Wow, it’s a small world! Yes, I definitely remember meeting Alithea and Abhishek at a couple of the clubs we had…you have beautiful children!

Thank you so much for your response, and I have to say that yes, being different sometimes means being excluded. It can also mean being thrown in jail, beaten, disrespected, and many other things. Look at many of the apostles, and other members of the early church, who were often thrown in jail because of their lifestyle choices. And God tells us to respond to all of that with a truly revolutionary reaction…love. After Bangalore, I had the opportunity to go visit an orphanage in one of the villages close to the coast, in what was a pretty seriously Hindu area. The Saints I met their (a man named Emmanuel and his family and church) get persecuted every day for their different-ness. And they show us an excellent example of how to respond, by continuing to love those who hate them, and by continuing to go about doing the Kingdom work that God has given them, ministering to widows, lepers, and orphans, and allowing nothing to get in their way. I’m not good at loving my enemies yet (but, I also don’t have many people trying to persecute me here in America)…but God will work through us all to spread his message of love!

Also, I’d be interested to know more about this statement:

I feel that love alone is not enough in this religious climate

Thanks!

Anyway, while religion is certainly behind the surprisingly large number of Jesus stickers on cars and bikes here, and yes, we sure do need a lot more love to go around than actually does, I feel that love alone is not enough in this religious climate. And being different may mean being excluded. There is a lot of conformism still, especially in “spiritual” not religious matters. Living the Zoe life is a state of being, not doing, and Bangalore is one place where living this Zoe life can indeed be a challenge! All the best to Austin for the rest of his stay here.

It is that we humans have a tendancy to want “experts” to tell us what is the right thing to do, how to live our live, what the Bible means, etc. I just can’t fathom that that is what Jesus had in mind. He wanted to reach all of us…the whole world.

Love God and love your neighbor.

It is a short and very succinct sentence. I’ve spent most of my life trying to understand it and how I can live it. I fall short everyday.

Thanks for your post. And wow! it must be amazing to be there.

To respond to your post - all I can say is YES! For me religion has seemed to make something that Jesus made simple - complicated.

Don’t misunderstand my use of simple and complicated. Loving God and loving your neighbor is hard sometimes.

Religion makes it complicated and impossible. At least, that has been my experience.

When I am operating out of love - things just flow. I still have to make hard choices about how I spend my time and money - and I fail a lot. BUT it is pretty simple - am I loving my neighbor when I make this choice?

You’re right on the money. Reading back, there’s a couple of things that I could have made clearer or changed…I didn’t have a chance to read back through before I sent it out to Randy and the other people on my list (being in India and such)….so yes, thanks for clarifying that.

Jesus calls us to live a life that is different from that of this world (that’s what happened in the Hebrew Scriptures as well…God calling a group of people to live by different rules, etc.). He calls us to operate on standards that are generally foreign to this world, and sometimes don’t make a lot of sense in the context of this world and its kingdoms (love your enemies, the last shall be first, the children are who you need to model your faith after, the least of these are desirable and the beautiful, etc.), and he calls us to do so while living in the middle of this world, and loving everybody we meet or interact with in this world (not condemning them), and participating in the things of this world. Jesus was nothing himself if not a man of the everyday people, not the religious elite, and he calls his followers to be the same way…loving, caring, different, inside of a world that trys not to be those things sometimes. If we separate ourselves from the “outsiders”, we’re no better than the Pharisees that Jesus gets frustrated with. Our job is to create a community that invites everybody to participate in our loving, playing, dancing, differentness, not a community that shoos people away until the meet our standards.

Maybe we’ve been trying too hard to make nations of all disciples, just like every other king and ruler does. Maybe it’s time to set ourselves apart from the world, intentionally. Not through condemning them, or through our words, or anything of the sort, but through our own lives and lifestyles and communities?

Austin, when you say ’set ourselves apart’ I assume you mean, be different - as in, be truly like Jesus, rather than, be separate - as in, form communities that exclude other people.

If so that sounds great to me!

Thanks for sharing your report from India with us.