Category Power Through Weakness

Placing roses on the mass graves.

Almost exactly a year ago today I received a text message while at work at Baxalta; it said that dad had been in a car accident and totaled the only vehicle that my family had. I informed my boss of the situation and he being the amazing human being that he is, may God have mercy on his soul, told me to go home. On the way home I was praying and fighting with the Spirit regarding how I felt about the situation. I arrived at the freeway exit and hit a red light, while waiting for it to turn green so I could turn left to get home; I felt God ask me why I didn’t join my dad in ministry. I responded angrily and tearfully while beating the poor steering wheel of my car yelling, “My dad gives to the poor, loves people, and if anyone has ever trusted You in faith he does!” “Yet he is always broke, always abandoned by his friends, and can’t even own a car!” “If this is how you treat those who give everything to You and trust You in faith then I want no part of it, no thank you God, I don’t have enough faith and you don’t take care of my family enough, to abandon all my hard work for You.” I was expecting Him to respond in anger or condemnation but instead I felt the Spirit ask me what it would take for me to join dad in the ministry; I asked for a salary. I told Him that if he could match 60% of my Baxalta salary I would quit my job and join dad in full time ministry, but the money couldn’t come from donors, couldn’t come from Mission Critical, and couldn’t come from dad’s business; it had to be free of all strings and just magically appear into my account every month. If God could answer that one simple prayer and show me that He does indeed take care of His children who trust Him at all times then I would walk in faith to wherever the Spirit led.

Less than a week later I felt spiritual warfare all around every aspect of my life. I could sense demons stalking me everywhere I went and I could sense angels praying for me and encouraging me. Obviously I was terrified and oddly curious as to what was going on. I spent hours in prayer, reading the word, and doing everything I could to minister to anyone I ran across. The spiritual presence intensified to the point that I walked outside at 4 in the morning with my hands raised in the air yelling at God, asking Him what the heck was going on! He responded, “trust me at all times, abandon everything and follow me.” A few short hours later I parked my car at an unknown location in downtown Atlanta and simply walked away from it, threw my keys off a bridge, threw my phone on the ground shattering it, and threw my wallet into someone’s mailbox; odd I know. The spirit strongly encouraged me to perform a miracle and told me, “We will walk and not grow weary, we will run and not faint.” So I walked, ran, walked, and ran all over Atlanta without saying a word for the following 28 or so hours. Never grew tired, nothing hurt, never grew hungry, and had no sore muscles the following day. While walking I saw many signs and wonders as well as many visions, some of which have been explained since, most of which are still a mystery to me. However, at the end of the walk I could not remember my name or where I left any of my belongings so I was committed to a psych ward. I have no idea how my family found me but they did and came and collected me.

Several months later after applying for veteran benefits I was declared disabled both physically (bone spurs on my feet and loss of hearing in my left ear) and mentally (PTSD). I received a disability pension that equaled 80% of my Baxalta salary and at that moment I knew God loves His children and can indeed do mighty miracles through those who trust in Him at all times. So I joined Mission Critical full time as we started planning several trips for 2016.

The first trip was to Colombia and I wrote 2 blogs of my experience there and I highly recommend to anyone who wishes to please read them, one was about the children in poverty there and around the world,  the other was about veterans here and abroad.  Both were written from the heart and difficult to write but expressed what the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is doing around this world with both children and veterans from my point of view. While those blogs came from the heart and were hard to write both pale in comparison to the experience I had in Rwanda.

Rwanda, oh how I could write from now till Jesus returns about the blessings and trials that country is and has been through and it wouldn’t cover a fraction of the feelings I have for that country. I read many military briefs and summaries of Rwanda while I was in the Navy, both of the failure of the international community to step in during the genocide and of the massive accolades that Rwanda has received for it’s humanitarian work since then. When I started working for Mission Critical and I heard that we had a contact in Rwanda who was working to build a Mercy’s house there and how he wanted us to come and preach there my first response was; who are we that Rwanda has anything to hear from us? We are not worthy to set foot in that sacred country; on that sacred ground. Yet in July of 2016 Rebekah, Brooke, Dad, and I stepped off a plane onto the tarmac in Rwanda, and THAT story alone is a miracle that needs to be told on another day. When we stepped off the plane, the same angels that I heard praying for me in Georgia were singing praises to God for us around the airport. I never felt closer to God than the day I went walking in faith in Atlanta, and stepping off the plane in Rwanda.

