Brother's Keeper

Last week my life was consumed with making a video for the end of Frank's sermon. His text for the day was the story of Cain and Abel. His illustration throughout was the mirror window principle, which has its origin from the book Good To Great by Jim Collins (a must read in my opinion). The idea is that when bad happens, we should look at ourselves in the mirror and do some self evaluation. The opposite would be looking through the window at others in the situation and putting the blame/issue on them. This is what Cain did with his brother. Rather than deal with the fact that he brought a poor offering--that his issue was between him and God, he got jealous of his brother and killed him. When good things happen, we look through window, giving others some responsibility, grace, and what not for allowing the good to happen. We see this all throughout the life of Joseph at the end of Genesis.

To close his sermon, Frank talked about us being our Brother's Keeper, at which point, we showed the video I built with the background music being Brother's Keeper by Rich Mullins.

But that's not the point of this post. As I was scouring the internet for images to put with the brilliant words of Rich Mullins, I came upon this flickr photostream of a guy who found healing from his wife's death by spending time with the homeless. I was so moved by his pictures and by his story, because they were so good, that there are three or four in the video. You should go read his story and then look at his amazing images.

Oh, here's my interpretation of Brother's Keeper (its 21megs--if you have a slow connection you may be waiting awhile)



One note on the video. . . those of you who aren't a part of South won't get the last image. This past February, our church collected peanut butter for Northwest Haiti Christian Mission. It became a huge thing--other staff vs senior minister. We collected over 5,000 jars of peanut butter--4 tons worth. That was a huge learning moment for us as we become our Brother's Keeper.

May you be your Brother's Keeper today.