Pain -The Remedy of a vagabond

Person: A diamond is just a piece of charcoal that handled stress exceptionally well.

Anonymous

Thoughts: 

We experience pain to make us grow  -  divorce, unemployment , foreclosure, world recession  etc....The pain that bleeds thorough  my heart can't be quenched by tears or can't be affirmed trough  friends. It is a pain that goes deep and make you feel the emptiness of life and the anguish of pursuit. where do you go when you can't pray or cry any more... Where do you look to when the whole world around you has crumbled and fallen apart.... learn how to master failure..

Ideas 

Mastering failure is  a sure step of building positive confidence in your life. We need to learn to understand that failure is  a normal process and picking up  after failure makes you  more focused and have the ability to swing again. Try and learn the problem  and  don't point fingers. Your mind and heart have to reconcile the facts and move to a place  of safety where you can:  

• Ask what the lesson was? 
  
• Take another swing
  
• Figure out a solution

Prosperity Gospel - Where is your Influence?

Person:

Jesus feed the Hungry, why does the Church do the same?



Thought:

Food is universal, everyone on planet earth has to eat, yet people are dying and there is a lot of food wasted. All this talk about prosperity in the church and how God is going to bless you and yet the world is dying of Hunger.

Here are some sobering facts:

• Every day, almost 16,000 children die from hunger-related causes--one child every five seconds.
• 35.5 million people—including 12.6 million children—live in households that experience hunger or the risk of hunger. This represents more than one in ten households in the United States (10.9 percent). ¹
• 350 billion pounds (160 billion kg) of edible food is available for human consumption in the United States.
• Food Waste 100 billion pounds (45 billion kg) -- including fresh vegetables, fruits, milk, and grain products -- are lost to waste by retailers, restaurants, and consumers.

By contrast, the amount of food required to meet the needs of the hungry is only four billion pounds

Idea:

• At a personal level:
  
1. how much of your personal budget is spent on food
   
2. how much of your personal budget is spent on Starbucks
   
3. Do something
   
• At Community level:
  
• Don't just send Money go feed the Homeless
  
• Don't just pray go feed the homeless
  
• Don't just talk or blog feed the homeless
  

The Lost art of Discipleship -The Church Finding Community

Person: Jesus was a Politician and not a religious leader.


Thoughts:

G12 is successful when the society is a communal. That is the culture and people have so many things in common in their normal daily routines, Same factory located in one area, Same work time shift,Same mode of transport ion etc. That is why it is so successful in developing countries like Columbia, Kenya , Mexico. It becomes difficult, to apply all the practices of G12 in a more diverse and always mobile society as SO CAL.

However by finding COMMON interests, we can be able to thrive and grow and make the church become part of the community as an organic element- a movement from the grassroots - A SOCIAL MEDIA - "THE OBAMA EFFECT"


Idea:

• Obama has attracted a large crowd of people who were not in the political mainstream
• The campaign is built from the bottom up, not the top down- grassroots
  
• Focus on core issues of health care, employment, education and Social Security