Celebration of Hope

My church does some amazing things with great regularity. Right now we are in the Celebration of Hope which is focused on world hunger in big ways. Check out www.willowcreek.org/coh08 .

This week, one piece is the Five Day Solidarity Challenge. As an act of solidarity with our brothers and sisters around the world, we are choosing to eat as they do. Several of us are doing this, and Day One so far is not too bad. A cup of plain oatmeal for breakfast, dry salad greens at lunch and about a half cup of rice and a piece of chicken about the size of a chicken McNugget (without the breading) and some more dry salad greens. Of course for me the big challenge was not burning the house down. I started the cup of water boiling this morning for the oatmeal and did not notice I lit the wrong burner. Pete's keys and a leatherette pouch with a microphone and cables started smoking and smoldering. Nothing like the smell of burnt PVC to wake you up. And then the rice tonight, almost but not quite crunchy. I will get the hang of this!

Second Challenge: Limit your consumption. How appropriate this being Earth Day and all. The really terrific idea is being conscious of ways to conserve and put those saved dollars in an envelope. This will go to a special offering on Mother's Day. Every dollar collected will feed more than six children.

Third Challenge Provide meals, actually Meal Packs. these are nutritionally complete packets developed by Feed My Starving Children. As a church we are meeting at various times and locations to help measure, mix, bag and seal and then box, are you ready for this: 3.5 million Meal Packs. These will feed 10,000 kids from Zimbabwe for a year. I think when we were shown the pictures of a little 8 year old boy, Omar, who weighed 19 pounds when he was first brought into Rescue Center and how he thrived on this concoction doubling his weight in two months, his hair growing back, I was hooked.

And for the next two weeks we will experince the World Market, where we can support Fair Trade artisans and be part of long term solutions to world hunger by supporting microenterprises. This is truly cool.

The Challenge is really not so daunting when I can see and do small reasonable parts that can still have an impact on world hunger. And maybe tomorrow I can do it without burning anything!