Monthly Archives: November 2007

My Pet

 chiqui.jpgShe was 6 years  and a  homeless dog. We took her from the street, scared and dirty. She used to seat in a very particular way on our car seat, with her two frontal legs in the middle of the frontal seats and the other ones on the back seat. She always wanted to be aware of what was happening everywhere, she used to be jelaous with other dogs and only played with Schnauzer ones, she liked to sleep with us sometimes. Her name was Chiqui, my very special and unique pet.

I suposed almost all of us have had a pet in some point of our lives, particularly when we were children.But when we chose to have a pet its like adopting a friend, pets becomes part of our lives, they are always by our side, they dont blame or demand nothing from us, just love. They dont even get mad when we leave them alone at home, instead of being sad they just shake their tails with happiness.

I thought it was good to write a post about my dog and a good way to recall her. 

Chiqui died two weeks ago, she was sick for three days and then died, everything happened very fast. We took her to the Veterinary because she had fever and a severe diarrhoea and then had two convulsions. We did everything we could. Sometimes its hard to accept that we are not the owners of life.

Its amazing what a pet may become for a family, certainly is another member at home. I used to talk with my husband about how will we react when Chiqui will die, but as happens with humans, we realized we are not ready to accept dead. I never thought it would be this painful.

Someone told us ” Stop crying its just a dog, I would not spend my money to save a dog” they thought we were overeacting.

As Christians we are called to respect and love every expression of life, animals and plants  are part of God´s creation, we have to manage his creation with responsability. Its true that they were created for our benefit but we should try to not make them suffer.

After some days we decide to find a new pet, we wanted to adopt a homeless dog again.  I saw some pictures of dogs who were available for adoption, so we went to the SPAC (Sociedad Protectora de Animales de Colombia), and chose Yomi, 18 months age, she had been for 10 months at the shelter, waiting for a family. So we sent the application, they came to visit us, and now she is living with us.

Only in Bogotá 200 dogs per week are catched on the streets, old and sick ones must be sacrified, because these organizations doesnt have the financial resources to feed them. Most of the people prefer to buy dogs with pedigree. Very few adopt homeless ones. They need love the same as us.

Yomi seems to know she must behave well, she is obedient and its all the time behind me. Sometimes she got scared of people, but she is happy now.

I encourage you to share stories about those wonderful friends, our pets.

Making better use of the World Wide Web

There are so many good resources and new developments in the world wide web. But it is so hard to follow. A great way of keeping track is using RSS or real simple syndication. So you can subscribe to the rss-feed of lwfyouth.org and get updates when we publish new posts.

Tim has published a very short and easy how-to-guide to using RSS. So if you would like to focus your web experience a little bit more be sure to check it out.

Youth and Diakonia / social action

During this week, a small group of people from all regions gather here in Geneva to talk about a handbook on diakonia. Diakonia is a Greek word and means “service”. In the New Testament, it is often used when Christian love becomes practical. Acts 6 tells the story from the first church in Jerusalem calling “deacons” in order to care and to support the sick, the poor and the widows. Therefore, “diakonia” means the social action of the church.

I was asked to present in that meeting the role of youth in diakonia. On the one hand, I recalled some of the serious challenges young people are facing. In my analysis, the vast unemployment is the most pressing issue:

“The youth unemployment rate, a measure of the percentage of young people who are looking but unable to find work in the youth labor force stood at 13.5 per cent in 2005″i. Compared to 6.4% for the overall global unemployment rate. The difference to the adult population is even rising. 85 million youths are unemployed. 300 Million are “working poor” defined as earning less than USD 2 a day. That is about half of the employed youths.

International Labor Organization. 2006. Youth Employment Trends 2006, Geneva, p. 4

The problem is really vast and it is pivotal: If you have a job you can solve many other problems much better.

