Project SWAP is happening this Saturday rain or shine. S.W.A.P. – Shopping with a Purpose is a charity garage sale with a twist. Food, fashion shows, music, and friends! With all proceeds going to Youth Without Shelter.

RSVP Here.

What creative ideas have you come across that integrate arts and justice in an event?

Check out this six-minute speech delivered to the United Nations by twelve-year old Severn Cullis-Suzuki (Canadian environmental activist David Suzuki’s daughter). This was taped 15 years ago and it is still a riveting message.

I think there was something I was suppose to talk about at the conference, but I ended up simply sharing a bit about my life and doing an anything goes Q&A for the rest of the time.

When it comes to speaking to crowds, I don’t think on-the-fly talks that can be done over the long haul. The truth is you can only ride your personality and past thoughts and experiences for so long. Every great communicator spends time working at their craft.

Still, I absolutely love meeting people exactly where they are and thinking on my feet, rather than trying to recall what I had intended to say.

When young person asked me, what’s the deal with people getting possessed?

What a fantastic question I thought. I broadened the term possession and shared about how possession is when people are overtaken by something.

I shared of an old room mate who had no issues doing the 30 hour famine everyday because he was ‘possessed’ playing Warcraft (Sorry Brian). I shared about how I can be possessed for hours online shopping at times just trying to find a way to save a dollar . I shared of how so often, not only with youth, but adults find themselves being different people when they’re with different people.

People are possessed when they are not being the person that they were created to be.

Jesus came to free us from this and walk with us on a journey towards relentlessly becoming the person that God had always intended for us to be.

I’ve been speaking at Teen’s Conference over the last few days. Looking into the eyes of these incredible emerging adults, I had forgotten how lost I was when I was their age.

- thoughts of ending my life secretly plagued me
- I mocked anyone who wanted to do anything significant with their life
- my journals were filled with darkness, death, and general destruction
- the bulk of any laughter that remained in my life was at the expense of others
- Every day I wanted to scream, but never did because I was more afraid of hearing the silence of no one really caring.

I remember telling people that I was sure that I’d be dead before I hit my mid-twenties, because I could see no further reason for existence. Life was just a sucky side trip on the way to oblivion. And anything worthwhile had already been done.

I could not have been more wrong.

Years back as a young punk kid, a friend and I stole some video games downtown.

Even worst, we put it in the backpack of another friend, without telling him. I remember sweating as I watched him prance through the metal detectors completely oblivious he was carrying our stolen goods.

Needless to say my friend wasn’t all too happy when he found out. He would later become the best man at my wedding. That in itself is a testimony to grace.

The heart-pounding part of the story is when we were in the mall later laughing about how we just scored, and a security guard yells out ‘Hey you!”

We tried to ignore him and just kept walking.

He quickly runs up to us. I almost urinate.

and he says “Gung hay fat choy!” (It was the Chinese New Year).

We make some small talk and he wishes us all the best.

Sometimes this is how I feel when I enter the presence of God. I’m exposed with all my failings, and as if He was almost oblivious to them all, He sends me forward with all His best.

It completely floored me when Ruth Ewertt of Yonge Street Mission shared that from a survey she helped conduct that “if youth felt a sense of love or belonging at home, even with physical or sexual abuse, they most likely would not run away and end up homeless.”

Everything in me tells me that I would leave an abusive situation. However, looking back I myself was excessively disciplined and I never ran away.Reflecting on this, I can’t even call it physical abuse because as much as I hated it I always knew there were good intentions somewhere underneath it all, proving Ruth’s point.

Even the times I did leave home, I would always eventually go back, because as wrong as what I felt they did to me was, I still felt that there was still something right about home. If what Ruth says is true, I’m guessing some of the kids may have been abused even less than I was, but when they ran away, they didn’t feel that they had anything to return home to.

It scares me to think that a lack of love or belonging may be the greatest form of abuse because sadly it changes my notions of a healthy home. There are many people I interact with where there have not been any reported cases of physical or sexual abuse, but this statement forces to me to change my assumptions on whether they are in a loving home. It is not enough for my family, or the families I lead to simply prevent physical or sexual abuse.

Ruth statement makes me feel like I’ve been in shock of all the wrong things. As bad as news-headlining type of abuse is, I need to be shocked by the lack of love and belonging that is being fostered in our own homes. When I reflect on how much I am loved by my own family and closest friends, street children are no different. They crave a sense of belonging and love just as much as I do, and likely more because they have received so little of it in their lives.

I am amazed at the capacity of the human heart to long for relationship even amid abuse. I am saddened that it was so difficult to come by for so many of the youth on the streets. Of all the labels I naturally place on street kids, ‘unloved’ has never been one of them. Youth at risk are not just victims, they are the undesired, the unwanted, the unloved. I use to feel that it was naive for people to think that street children are not dangerous.Now I feel it is completely naive of me to assume that they have had just as much opportunity of experiencing love as I did.

Of all the things I’ve ever wanted in my life, for the first time, I want the unwanted.

I just finished reading Reclaiming Youth at Risk. I had my doubts at first. It uses Native American child-raising philosophy in helping create redeeming environments for our youth today. It has caused me to have a much deeper respect for the natie american people as well.

A quote from poet Edwin Markham:

He drew a circle to shut me out.
Heretic, rebel a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win.
We drew a circle that took him in.