Several years ago, I told a dear friend of mine that I was praying God would pour down rain on her Gay Pride parade.

I’m not kidding.

But let me back up a little bit…

When I was in middle school, we moved to Ohio for 4 months and 23 days. I was the new girl with a slow southern accent. Most kids were accepting, but some had cruel prejudices about southerners.

Not Jenny.

She risked rejection by being my best friend from day one and because of her, I was welcomed everywhere I went.

Since then, she and I have grown up into a world that sometimes rejects both of us for different reasons.

Which leads me back to the day I asked God to rain on her parade—Jenny’s…the same girl who’d loved me and become my best friend when I was a friendless outsider.

I thought God would rain out her day and she would feel convicted and change her life.

I hate admitting that. 

So the parade came and went…and when I saw the pictures of her event bathed in sparkling sunlight, not a cloud in the sky, I was the one who was convicted.

I realized then the God who moves hearts with His Love doesn’t think like I do, and His ways are different than mine.

…So are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts higher than your thoughts.

 ~ Isaiah 55:9

But because God is merciful even to folks like me, a miracle happened anyway: she’s still my friend.

I rarely know what Jesus would do because 100% of the time throughout the Bible He did the opposite of what I’d expect and wowed everyone with His kindness, so I don’t pretend to know what Jesus would do.

But I know where He is: He’s in the midst of our parades, parties, and protests, searching us out and loving us back to life, back to Himself.

You say about Me, ‘Look at Him! He’s a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ But wisdom is proved right by her actions.

~ Jesus

{Matthew 11:19}

So it’s not even our sincerest efforts to make sure everyone is loved that makes anyone like Jesus, but our willingness to be rejected by our own people because of our deep love for every kind of person.

Even people like me.

People like me who clung to Scripture-lists of sinners who won’t be in Heaven, as if it were a formula, but refused to obey the list found in Isaiah 58.

But I’m done with that.

I’m so very done, because as I type these words there are children, stolen children, who won’t survive the night because they’ve been purchased to be used to death.

In my own city, I’m told there are children who never, ever have enough to eat.

This very night, there are souls wondering if anyone would miss them if they just went to sleep and never woke up.

There are abandoned elderly shelved in nursing homes with no one to visit them. Ever.

And I once felt the best use of my prayers was to pray rain on someone’s parade.

Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you.

~ James 1:27

I’m done, friends.

I hear my brothers and sisters calling out that Jesus is coming back soon…because He is. I know it too.

And according to Isaiah 58, we don’t have time to waste projecting our convictions onto other people when the sewers of earth are swallowing the very people Jesus told us to protect.

Pro-life has to mean life for everyone—not just the unborn so very few of us are willing to adopt, foster, or simply feed.

Jesus said it will be good for the servant whose Master finds him busy about His work when He returns {Luke 12:43},  and I don’t think that means behavior management.

I hear calls for REVIVAL, yet we’ve been given the recipe for revival in Isaiah 58 but most of us let it wash away in unimportance, along with the children and teenagers being auctioned right now.

I beg you, everyone who claims the risen Messiah as their Master, to read Isaiah 58 with an open heart before God, and if your conscience survives, then carry on with what you feel God is leading you to champion.

But if you’re like me and find you have a goliath 2×4 in your own eye, please exhale and remember how God saved you by His grace.

Then go save the world.

 ~ Isaiah 58 ~