times when the laundry hamper was empty to a perpetual laundry producing machine.
We went from having leftovers from dinner to barely having enough.
We went from three kids to six, two soccer teams to four, packing three lunches to six, from very little homework assistance to a lot, from kids who were at the top of the class to kids who are behind.
And I won’t even get into the change Kamri, Lucas, and Lilli have endured.
I stand in awe. How naive I was the morning I awoke to from a dream. All of this born out of the pursuit of a dream.
To God be the glory forever and ever, AMEN.
Outside of the Box Thinking Results in…a Box
I once thought about being an architect. I love creating living spaces. I can still remember designing my first house in seventh grade shop class taught by an incredible teacher, Mr. Vincent. Since then I have had the privilege of designing and building all three of the houses in which Kristi and I have lived, but I never thought of doing something like this… 
It’s not just any box, but a box of glass that also happens to be a house. That’s right, a house. The story is that a family bought property on which there was a very old house in Lithuania, but the house was not considered large enough for the family. Traditional thinking would be to some how fabricate an addition to the house that imitated the original architecture.
The result; however, is anything but traditional. It is stunning! Instead the architect designs a glass enclosure of the house and makes some living space very public, like eating and kitchen and even hallways and entryways. Bedrooms, bathrooms, and other private living space is contained in the original house. I still wonder what they did with the original fireplace and chimney. It is still there but did they exhaust it through the roof and is it still useful? There is a lot about this structure that boldly allows the residents to live their lives in public, while making space for some mystery. For instance, I love the fact that the people at www.coolhunter.com don’t show us what the builders did inside to the traditional house.
Transition to traditional thinking about being the Church. While the Internet’s impact on our culture is relatively new and at the same time rapidly evolving I wonder how traditional ways of being the Church will need to change. Can the cultural norms for communication like email, texting, Facebook, and Twitter replace good old fashion face-to-face, or might it just need to encapsulate the personal? While some struggle to answer the Either-Or questions I think we need to start figuring out better ways to do Both-And. When it comes to being the Church what old structures do we need to keep within a modern architecture? How might we encapsulate traditions in a modern way that make our living out the Gospel of Jesus public and mysterious at the same time?