don't look back

I gave out some of my support letters at church this morning. I guess it's real now, no looking back. I did realize after getting home from church that I didn't put any info in the letter about getting money to me, should anyone decide to donate. I suppose the people I go to church with can probably just give it to me when they see me. But now I need to make a little thing to put in the envelope with my address etc on it. I have so many emotions about going to Africa. I can't figure out if I'm happy, excited, scared, apprehensive, crazy. Probably at least a little bit of all of them. This morning we talked about "persecution and suffering among Christians." It made me a little bit sad, because we as American Christians think we're being persecuted when the media paints a picture of Christians as being naive and having blind faith. Or maybe we think that OUR suffering is more of a psychological thing, like, we are really suffering when someone thinks negatively about us or talks badly about us. So then we had a discussion of how mental/psychological persecution might be harder to recover from than physical persecution. While I agree that there are lots of ways to be persecuted psychologically and mentally, I really don't think most Americans have ANY idea of what real suffering is. Over in India right now, thousands of people, quite a few of whom are Christians, are having to HIDE IN THE JUNGLE!!, because Hindu extremists have been burning homes and churches to the ground trying to kill them. How's that for physical AND mental persecution. We as Americans don't have to worry that when we go to sleep at night some anti-Christian group is going to torch our house with us in it. It just makes me sad that we take our puny little "persecutions" and try to make them as bad as what the rest of the world is going through. This economic "crisis" we're going through right now, to me it's like, yeah welcome to how the rest of the world lives. Only even when we're in an economic downturn, we still are better off than almost the whole rest of the world. I guess that's enough ranting for now.