russbutcher.com

I was walking in our mission field (our neighborhood with 105 homes where people live that God seeks to have a relationship with!) last night with my family and one of our neighbors was pulling a wagon filled with very large pots for planting. We stopped to talk and hang out with the neighbors and found out that these planting pots that he was pulling back to his house were left over from the police “bust” of the marijuana “grow house” in our neighborhood.

Yes, I said there was one of those marijuana “grow houses” in my neighborhood! I know what you are thinking; “Russ, if you are such a great missionary in your neighborhood, why didn’t you know there was a marijuana “grow house” in your neighborhood? Wellllllllllll, it is simple….I think…..I always look for the positive in people and have a hard time suspecting negative things from people such as having a “grow house” in my neighborhood. Sounds great, doesn’t it! Actually, I am as naive as the next guy and had no clue!

Anyway! Back to the story! My neighbor explains that the police removed the pot (marijuana) from the pots and threw the pots (not the pot) in the woods behind the house. (Sounds like we need to call the EPA about dumping) While they were focused on disposing of the marijuana (I wonder if they built a fire with the pot, put on a grateful dead song and watched it burn? or if they held hands around the fire and sang cum baya?) Sorry, I am ADD!

Another neighbor went and got the planting pots, washed them out and began to make them available to other neighbors in our neighborhood to use in planting and gardening around the house! Isn’t that awesome!

Here’s what I thought! God does the same thing with us! He takes us, full of sin, deceit, and with all of our past baggage and cleans us up to be made available for use in His Kingdom! Isn’t that awesome!

It reminds me of something I mentioned in a service a couple of weeks ago about Kopi Luwak Coffee.

The links between creativity and pain, creativity and suffering are symbolized in the story of Kopi Luwak coffee, the most expensive, exquisite, exotic, flavorful coffee in the world. The story of what makes Kopi Luwak worth $300 per pound is the gospel in a coffee bean.
The Luwak is a rare kind of civet cat native to Java and Sumatra. In Africa the civet cat (or more precisely its sex glands) is the source of musk, the chief ingredient in men’s perfume. In Indonesia the civet cat is the source of the world’s best coffee beans. A lot rides on the health of these fox-sized creatures.
The Luwak has a very picky appetite. You might call it the Juan Valdez of the animal kingdom. It eats only the choicest, most perfectly matured coffee cherries, which it partially digests. The coffee beans then travel through the animal’s intestinal tract and are evacuated.
The hard bean is then collected, roasted, and brewed. Stay in an East Java plantation, and this is the coffee they might serve you for breakfast.
For the rest of the world, there are only about five thousand pounds of it available per year to people outside Bahasa, Indonesia—at $300 per pound. The most expensive coffee in the world carries the name “Dung Coffee”.

The message of the gospel: God can take the worst and turn it into the best.

Let’s look for opportunities to share God’s love in such a way that people will exchange ordinary living for an extraordinary life through the transforming power of Jesus!Walk across the street! Meet someone that needs Jesus!