But what was it specifically about Rwanda that is so hard to write about? Is it the genocide that happened? The fact that that genocide happened during my lifetime? The fact that I remember watching it unfold on the news as a kid? Yes and no. On our first day in Rwanda, my first time ever visiting Africa, we ran many errands to finish the final preparations for the many crusades that pastor Ndagijimana had planned for us, also on our first day in Rwanda we discovered that not only had Ndagijimana finished and finalized the paperwork to make Mission Critical Rwanda a legitimate entity in Rwanda but that he also planted five churches under it. So now not only are we a mission team in Rwanda trying to start building an orphanage there, we are the heads and representatives of five new churches in the country, shocking news to us. After running many errands to finish preps for the crusades he planned we visited the genocide memorial. Let me say that nothing prepared me for what we were about to see.

Preaching in Nygatare

We arrived at the museum and I noticed that they were selling roses to place on the graves, the proceeds for the sales would go to the families of the survivors. “Magically” there “happened” to be 5 roses left for sale, there were 5 of us, so I bought them and we walked down to the graves. I had no idea what to expect from this visit or what the graves would look like but as we walked down the steps I saw 5 large slabs of concrete surrounded by black walls with red roses bushes, the blocks of concrete looked like half finished basketball courts to me, rough and just sitting on the ground with no edging. When it finally hit me what those blocks of concrete were; I audibly gasped, I started shaking, and had to remind myself to breathe. I was looking at the unmarked unfinished tombstones of 250,000 people. My dad happened to be nearby and I grabbed him violently so I wouldn’t collapse. I couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe, and couldn’t walk. He gently but forcibly shoved me forward trying to remind me, I guess we haven’t talked about it since, not to make a scene at this place of remembrance. At the bottom of the steps, there was a wall with many names on it. I thought at first how odd it was that SO MANY of their first names were the same, then I realized that they listed the last names first. Because this was a genocide of a specific ethnicity of people and of course they wiped out whole families, so this wall has at one spot 26 last names that match, the entire family. The rest of the museum is dedicated to laying out the history of the country, the theology and colonial history that led to the genocide, the actual daily events of the genocide, and the aftermath of the genocide. Before colonialism Rwanda did not have different ethnicities, just a social caste system that presented titles to different Rwandans based on their wealth or social standings. The Belgians took this caste system and made it, forcibly, into different ethnicities in order to more efficiently rule over the Rwandans. After Rwanda became free this social order remained and the church even got in on it by teaching Hamitical theology to support the idea that some Rwandans were born lesser than others, children of Ham. This entire situation came to a head in the 90s where the government spent at least 10 years planning the genocide as a final solution to the problem of the children of Ham and set in motion the Genocide. 1 MILLION people killed in less than 100 days, faster and more efficient than the Nazis. Afterward the “children of Ham” took over the country and wiped out all records of ethnic background and basically forgave the perpetrators of the genocide. Sentences were handed out but in our eyes would be considered very lenient. How do you punish 2/3rds of your country for killing the other 1/3rd of the country, there wouldn’t be enough jails or gallows to hand out actual justice.

THIS is the Rwanda that shocked me. As an American I’m used to stories of gross injustice where a hero rises up and overcomes evil. While that story IS there, the oppressed people rose up and using sticks and stones defeated the government forces who had guns and tanks and stopped the genocide, but the ending surprised me. How can you forgive, how can you move on, how can you let people who machete’d unarmed men, women, and children in the streets return to normal life after only repairing a road here and a house there? How does Rwanda today set the example of humanitarianism in Africa only 20 years after the genocide which had deep systemic racism for the 150 years before that? Obviously from my point of view God worked a miracle but these aren’t the kind of miracles I was taught in American churches. I’m used to the miracles and stories of God stopping injustice and punishing the sinners who abuse the innocent. I’m not familiar with the stories of how God seemingly turns a blind eye to horrible horrendous offenses and then FORGIVES the offender. I’m familiar with the God who protects the innocent, not the God who allows the innocent to suffer so that He wins over the abuser.  While I earnestly believe that every victim of the genocide was and is dearly loved by God who comforted them in the afterlife for their suffering. I also learned from Rwanda that the same God forgave and loves millions of the perpetrators who committed the genocide and comforted them in the afterlife from the guilt of their actions. That is why the visit to Rwanda shocked me so badly that I had to remind myself to breathe, but also took me months of reflection before I could write a blog about it.