But something else is even more important: Continue reading

Annapolis

Only 45 minutes from my home, in Annapolis, Maryland, leaders from Israel and Palestine, along with ministers from other states, will meet and begin their conference on the future of Palestine and Israel and the entire region.  The expectations for this meeting are low, but the hope is that this will help jump start a new round of negotiations that will lead to a Palestinian state by 2009.

As usual, the Palestinians are the underdogs.  The conversation will focus, as it always does, as to whether Israel will actually comply with international law and therefore end the occupation of territories it has conquered.  Somehow, Palestinians are expected to make concessions and agree to relinquish control over territories that they have a right to, including parts of East Jerusalem and the entire old city.

Of course, the United States is not an honest peace partner.  Especially during this current administration, they have unequivocally supported Israel even as it blatantly defies international law by expanding illegal settlements in the West Bank.  Israel has been in violation of multiple UN resolutions for over 40 years, engaging in one of the longest running occupations in the world today.  If it were Iraq, or maybe Iran, then this could mean war.  But if you are our allies, then it is acceptable, and even encouraged.

Continue reading

Praying together

Christians have been praying for unity for a long time. Since 100 years, they do that during the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, for example. In January, people from different Christian churches celebrate worship services together and do even daily prayer.

The 100th anniversary was for LWF Youth a reason to join with many other Christian Youth Organization on the global level to encourage young people to pray together.

It is easy:

  • Check whether in your congregation are already services for the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.
  • Decide with your youth group whether a youth prayer service together with other young Christians is appropriate or whether you want to join the adult service and just have a youth-get-together afterwards. In any case, check with your pastor.
  • Ask other young Christians you know to plan the service together with you (That is important: Just inviting them is not enough).
  • Try to ask not just the people that typically hang out with but find others.
  • Advertise your ecumenical youth prayer meeting widely and let us now that you had it.

Here you find the official joint call in English, Spanish, French and German.

More Information is appearing on an LWF Youth issue page.

Taizé in Geneva

This morning, the chapel in the Ecumenical Center had unusual visitors. Every weekday morning, we gather here at 8.30 to have a short time of worship together. And people from many different organizations, Christian traditions and from all continents come. But today, there were 15 men in white robes sitting on the floor in the center of the sanctuary.

They were brothers from Taizé praying with us. This had a special reason. The ecumenical community from Northern France is preparing a European Youth Meeting here in Geneva at the end of December. Approximately 30,000 young people are going to come from all parts of Europe to stay with Swiss families, have three prayers a day and some bible studies and discussions.

For those of you who have never been in Taizé or have not experienced a Taizé prayer, it is quite special. For the most part, it consists of songs. In the last forty years, many songs were written by the community. They are always very simple, are prepared in multiple languages and are repeated very often. You can hear some examples here. After that, a bible text will be read – again in many languages. And then there is just silence. For several minutes nobody says anything. A colleague of mine said: “That is quite impressive. Usually, we are not able to be silent for twenty seconds…” The prayer concludes with some intercessions.

Afterwards, Brother Emile, Chandran Paul Martin (Deputy General Secretary LWF) and I were sitting together to prepare a bible study. This bible study is going to take place during the Taizé Meeting together with the World Alliance of Reformed Churches. The theme will be “The Word of God is not chained” (2 Timothy 2, 9). The workshop will feature stories and reflections how the word of God sets people free and how young people can claim that today.

So, if you are planning to come to Geneva for the Taizé Meeting or are convinced just now, please let me know and I would be very happy to meet you. I am sure we can arrange something.

The Global Christian Forum and young people

Last week, the Global Christian Forum met for the first time on the global level in Nairobi, Kenya. It was quite an achievement. It brought together people from faith traditions who in many cases do not speak to each other: Roman Catholic and Pentecostal, Historic Protestant (like Lutherans) and Evangelical. I think it is not exaggerated to see in this a “historic breakthrough” as the World Council of Churches calls it. There is too much pain because Christians said to other Christians: Your faith is not right.

