Aaron and Anne-Sophie

Once a year the cherry blossoms bloom in DC and last for about week, although they peak for only a couple of days. Luckily the weather was nice enough for a brief moment for us to check them out at their peak. We posted a few photos for you to get a taste. Unfortunately the weather didn’t last and it even snowed a little last night.

There are 4 websites that you might be interested in taking a look at. First of all, our friends Ben and Aeri have created a website for the church’s Ugandan orphanage project that you can learn about and donate money to at: www.ycvm.org . Anne-Sophie’s sister, Florence, and her boyfriend, Clement, are traveling for a year across South America and Asia. They have a travel blog (in French) with photos that you can check out: http://embarquement.canalblog.com/. They’re in Guatemala right now, where Anne-Sophie and I went on our first international trip together. My friend Joel, whose travel stories across Asia I once posted on our site, wants to put together a photo exhibit tour of his recent trip to Palestine to put a human face to the Palestinian Christians in the region. Here is a link to see some low resolution samples of his photos. Let me know if you want to help fund his project. Please do not download the photos without his permission. Finally my old college roommate Dan plays piano for a latin jazz band in LA, so you can check out his band’s myspace site. If you’re in the area you can see him perform.

Last month social justice minded religious leaders from all over the country gathered in Washington DC to advocate that our country be led by a new moral compass which should be centered around children. Though other religious groups like to debate about the start of life before birth, we focused rather on the quality of life after birth. 9 million children in the US live without healthcare. Globally, thousands of children will die daily due to preventable diseases, poverty, and conflicts we directly or indirectly support or ignore. Millions may die to causes related to global warming. The children of now suffer needlessly simply because they happen to be born on the wrong side of the border, and the world we’re leaving for our children of tomorrow is disintegrating. We had to speak with urgency to congress as if every child left behind was our own child. According to Bonhoeffer, “the test of morality of a society is what it does for its children.” Do we pass that test? Although the conference covered many issues, I just wanted to highlight a few that struck me and that you can act on. (more…)