The blue choir

What does my story in Atlanta have to do with this? Minutes after throwing my keys off the bridge I was led into a tunnel that had beautiful murals on both walls of African women in blue dresses who were staring at me, their eyes and expressions followed me through the tunnel; as if to say, “don’t give up Levi, we need you.” Two weeks after visiting the museum I was scheduled to preach a sermon to our new church in Nyagatare, a border town in the North East of Rwanda, and as I stood up to preach I realized I was preaching to the choir from Kigali, Rwanda’s capital and our base of operations in East Africa. They were all beautiful Rwandan women wearing blue dresses who were staring earnestly at the American who was about to deliver God’s word. During my sermon I was reminded of that vision so I forsook my notes and mentioned it to them. I don’t know entirely why God wanted me in the ministry, I have nothing to offer, but I do know that during the genocide which rocked Africa and the entire world in 1994, He knew I’d visit that museum and learn something about how He truly works and what forgiveness actually looks like. The story of redemption in Rwanda, redemption in my life, and the Bible for that matter is not a story of an underdog who overcame evil and stops injustice from happening. It is a story of an innocent defenseless man who is brutalized, tortured, and killed and yet forgives all involved. Just like Rwanda is a story of a group of people who were brutalized, tortured, raped, and killed and yet forgave all who were involved. Rwanda could have easily rejected the Gospel of Jesus which was taught hand in hand with Hamitical theology for 150 years and returned to their tribal ways which were very peaceful for thousands of years. Instead on that museum etched in the wall are written these summarized words, “While the Europeans brought racism and genocide, they also brought modern medicine and the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and for that we thank them.”

Probably the most chilling and yet amazing words I’ve ever read.

Back in 2011 I wrote a blog entitled Power Through Weakness where I explored Paul’s motif in 2 Corinthians 12 regarding His thorn in the flesh. I later wrote Power Through Weakness II in 2012 where I explored Jesus’s weakness that translated into the greatest victory of all time. In my own experience, I have been sick with Systemic Lupus for over 14 years. The easiest way to explain what that is like is that it is like having the flu everyday for 14 years. Some days it is a light case and some days it is a heavy case but it is always the flu.

And yet I have seen God do more of the miraculous and powerful in my life and ministry since falling to this incurable disease than my whole life before. But sometimes I forget and begin to get discouraged about my condition. This year I have spent as many days in bed as out of bed and I have “missed” work and ministry opportunities as a result and this plagues my mind at times. Currently I have been down for 10 weeks with a flare up and was beginning to wonder what God is up to. I have amazing global opportunities before me this year and I so want to be strong.

This last weekend my wife and I traveled to Dallas/Ft. Worth and I was blessed to speak at a ministry function. We then went to our dear friend’s house and I was so sick I thought I was going to die. I made it through the night and we went to church with them the next morning. I was never so surprised when the pastor stood up to speak and he said, “Well folks as most of you know we have been preaching through the book of 2 Corinthians and today finds us at 2 Corinthians 12:9-10 –

Each time he said, ‘My grace is all you need. My power works best in weakness.’ So now I am glad to boast about my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ can work through me. 10That’s why I take pleasure in my weaknesses, and in the insults, hardships, persecutions, and troubles that I suffer for Christ. For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

The pastor then proceeded to preach a beautiful, powerful, passionate message entitled “Lessons From Thorns”. I sat there as the tears dripped off my beard and thanked God for the providential message straight to me. After the message, our friends commented that it was the best and most passionate message they had ever heard him preach in the 3 years they have attended there. I was so encouraged.

