(the view from behind our front door)

Today I’d like to talk about missions in your face. Actually in MY face. I’ve been on too many Mexico missions trips to remember. I’ve co-led a Romania missions trip. My wife Jen went to Fiji on a missions trip. When I was a youth pastor I used to take our kids to downtown San Diego to feed the homeless once a month. But what’s been on my heart is the need right here in our suburbia paradise of Hummers, 3,000+ square foot homes, wineries, and wanna-be Orange County people. What’s the problem? Well, the bottom has fallen out from under a majority of these people. They’re losing their homes, their hummers, their marriages, etc.

So where to suburban soccer moms & dads go when they can’t feed their families? What do they do when the water gets turned off? What happens when there’s not enough gas in the Lexus to get to work?

There is one place that is literally in MY face. It’s right across the parking lot of our church. It’s a place called The Community Resource Center (no website - we gotta fix that), and it’s run by St. Martha’s Catholic Church. Here’s a place that twice a week fills hundreds of cars (hummers included) with groceries as they pass right by our church. Here’s a place that gives moms who can’t feed their babies, boxes of formula, diapers, medicine, and referrals to other local places where they can get more help. Here’s a place that gives older folks an opportunity to give back to their community, rather than sitting around a bingo table all day. Here’s a place that passes out toothbrushes because there’s actually families that have to spend their money on Top Romin, rather than basic health necessities.

While I am “busy” in my office, cars full of needy and desperate people are lined up to go to the building right across the parking lot from our church. So my goal is to spend more time out there, with those people, than in my office. I don’t know what that exactly looks like yet, but I’m committed to being a part of something that effects the people right in MY face.

“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” James 1:27

Take some time today and pray for the Community Resource Center in beautiful suburban, Murrieta, California. They are actually being the church to people that live right next door to me.