Tsunami Tragedy

If you are like me, the news coverage of the tsunami and the unbelievable death toll has been beyond comprehension. I urge you to make a donation to a relief organization such as the International Red Cross. If each of us gives what we can, we can make a difference...whether it is $5 or $5,000.
https://www.redcross.org/donate/donation-form.asp

Also, I urge you to email President Bush and ask him to increase our national donation to the effort. We have given 15 million dollars so far, and yet that is a small amount in the face of such a horrendous disaster. His email address is president@whitehouse.gov

Below is a copy of the email that I just sent off to him.


Dear President Bush,

Thank you for the millions of dollars that you have already earmarked for the tsunami tragedy in the Indian Ocean region. Please, Mr. President, would you send more money? We have an obligation as the richest, most generous nation in the world to do even more! In the face of such unbelievable tragedy it is not only the Christian thing to do (speaking as a believer myself) but it is the humane thing and the political thing to do! We need to do more because it is the right thing to do... it will also be a testimony to our enemies that we are doers of the right thing as well. But most important is to do good where we can because we have been blessed and have an obligation to bless others.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Joanne Rojas

The Incarnation

I love Christmas.

The fact that God loved humanity that He would enter history as the most helpless of His own creatures--as a human baby--really blows me away. He left heaven to be born of an ordinary young woman, to be raised by ordinary parents, to live among us--simple and ordinary as we are. He willingly put himself into a position where he had to learn to walk, talk, eat and play like you or me. He wasn't pretending to be a baby and biding His time until He could--ta daa!--remove the mask and show that He was the Messiah. He really knew hunger and felt wet swaddling clothes and heard sweet lullabies and woke up Mary and Joseph many times in the middle of the night. He really put on human flesh so that he could be one of us.

This is the central message of Christmas that never gets old for me, that never gets buried by the commercialism and the hype. Jesus loved us so much that he lived and died and rose again--YES, that is the gospel. But it all starts with a squealing infant who needed his parents and was completely dependent on them for his very life. What a miracle.