But my surprise was not yet complete. Many in my family have been reading a daily devotional together and the topic that particular day was Strength Through Weakness from 2 Corinthians 12:9-10… WOW! Ok, Lord!… but my surprise was not complete yet… Later that night my wife was reading a different devotional for women that she and my daughter are going through together and the topic… you guessed it! Strength Made Perfect in Weakness from 2 Corinthians 12:9-10… Very humbly now, I looked to heaven with arms thrown wide and quietly said, “Yes Lord, I want your power more than my comfort. I want your strength more than my strength. I lovingly submit to your sovereignty and I excitedly anticipate the mighty things that You are planning and will perform while I remain weak in Your arms.

Matt Bullen

On January 30, 2011 I wrote a blog called Power Through Weakness that is near and dear to my heart and to which I received much positive response. Here is part II.

“Have you never yet learned the lesson that the Holy Ghost works with mighty power, while on the human side everything appears feeble?” – Andrew Murray

Jesus is our example in everything and readers of this blog and those who have attended mission trips with me know that I love to highlight certain areas in Jesus life that are heroic and admirable and encourage the imitation of such. But in re-reading Andrew Murray’s sermon Absolute Surrender, I remembered another area of Jesus life worth exploring. His weakness.

Some of the most anointed and powerful victories in Jesus life and earthly ministry occurred at moments of His greatest human weakness.

Take for example His being tested in the wilderness for 40 days. After fasting, being alone, no comfortable bed, no shelter, with wild beasts, and so on for 40 days Jesus must have been nearly as weak as a human being can get but no one can deny the incredible power of the Holy Spirit that was upon Him as He thrice defeats Satan, the arch tempter of the universe. Luke says, “Luke 4:13-15   When the devil had finished every temptation, he left Him until an opportune time. And Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about Him spread through all the surrounding district. And He began teaching in their synagogues and was praised by all.” In His human weakness the Holy Spirit was strong. And so with us.

Again, at the well of Samaria Jesus is so exhausted and hungry that the disciples leave Him there and go into town to buy food. But though He is weak in body Jesus is full of the Holy Spirit and He begins to witness to the Samaritan woman and a whole town gets saved. Power through and in spite of weakness.

There are others (asleep in the ship but rises to calm the storm, weary and seeking a quiet place but ending up feeding 5 thousand, and more) but one of the most heart-wrenching examples may be in the Garden of Gethsemane.

About this Andrew Murray says, “Look at the Lord Jesus Christ in Gethsemane. We read that He, ‘through the eternal Spirit,’ offered Himself a sacrifice unto God. The Almighty Spirit of God was enabling Him to do it. And yet what agony and fear and exceeding sorrow came over Him, and how He prayed! Externally, you can see no sign of the mighty power of the Spirit, but the Spirit of God was there. And even so, while you are feeble and fighting and trembling, in faith in the hidden work of God’s Spirit do not fear, but yield yourself.”

And who could miss the significance of Christ’s human weakness at the trial, the scourging, and the cross. And who could deny that though outwardly it appeared that the young Rabbi from Galilee had lost and lost big yet behind the scenes the greatest victory in history was taking place!

Let’s not get distracted with our weakness and our losses in this realm and forget that just behind the curtain God may be doing something incredible as long as we stay submitted to and resting in Him.

Blessings,

Matt

Read Part III HERE

One of the P’s from the ministry of Jesus that I shared with our team on our recent trip to Bogota, Colombia was Power. At the end of the devotion I shared that the path to power is weakness. Here are some more thoughts on this subject.

Wonderful words from the book Spirit Empowered Preaching by Arturo Azurdia about power through weakness. Applicable to preacher and Christian alike.

“In a vestry in Aberdeen these words were used to confront the preacher ere he mounted the pulpit stairs: ‘No man can glorify Christ and himself at the same time.’ If the Holy Spirit is to speak through the preacher and the preaching he must have clear passage – not through a void, but through a mind and personality laid open in all its delicate and intrinsic parts to the operation of the Spirit, to the end that his total powers may be willingly and intelligently bent to the present purpose of God.” – William Still

“What is the requisite of such dedication? A man must recognize the significance of his inabilities. All that has been thus far set forth in terms of prayer and exegetical diligence grows out of one all-encompassing recognition: any attempt to proclaim the word of God will prove futile if the only strength in which to do so is less than divine. A major step toward experiencing the power of God necessitates a thorough-going recognition of our lack of it. Herein, then, is the third responsibility given to the man of God: the preacher must recognize, and even revel in, his own human inabilities.”

