How Did God Burst The Bubble I Live In?

Thank you for your comments from my last post. I would like to reflect on some points from some of them from some of you who have been put in the position of seeing outside the bubble.

Morgan~ The first time God "burst" my bubble was when I visited the nursing home for the first time. I remember thinking about how selfish my life had become, and this was God pointing me to a purpose bigger than myself: serving "the least of these".

Susan~ He has pushed us to stop being selfish Christians. Oxymoron, right? But that is what we were and are still struggling to overcome. It started with deciding that if we loved God and we loved people, shouldn't our lives reflect that?
..........Tonight He continued to work on me as I wept uncontrollably over my selfishness and how much of my life I have already wasted on myself. I pray that I don't get sucked back into the "American Dream" Christian life, but that I can pick up my cross and follow Him. It is a constant battle.

Gretchen~ I used to live in a bubble, and am SO glad that God burst it. The hardest thing is that others in my family still do.

Staci~ God has "burst my bubble" pretty recently by opening my eyes even more to the world.. I have wanted to work with orphans overseas for years, but never as much as He has given me a passion for in these last few months. He has opened my eyes to the need to reach the unreached people in the world who have never heard the Gospel and I feel my heart being tugged in that area.

Here are a few examples from my own experiences
It started with me when my kids were acting rotten, when they were all age 10 and under. My husband and I loaded them up and drove downtown to look for homeless people on the street to teach them a lesson. Well, we found them. There was an Asian man, whom my kids nicknamed Jackie Chan, we met sitting on a bench, wrapped in a blanket with two trash bags beside him that held everything he owned. My husband got out with a couple of the kids and handed him some homemade pumpkin bread and coffee that we had brought along. He immediately said "God Bless You" and quickly sat up and scarfed it down. We sat and talked with this man and heard a bit of his sad story about had he had lost everything and had no family. My kids looked like deer in headlights. Their eyes were as big a quarters. We left and went home that night. All of my kids included Jackie Chan in their prayers for weeks to come. And anytime they acted up all I had to do was remind them of Jackie. That night burst our bubble. We left on a mission to quickly find some homeless people to teach our kids a lesson and God taught us one.

I later took my bible study group out to do the same thing. We couldn't find the homeless on the streets because it was cold. I drove to the only mission I knew of which was the men's mission. They told me to go to the women's mission. I didn't even know there was one. We got there, expecting to see typical looking, toothless, dirty, homeless women and were greeted by the smiling faces of children and mommas who were hurting because they couldn't provide for them. Again, I went out to try to teach my group a lesson and God taught us all one. That burst the bubble of my worldview, once more. I couldn't lay my head down at night knowing that those hurting people are just on the other side of town, which is why we have served there since then.

We set out to adopt a child from Africa. We knew a child would need us. We could rescue him, so to speak. We landed on the rich soil of Africa and braced ourselves for the poverty we had heard about. Expecting to see the worst, we were greeted with more love than we could have ever imagined by some of the poorest people in the world. They have nothing but yet they have everything. We have everything in America, but yet, we have nothing without the love of God. We were there to pick up our child from this country but yet God grabbed our hearts in ways we could never have imagined. We went, thinking we were doing them a favor but yet God burst our bubble once more. They did so much more for us than we ever could have done for them. They opened our eyes. We came home and could not lay our heads down at night, knowing that our son's country suffers with poverty as it does and not do anything about it. We have been serving there for the past two years and receiving more blessing from them than we could ever give.

These are a few examples of how we saw outside our bubble in which we live. In each instance it required that we take the first step in order to see it. You have to go. You have to step into it in order to be changed. God is waiting there every time.

Blessings.