We have to overcome the notion that it is possible that people who belong to Christ do not belong to each other. The meeting of the Global Christian Forum is an important step in this direction. However, where are the young people in this? At the Global Christian Forum, young adults were largely absent. It was a meeting of the leadership of churches and Christian organizations.

To be honest: I am afraid young people are in many cases rather part of the problem than part of the solution. It is us who are very enthusiastic about something and then are easy to dismiss those who think differently. If we are passionate about social justice, we have little patience with those who aren’t. If we are passionate about evangelism, we question whether people who have different priorities are true to the gospel. Certainly, this passion makes young people the driving force on the grassroots for many important movements.

But how can we become part of the solution. How can we develop this specific passion for unity? How can we support the process of the Global Christian Forum?

I am making a few suggestions: Continue reading

Youth, Media and Migration

Already buried by many others is a post by Emily about a UN initiative on youth and media. Now a friend from Nigeria is looking for contacts to film a documentary. Please check it out here:

http://lwfyouth.org/2007/06/19/un-plan-focuses-on-youth-media-migration/

LWF Youth and social networking

Yes, I am on Facebook, too. I am not very active and I am certainly a late adopter, but now I have my profile. And, yes, it is nice to see the faces of the people that I have so little chance to see in person.

Social networking is a fascinating tool to keep in touch with friends (and to kill a lot of time, too.) My job is to think about how we can use it best for international youth ministry. Here are a few ideas how to do that:

1. Make basic information about LWF Youth available.

2. Make it possible that young Lutherans around the world can get to know about each other and connect.

3. Use social networking sites as a platform to facilitate online discussion about specific topics.

Maybe, there are more opportunities. But I still have to think about it. There is always this obvious limitation: Many, many people do not have access to the internet at all.

Today, I started a facebook group. You can find it here and join: LWF Youth

However, I like much more the social networking site www.takingitglobal.org

It is run by young people who are concerned with social and environmental problems. It does not have advertisments and it is more serious than facebook. The site is simpler and it does not take so long to load if you have a slow connection. Therefore, I have decided to use it as our platform for youth liaisons and to have our online consultations hosted there. So please check out this platform and you could start with my profile: http://profiles.takingitglobal.org/lwfyouth

However, I am having second thoughts because the same would be possible with Facebook that obviously has already many more people. Therefore, in this post I simply ask to help me by answering the following questions:

1. How do you use social networking sites?

2. How could LWF Youth use them most effectively?

3. Is it the right thing to use takingitglobal or would it be better just to take facebook?

Council of Churches in Brazil going in its 25th year

A text by Thomas Kang from Brazil:

Twenty-five years ago, in the midst of political turbulences during the last years of the Brazilian military dictatorship, the National Council of Christian Churches (CONIC) was founded in 1982.
Nowadays, six churches are full members of CONIC: the Roman Catholic Church (Brazilian Conference of Bishops), the Christian Reformed Church, the Episcopal Church of Brazil, the Evangelical Church of the Lutheran Confession in Brazil, the Syrian Orthodox Church (Antioch) and the United Presbyterian Church.
On Thursday, the CONIC will begin its Ecumenical Missionary Conference. This event will coincide with the celebration of the anniversary of CONIC, despite the main issue of this conference is a very delicate one: mission and evangelism. It is important to deal with that issue since churches in Brazil which are members of CONIC felt a certain lack of ecumenical understanding on mission. Many pentecostal and neo-pentecostal churches are growing rapidly. However, the historical churches do not feel comfortable with certain features of the way that some of these new churches deal with mission. On the other hand, at the same time pentecostals are growing, the historical churches have been stagnated in membership growth. It’s evident that an ecumenical dialogue about this issue can be fruitful in order to find effective and respectful ways of making mission.
As an active youth participant in the ecumenical movement, I was invited to participate in this conference. I hope I can give you good news next week about youth, ecumenism and mission. Keep the Brazilian churches in your prayers.”