Revolt Towards

Ash Wednesday & 40 Days of Starve

 

So today is Ash Wednesday. Today is also the start of Starve, something I created a few years back now it's taking shape and life. Or should we say death?

The purpose is this: let us have a Season of Lent in preparation for Easter in seeking the face of the One who loves us by starving our life so we can find real love and life again. Starving our hunger. Our apathy. Our technologies. Our consumption. And our wallets and greed.

I invite you to join us with as we call for 40 Days of holistic fasting from from today-Ash Wednesday, February 17th, 2010, and ending on Palm Sunday, March 28, 2010. Following Isaiah 58 and Joel 2, this is a call to starve ourselves so that we might see a new Spirit of Love on the face of the earth. 

You can check out more information on Starve over at the Revolt Collective site and sign up for daily emails. You can also check out the Facebook Event page too.

Love you all. Here's to starving our lives that a greater glimpse of the One who gave Himself up for us may be revealed.

I leave you with an Ash Wednesday liturgy:

We have chosen to fast 

Not with ashes but with actions 

Not with sackcloth but in sharing 

Not in thoughts but in deeds 

We will give up our abundance 

To share our food with the hungry 

We will give up our comfort 

To provide homes for the destitute 

We will give up our fashions 

To see the naked clothed 

We will share where others hoard 

We will free where others oppress 

We will heal where others harm 

Then God’s light will break out on us 

God’s healing will quickly appear 

God will guide us always 

God’s righteousness will go before us 

We will find our joy in the Lord 

We will be like a well watered garden 

We will be called repairers of broken walls 

Together we will feast at God’s banquet table

Call It Going Green or Going Blue...It's Still Short of the Kingdom.

My good friend Joey Briglio over at TheBlessedNaturalist.com just posted a blog about the next push in the environmental movement to go BLUE. There are three objectives of the BLUE movement. "First, to measurably improve the quality of life of the people who join. Second, to engage as many people as possible in the effort. And third, to increase their effectiveness in making a difference in their community and the world."

The interesting this is that I was at the Earth Day Fest a year and a half ago in Ojai when the LEEDS guy brought up that "the next thing is BLUE". So what does it mean and how do we use it? I laughed when I read the BLUE article that said:

How do I use it in a sentence?

"I'm totally into the environment," she says as she updates her status on Facebook, "but I'm the type of person who's BLUE and not only green."
 

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As I was laughing at this statement and commenting on Joey's blog the other day, it hit me—I wonder if the coming push to BLUE is humanity's take on the Gospel of the Kingdom. Because as some of you might know or have figured out, I've struggled with Green from the get-go, not as a bad idea, but an incomplete one. Blue is way closer to solving the frustration in my heart about Green. At least Blue has goals and a concentrated push of the three values behind it. 

But as I was saying—maybe, just maybe, the real answer we all need, even the Church (because God knows they don't get it at all) is the Gospel of the Kingdom that encompasses Green, Blue, and every other spectrum of the rainbow with the promise from God himself that He will not destroy the earth again. Unfortunately, that doesn't mean we ourselves are free from destroying it. For better or worse, He has entrusted it to us to care for it because "the earth is the Lord's and everything it"—man, woman, animal, plant, land, water, sky.

I truly love that our faith and our God is mindful of all these things. He's mindful to the concerns of the planet that is groaning and the sparrows and the blades of grass, as much as He is mindful to the my own yearnings, cries and desires in my own life. And then on top of it, the renovation He does in my heart to pursue His heart makes me love the things He loves which is the groaning planet, the sparrows and the blades of grass and my brothers and sisters around the world with their own yearnings, cries and desires. It's a cyclical faith that we live where the outflow of our relationship with Him spills out ONTO and INTO the world around us.

If the cyclical reality of our faith—our hearts to His heart and back to our heart for 'all creation'—is not happening in our lives, then we are missing some integral points to the whole Gospel itself.