Its the title of a book I picked up by Rolf Potts, and he defines it as leaving the ordered world to travel on the cheap for an extended period of time. It is pretty interesting so far, and I think I will enjoy the wisdom the author shares about traveling. I wanted to share witha quote from the book, which I think is especially relevant to our current sermon series at church.  He says this:

“The more we associate money with life, the more we convince ourselves that we’re too poor to buy our freedom”

This is something I have been thinking a lot about in the last couple months, and since Paul’s comment about his friends slogan which was “Live simple, Live free.”  I think as a culture, we enslave ourselves to our stuff.  We buy things that we think we need, and then we have to pay money to maintain those things, and so we just end up enslaving ourselves more and more.  We do this with no mater what we buy, houses, cars, motorcycles, iphones.  The ironic thing is that the more we own, the more we enslave ourselves.  I have been working hard to own less things, so that I can be more generous, and so that I can be more free.  It is hard, even this computer I am typing on can be a hindrance.  We think we can’t afford to buy our freedom, but financial freedom comes when we just stop buying more than we actually need.

What if we just bought what we needed, maybe even just what we needed to be comforable?  I picture everyone living in airstream aluminum trailers, with crappy cars, and no yard, but maybe that is just cause I grew up in Victorville.  But imagine what people could collectively do with all that money.  On the selfish side of things, people could travel the whole world, whereve they wanted.  And on the philanthropy side, we could make it so that everyone in the world has access to clean water.

I don’t think having things is bad, I just think it is sad that we are so enslaved to our stuff, and so caught up in the idea that money is all there is, that we believe we will never be able to buy our own freedom.

*Note: Kozmo did eventually fix his bike.

This school semester has really taken a beating on me!  I have been working full time and going to school full time which is why I have not blogged or posted any videos lately.  The school semester is winding down though, one month left, so expect more from me.

Cheers

Ryan

So I road up to Rosemead this morning to go to a small conference at a church about bridging the gap between the GLBT, and the church.   The guest speaker was Andrew Marin, founder of the Marin Foundation.  He had some really good things to say about the church, and about how we should respond to people in the GLBT community.   He summed it up in three basic points:

1. Its the Holy Spirit’s job to convict, Its God’s Job to judge, and its our job to love.
2. We are called to live in relation to and relationship with the GLBT community.
3. The number one way to encourage someone in the gay community to pursue a relationship with Jesus (which should be our goal as the church, not trying to make them straight) is to teach them, and affirm the belief that God exists, and desires a communicating relationship with them.

What I was so blown away by, was that this is really no different then how we respond to any community that needs Jesus, but for some reason we act so differently with GLBT community.  Anyway, if you have the time check out there site, themarinfoundation.org.  He was a fun speaker to listen to, and he had a lot of really good points.

On a completely different note, the 605 has got to be the worst freeway to ride a bike on.  It is so bumpy, and just overall scary compared to any other freeway I have been on, even the worse then the 710.  I am the only that feels this way?

And lastly what is up with the fires today, it is really gross outsibe, and I saw on the news that over 10,000 people have been evacuated from their homes.  Lets remember to pray for then today.

YAY!

The site is back up.  It was down for a few hours today, because of some glitch with our hosting site, but all is well again.

I thought I would also use this post to share some updates on what has been going on with trip planning.

We are pretty set on the cities we plan to visit, you can see those by going to our tour schedule page.  What we have been working on lately is getting all the church’s names and info together that we plan on visiting.  I am about 60% done with that, and I hope to be completely finished in the next week or so.  From there we are planning on trying to get a hold of these churches, via email and telephone, to schedule the time for us to stop by and visit.  When the list is complete we will have over a 100 churches that we plan on visiting, but for now, there are still a lot of cities where we don’t know of any local churches.  I am sure there are some there, but before I just start doing google searches, I thought I would list some of the cities we plan on visiting and seeing if any of you know of churches close to those areas. So here you go:

Baltimore, MD
Bowman, ND
Butte, MT
Cheyenne, WY
Coeur D’Alene, ID
Custer, MT
Des Moines, IA
Ellensburg, WA
Fairmont, WV
Franklin, NC
Keystone, SD
Knoxville, TN
Long Beach, MS
Louisville, KY
Manchester, NH
Memphis, TN
Miami, OK
Mobile, AB
Montpelier, VT
Murdo, SD
Nashville, TN
Oshkosh, WI
Pittsburgh, PA
Portland, ME
Providence, RI
Redding, CA
Richmond, VA
San Louis Obispo, CA
Seattle, WA
Sioux Falls, SD

I added a feature on the tour schedule page, that allows people to follow where we are on a map.  Check it out, and let me know if you think it works.