Oh the Holidays!

Ohhhh the holidays! Where time moves at WARPED speed and there never seems to be enough hours in the day. Add some crazy jetlag and a wicked cold and each day gets that much shorter. It gets harder to find the quiet time you need: Peaceful time with your Heavenly Father and slowing down to "smell the roses." It's easy for this season to be corrupted into something it was never meant to be. A time of closeness, love, joy, and thankfulness can easily be skewed into greed, discontentment, anger, and dissatisfaction. 

Think about it: This season is all about thanking God for sending his only Son, Jesus, to this earth to save us. What's even more fantastic is that God knew all along what he was doing when He sent His son as a baby born into poverty, laid in a mucky manger, and greeted by barn animals and shepards (who, in those days were crazy loners). He was wrapped in dirty clothes and was completely defenceless. Our glorious savior was placed in the most unlikely of situations so that no one could say, "God just couldn't understand what I'm going through." He knows. He lived it. That is the reason for the season: God so loved us that he gave us his only Son to be the savior of the whole world.

This is the kind of wonder I've been in constantly while in Thailand. Each child in the slums, each prostitute in the bar, each orphan, every human being there (and everywhere) is brilliantly and wonderfully loved by the great Creator of the universe.  There, it seems that the love is so much more tangible because so many have never felt real love before. As soon as you tell them how Jesus loves them, you can see it in their eyes that they have never known that kind of love and care.

I challenge everyone to try to imagine how tangible the Father's love is for His children this season. The same love is available and abundant all year round, but I challenge you to recognize it in THIS season where it's so easy to be distracted by basically everything else.

Here is the online Christmas service from my church (Overlake Christian Church). It's super short and talks a lot on what I have just discussed. Enjoy!


Home for Christmas from Overlake Christian Church on Vimeo.

Calling ALL Men!

Hey MEN! Yes... you! I'm calling out to YOU! I am calling out to you to tell you that YOU were called to GREATNESS! You were designed to protect, provide, defend, and be strong.


One of the things that fascinates me the most about the sex industry is how contradictory it is to what really brings happiness, wholeness, and joy. The sex industry says, "Hey, sex is fun, it feels good, so why not do it? Who cares who you do it with? As long as it's consensual, no harm, no foul." It teaches you that looking at porn is harmless. It's just you in your room watching something on your computer...you know... doing your thing. Here comes the buzz kill: It does do harm and it won't bring your lasting joy.


I'm not even going to talk about this on the woman's (or supply's) side. I want to talk about the demand side: The men.


The men who come to Pattaya to take out a bar girl start to all look the same after a while. They all seem to be in the same latter years of their lives (between 50 and 80 years old). Many of them have been married before, have families, daughters, sons, even grand kids. They often walk around without a shirt on despite their giant pot-bellies and carpet on their chest. In my experience, they have been rude and ungentlemanly (not holding doors, getting up from their seat on the song teaw when an older woman gets on, not making apologies for knocking someone while walking, etc.). They are misfits. They are the kind of men who wouldn't get very far with any other self-respecting woman from their own country. They have been rejected, unloved, and emasculated by life's challenges. They are far from champions.


They come to Pattaya in search of one thing, but really it masquerades as something else. They come for sex, but what they really want is love, affirmation, something REAL. They will, of course, deny all of this saying that they want something easy and uncomplicated, but think about this: What kind of an ego blow is it to have to PAY for sex or a girlfriend? Talk about settling. These guys come to basically settle for something that has the facade of the "real thing" but is so far from it that they have to pay for it to continue.


Now, onto the porn. It's known that many of the women in armature pornographic images and videos are trafficked. They are moved around so fast that no one can tell if something is wrong or not. As spoken about in the video below... well... watch the video:



Jacob's Story from Unearthed on Vimeo.




Here is the point of this all: The demand is the biggest part of the problem. It's time to stop beating around the bush and take some responsibility. Every time you brush off this responsibility, you become less of a man. My blog. My opinion. Man up!! Do something about this. Stop the demand!

I have more to say on this subject so: TO BE CONTINUED...

Intentional Juxtaposition

Some of you might thing that the name and décor of my blog are perpendicular to the content of the majority of the posts. I don’t see these details as being incongruous because the general nature of my posts. They are sad, depressing, horrible, and can leave you feeling hopeless sometimes. My intent of keeping the colors bright and the title bubbly is to offset this darkness with some level of blind happiness. It’s not my intention to bring you down and keep you down. It’s to bring you to the level of evil that exists and is accepted in this world, look it in it’s sordid troll-like face, and remember that there is HOPE in this world.



I would like to write about hope at the moment. If everything were as it’s supposed to be, there would be no discrepancy and evil on the earth. What would people have to hope for if every need was already provided and present? Because evil exists, hope does too. I find Joy in this thought. You can find hope is the craziest of places:

• In the middle of a war when your next breath isn’t certain
• In the dark hotel room where a young girl is held captive for her pimp’s profit
• In an impoverished family struck with HIV/AIDS

All these scenarios have one thing in common: you hope to never be living it. True, people don’t HOPE for terrible things to happen to them or their loved ones (or anyone else rather), but the mater-of-fact is that they DO happen. The fact that they DO happen allows for something magical to occur: HOPE! The soldier fighting for his/her country hopes to be one day reunited with the family and friends they love. This hope fuels their fire to press on. The girl who is stuck in the hotel room may not know there is hope, but the fact that more people know about human trafficking today than 10 years ago lends itself to one day restore this girl’s hope. She may hope for rescue, but chances are, she has shut herself off completely and no longer feels as a human being should. We have the ability to hope FOR her. We can HOPE for her RESCUE and RESTORATION. Either way you slice it, the situation isn’t without hope. Lastly, the impoverished family stuck with an incurable, life threatening disease may not seem like the most hope-filled situation, but there are doctors and aid workers laboring everyday to find a cure and provide anti-viral medicine to those affected with HIV/AIDS. I hope for a better future.

In the times when it’s the most difficult to find good, HOPE!



So I know that my happy colors, silly title, and picture of a puppy are pretty surface level and doesn’t probably make you hope for better than what is current, but it’s an attempt. It’s my HOPE that you feel a CALL TO ACTION instead of getting down in the dumps and defeated by evil. If I have to keep the happy colors, silly title, and the Daily Puppy to remind you there is good in this world, then I’ll do just that. It’s not my severe ADD, it’s my HOPE for you as a reader.

And now, my cute puppy:

How could that keep you from hope?