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Valentine’s Day 2016 fell on a Sunday, and on this particular one, I went to a village church and met a little boy that would capture my heart and leave a mark on it forever.  He was about twelve years old, skinny, and leaning on a wooden stick. His face was serious. Stoic. When I tried to make him smile, he would not. It almost seemed like his eyes told the story of twenty years of suffering, as if childhood had been stolen from him. And no wonder, for his knee was permanently fixed at a forty-five degree angle, the entire knee joint swollen to the size of a large grapefruit. It was covered in a black, crusty, infected, chronic wound.  He had fallen off his bicycle two years prior, and although his family had done their best to take care of him with doctor visits, bone settings, and dressing changes, all their extra saved money eventually ran out, and this little boy remained unwell and resorted to dropping out of school and spending his days on a wooden crutch.  On Valen

If you are around me enough during my first few weeks back into the United States, you might notice a few things that could be explained as “reverse culture shock”.  You might notice that I always take my shoes off at the door, that I am paralyzed by the amount of choices in the super market, that I crave rice and fresh vegetables, that I’ve already washed all the dishes by hand by the time I even remember about the dishwasher. For a while, I wake up at 4am and want to go to bed by 8pm. I may spend the majority of my time under an electric blanket, even if you think it’s not cold enough (it is to me). I may forget how to pump my own gas or put my credit card in the reader instead of sliding it. I feel weird wearing pants, I drive slow and have the tendency to think that I can drive anywhere, even if it’s not a road. I may speak a little frenglish every now and then or ask you if what I just said was an actual English word. I will want to wash my hands immediately before every meal

Every day, hundreds of refugees are flooding into Greece and countries like it around the Mediterranean Rim, seeking refuge from conflict and crisis. You have probably heard news headlines about the modern day refugee crisis, but I wonder how many people are hearing about what this means in the spiritual realms for the kingdom of God.  For God is so good at taking crisis and creating victory, transforming tribulation into triumph.  Just like what we read in the book of Acts when God used the persecution of the early church to send the gospel across the world, God is similarly using the modern day refugee crisis to get his gospel to unreached places through displaced people.  I sat in the Glyfada church of Christ in Athens, Greece, one Sunday night and worshiped in both English and Farsi with a full room of predominantly middle easterners. It is extremely difficult to get the gospel into places like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Iraq, but people are being brought out of