“Of the many paradoxes that appear in Paul’s Corinthian correspondences, one of the most significant is his recurring theme of power through weakness. Certainly this emphasis is taken because of the triumphalistic spirit so prevelant in Corinth. Such self-confidence invalidates the need for divine power and thus compromises the success of the gospel. Hence, Paul sets forth this apparent paradox on at least three occasions. The reader should take note of three similar phrases, or purpose clauses, translated ‘that’ which magnify the power-through-weakness motif. Consider the first:

And I was with you in weakness and in fear and in much trembling. And my message and my preaching were not in persuasive words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith should not rest on the wisdom of men, but on the power of God (1 Cor. 2:3-5).

Stated simply, Paul’s conscious weakness gave way for the faith of the Corinthians to come into existence by the means of God’s power. A second, and similar, phrase appears in 2 Corinthians 4: ‘But we have this treasure in earthen vessels’ (2 Cor. 4:7a). The message of the gospel, given to Paul and his associates, existed in frail, limited, and weak physical bodies. Paul elaborates:

we are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not despairing; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying about in the body the dying of Jesus…(2 Cor. 4:8-10).

What purpose did this serve? ‘…that the surpassing greatness of the power may be of God and not from ourselves’ (2 Cor. 4:7b). Paul’s evident weakness served to magnify the greatness of God’s power. Finally, Paul raises this paradox again in 2 Corinthians 12:

And because of the surpassing greatness of the revelations, for this reason, to keep me from exalting myself, there was given me a thorn in the flesh, a messenger of Satan to buffet me – to keep me from exalting myself! Concerning this I entreated the Lord three times that it might depart from me. And He has said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for My power is perfected in weakness.’ Most gladly, therefore, I will rather boast about my weaknesses, that the power of Christ may dwell in me. Therefore I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distress, with persecutions, with difficulties, for Christ’s sake; for when I am weak, then I am strong (2 Cor. 12:710).

If human weakness is the channel through which God most readily communicates His power, Paul was prepared not only to affirm his weakness, but to revel in it. Hence his steady theme is undeniably evident: God’s power is expressed through human weakness.”

“It may be asked, is this theme unique to Paul? One may answer ‘yes’ if the perspective from which this is being asked concerns the specific explanation of this power-through-weakness concept. However, without hesitation one must answer ‘no’ if the perspective from which this is being asked concerns the record of God’s dealings with His spokesmen. That is to say, the Bible records the similar experiences of men like Joseph, Moses, David, Elijah, Jeremiah and Hosea. The fact is, it is highly unlikely that any man will ever know of the Spirit’s power until he is willing to confess before God, ‘If You must hurt me to make me a suitable channel of Your power, then do so.’ Sometimes this pain may be visible to the naked eye. On other occasions it may be hidden from public view. But this is God’s most frequently employed means of equipping His servants.

Hudson Taylor once stated: ‘All God’s giants have been weak men.’ Why is this the case? Because a weak man possesses no confidence in his own strength. When desperate for power he searches outside of himself. Taylor went on to say, “God uses men who are weak and feeble enough to lean on him.”

Christian preachers are notorious for touting the successes of Charles Haddon Spurgeon, the ‘Prince of Preachers’, and rightly so. Unfortunately, few are aware of the weaknesses that providence inflicted upon him. Spurgeon was a man who experienced deep bouts of depression for extended periods. In 1858, at age twenty-four, depression struck him for the first time, and consequently afflicted him for the rest of his life. He confessed of occasions when he ‘could weep by the hour’. When his wife Susannah was thirty-three years old she became a virtual invalid and rarely heard Spurgeon preach for the last twenty-seven years of his ministry. Spurgeon suffered from gout, rheumatism, and Bright’s disease (inflammation of the kidneys). In fact, ‘one third of the last twenty-two years of his ministry was spent out of the pulpit, either suffering, convalescing, or taking precautions against the return of these illnesses’. In addition, Spurgeon endured a lifetime of public ridicule and slander. Occasionally, it was directed at him from unbelievers. Often, the source of the attack came from other preachers. How, it must be asked, did Spurgeon himself interpret these manifold experiences of suffering and affliction:

‘Instruments shall be used, but their intrinsic weakness shall be clearly manifested; there shall be no division of the glory, no diminishing of the honor due the Great Worker. The man shall be emptied of self, and then filled with the Holy Ghost… My witness is, that those who are honored of their Lord in public, have usually to endure a secret chastening, or to carry a peculiar cross, lest by any means they exalt themselves, and fall into the snare of the devil…. Such humbling but salutary messages our depressions whisper in our ears; they tell us in a manner not to be mistaken that we are but men, frail, feeble, apt to faint.’

