Natalie Patton is an overly caffeinated, partly cloudy, always-scattered wife and mother of three tots living in Bangkok, Thailand. Pull up a chair, and you’ll find she’s part weirdo from being an expat in the Middle East and Asia for the better part of a decade. She’s a proud U.S. Air Force wife who lives with the cognitive dissonance of knowing war but seeking peace. She works with Somali refugees in Bangkok. When she’s not chasing down a tuk-tuk or letting her son sample fried grub worms on the street, she is found with a good book, a good recipe, or a good song. Follow her scattered life at https://nataliepatton.wordp
Posts By This Author
The Legacy of Patrick: Light in Each Other, and the Earth
Tragically, the separation of spirit from matter has tainted the way we see all of humanity. In the past, it was used to justify violence against the Native Americans, and in the more recent past we’ve dismissed thousands of casualties from wars in the Middle East. We have leaders today who consider war in Korea palatable because “if thousands die, they’re going to die over there.” This is a direct result of a theology that cares more about souls than it does bodies. It’s much harder to love our neighbor if we don’t see the divine, the Christ, within them. It makes it much easier to characterize entire swaths of people groups who don’t have “Jesus in their hearts” as being the enemy. It continues to pervade modern day missions that typify non-Christian cultures around the world as savages living in darkness, rather than looking for the light that is already present and using that as the starting point.
‘Never Again’ Is Upon Us During Advent Season
Image via Hafiz Johari/Shutterstock
I ask myself how we got here, why the American church has hardened its hearts to refugees when one of the major themes of the Bible is welcoming the stranger. How did we lose trust in a vetting system that has worked for decades? How did we begin to see refugees as dangerous when there is no statistical evidence to back it up? How did we forget that so many of us are descendants of people who were oppressed and looking for a better life? How did we stop seeing the beauty of American culture as coming from a collision of cultures? How did we lose our way — did it happen overnight or has it been slowly brewing for a long time?
8 Sayings Christians Use to Let Ourselves Off the Hook
Our toxic apathy is rooted in a lot of places, but sadly we don’t have to look any further than the church itself to find several excuses to not care for the poor, vulnerable, marginalized, and downtrodden in our community and in our world.