Intensely Beautiful

Watch this video to experience an intensely beautiful moment. It's 50 minutes total, but if you don't want to listen to the whole thing, go to the 40 minute mark and wait. I just learned about this guy Shane Claiborne. He was featured on a program on NPR. He is not a dynamic speaker, but his words are powerful because of the way he lives.




Here is an excerpt from Shane Claiborne's book, The Irresistible Revolution: Living as an Ordinary Radical. Chapter 5

“Coming out of college, my friends and I were pretty unwilling to “conform to the pattern of this world,” as the Scriptures say (Rom. 12:2). We knew all too well most people would take it, but we also knew that there is a narrow way that leads to life, and we wanted to find it (Matt. 7:13 – 14)….

We went to the ghetto. We narrowed our vision to this: love God, love people, and follow Jesus. And we began calling our little experiment the Simple Way. In January 1997, six of us moved into a little row house in Kensington, one of Pennsylvania’s poorest neighborhoods, just minutes from old St. Edward’s cathedral. It felt like we were reinventing the early church for the first time in two thousand years. (We were quite ignorant.)

We have always called ourselves a tax-exempt 501c3 antiprofit organization. We wrestle to free ourselves from macrocharity and distant acts of charity that serve to legitimize apathetic lifestyles of good intentions but rob us of the gift of community. We visit rich people and have them visit us. We preach, prophesy, and dream together about how to awaken the church from her violent slumber. Sometimes we speak to change the world; other times we speak to keep the world from changing us. We are about ending poverty, not simply managing it. We give people fish. We teach them to fish. We tear down the walls that have been built up around the fish pond. And we figure out who polluted it.”
If you want to read more…check out http://www.thesimpleway.org/shane/sampler.pdf

Still don't know too much about him. We all have ways of living out our call, but ever since I learned of this ministry and watched this video I have been challenged and moved. Hope you will be too. When I watched this video for the first time, I focused on the nun as the incarnational presence of Christ, but the more I watch it, the more I see Jesus in the eyes of the little boy who looks at her.