God will have no competitors. For this reason He manifests His power through weakness.”

Now for some of my own thoughts on this. It is endemic to our human nature to loathe weakness and love strength. Every little boy wants to be Superman, Hercules, and the Incredible Hulk all rolled into one. But “God’s ways are not our ways” and “He has chosen the foolish things of this world to confound the wise.” Our Father wants us to rely completely on Him. He wants to be strong for us and receive our praise in return. He says, “Come unto me all you who are weary and heavy laden and I will give you rest.” He knows how bent we are on idolatry. He knows that if we had strength we would rely on it and not on Him. He wants us to be as little children totally dependent on our Father. When things are really rough and I am in a lot of pain and I have to preach or counsel someone, I don’t have to discipline myself to pray. It is automatic. All I can do sometimes is cry out “Father, Father, Father.” That is when the power comes. When I’m in Colombia and I see the great need and feel my utter weakness to accomplish it I hear myself in my spirit saying “Jesus YOU are sufficient for this” or “God overcome, God overcome.” Many times I just cry out from Psalm 63:1 “Oh God.” Sometimes all we can do is lean towards our Father in our spirit. We don’t even have the words, but like a little child we turn to our Father with a pleading look and “the Spirit helps our infirmities” when we don’t even know what to pray, He prays for us with “groanings which cannot be uttered.” I believe that we would see the hand of God in our lives much more than we do if we would quit trying to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and be tough and muscle through and instead do our work diligently but always with a sense of dependence and leaning on Him.

Spurgeon had all those difficulties but he continued to preach to over 10,000 people for 40 years. It is said that there were 15 steps leading up to his pulpit and as he ascended the pulpit, every time his foot would land on one of those 15 steps he would quietly say, “I believe in the Holy Spirit.” He knew that he didn’t have to be strong, just obedient. Hallelujah!

Remember Gideon in Judges 6 & 7? He had 32,000 men to go up against a much greater force of Midianites but then, “The LORD said to Gideon, ‘The people who are with you are too many for Me to give Midian into their hands, for Israel would become boastful, saying, ‘My own power has delivered me.’” (Judg. 7:2) so in the end, Gideon has 300 men. Total weakness. Why? So that it would be obvious to everyone that God had done it. He will not share His glory with anyone.

Even Jesus Christ, the God-Man accomplished His greatest work of all time and eternity through weakness, “since you are seeking for proof of the Christ who speaks in me, and who is not weak toward you, but mighty in you. 4 For indeed He was crucified because of weakness, yet He lives because of the power of God. For we also are weak in Him, yet we will live with Him because of the power of God directed toward you.” 2 Cor. 13:3 and Jesus gave all of the glory to His Father and His Father in turn glorified Him, “So also Christ did not glorify Himself so as to become a high priest, but He who said to Him,

“YOU ARE MY SON,

TODAY I HAVE BEGOTTEN YOU”;

just as He says also in another passage,

“YOU ARE A PRIEST FOREVER

ACCORDING TO THE ORDER OF MELCHIZEDEK.”

In the days of His flesh, He offered up both prayers and supplications with loud crying and tears to the One able to save Him from death, and He was heard because of His piety. Although He was a Son, He learned obedience from the things which He suffered. And having been made perfect, He became to all those who obey Him the source of eternal salvation, being designated by God as a high priest according to the order of Melchizedek.” Heb. 5:5-10

We constantly see Jesus in the gospels being “childlike” “I only do what my Father tells me to do…” and so on. He is our example. We must rest in our own inability and depend in faith on His ability and then we will see God pour out His grace and glory.

Why does God command us to do so many things that we are totally incapable of doing? So that we will come to the end of ourselves and realize that we cannot do it unless He does it through us.

“Blessed are the poor in spirit…”

Read Part II HERE