Tejeda

This morning I spoke to a Bible Study that meets at Tejeda Middle School. It's really awesome how they have it. I think it's run by mostly parents and students. But they had about 100 kids show up 40 minutes before school to participate in this Bible Club.
I spoke about loving your neighbor and really loving Jesus from Matthew 22 (the Greatest Commandment). These are 2 things I talk about often, but I've just been thinking about it so much lately. What does it really mean to love God with all my heart, mind and soul. If I'm loving Him with all my mind, then I probably won't start daydreaming through my prayers. If I love God with all my strength and soul, then why do I sometimes have a hard time finding time to spend time reading my Bible. I get too busy. But I know when I was "in love" with girls in the past, I thought about them a lot. But during my day, how often does God just pop into my head because I love Him so much. I still have a long ways to go in this and a lot of thinking to do about what loving God like this really would look like.
Then I talked about loving our neighbors as ourselves. Do I really love people like I love myself? Not if they cut me off in traffic. Not if they take too long in the grocery store line. There's a pastor in California who decided if he was going to love people as much as he loves himself, then that means that he is going to spend as much on others as he does on himself. He gives to the Children's Hunger Fund. I think that's amazing. If he's convicted to do that, then great. So far, I'm not at that point, and don't necessarily think I have to be, but I think it's admirable anyways. But I have started thinking about what can I do to show love to our world. We help with feeding hungry in Africa. We help with former prostitute teens in Thailand. I take our junior high students on service projects around San Antonio where people are hurting. I want to do more.
I just heard a term called "christianaphobia." I wrote a blog about it last month, and you can read that here. This is the fear of Christians. It's particularly happening in Europe and the West Coast of the US. Non-believers are afraid of Christians because they think we are angry all the time. We're always against people who aren't like us. The rest of the world sees us as a Christian nation, but we fight so much and are in war a lot, and it seems like we strive on that. I knew some homosexuals in San Francisco who hated Christians because of how they were treated. And because of that they didn't want to know God. It makes me sad, because this is the second greatest commandment, to love our neighbor. If we were truly loving our neighbors in a radical way, people wouldn't be afraid of us, they would be attracted to us. If we were loving in a radical way, we wouldn't be so concerned with what we didn't have or keeping up with the Joneses. We would be more concerned about helping injustices in our world.
I went into things a little bit more in depth here than I did this morning at Tejeda, because I've been thinking about these things a lot the last few months. And so, since this morning I talked about these things a little bit, I've been going through everything in my head about how I can follow these 2 greatest commandments.