This is way overdue, but this past week has just been full of ups and downs and I am finally able to flush it all out into my blogger! (that sounds gross)
Last weekend, three churches combined together in an effort called the 30 Hour Famine. World Vision and Nazarene Compassionate Ministries are the organizations the proceeds from the event goes to. The Famine is basically a weekend where participants agree to go a mere 30 hours without eating; A) to get a small feel for how those suffering with hunger and malnutrition feel on a daily basis, and B) to raise awareness and help fund causes like World Vision's mission teams that go to impoverished places and help start educational systems and give small loans to help with small business ventures; such as farming in areas with drought.
It has been an honor hosting this event for the past four years, and this year we got to combine with two other churches, one of which traveled two hours to participate! Each year we held fundraisers that built up to the event, but since this was a first for the other churches, we focused primarily on how to build the excitement and awareness for the potential to do more next year, and God worked through the hearts of His Church! Over 20 teens came for the weekend, and more than five adults showed up to help chaperone and volunteer!
To kickstart the event, we had the participants tell us why they decided going 30 hours without eating for an entire weekend would be a good idea. (Keep in mind they were to start their own personal fast at 7am, and the event didn't start until 1pm, so most of these teens had already been going since supper the night before simply because waking up before 7:00 is just too early to experience daylight.) their answers ranged from "my friend invited me" to "I just wanted something to do this weekend". We heard a LOT of "I'm already starving", "I may go home early", "I hope you have enough r for me!", "There better be Gatorade", and "I hope I don't get bored"; the focus started out completely focused on the individual self.
World Vision puts together a very cool game every year, called "Tribe". It could easily be compared to the National reality TV show "Survivor". What's another Spirit motivated side to this game is that each challenge includes a time of devotion and reflexion on how it compares to one of God's promises in His Word; the Bible. This year, teens went through a True/False round to determine "Tribal Leaders" and learned fast facts about how hunger effects more than just the stomach, but also causes loss of education and lack of income for families. Participants were then numbered off and placed in Tribes; Bangladesh, Afghanistan, Zambia, Uganda, and Bolivia. Each participant received a card with the identity of a child and had to take on their lifestyle through the challenges; such as blindness, loss of a limb, weakness from hunger or Malaria, or being mute. We had heavy backpacks, sunglasses, duct tape, gloves, and earplugs to make these characteristics more real.
Tribes went through the same challenges actual people go through in the villages they represented: working together to keep other tribes from stealing what little food they had (garbage bags filled with rice and binder clipped to their pockets/belt loops), find food through droughts (balloons filled with food items written on strips of paper), use anything they could to gather water (ladles, cups, milk cartons, buckets that dumped into a kiddie pool), prevent mosquitos from spreading diseases like Malaria (finding pieces of a flashlight and putting them together, then shining it through a bed sheet that represented a bed net), and make it safely across a flood (using items from their overnight packing to get across from one end of a gymnasium to the other).
In the midst of all this fun and excitement we do a candle vigil in memory of the lives of children under the age of five that are lost due to hunger and malnutrition. Because of the help from organizations like World Vision and NCM, the numbers have dropped. Instead of one child dying every 7 seconds, one is lost every 12 seconds. That is still a number that should strike us all as troubling, considering there is enough food in the entire world that, if it were evenly distributed to every person, each one of us would have 4.5 pounds to eat per day. So me and three other chaperones took turns blowing out one candle every 12 seconds to represent a life lost to this preventable cause of death. By the time the last candle is left standing, the image really shows us how important the "light" from one life truly is. This message started spreading throughout the night and really helped begin a new focus on working together and encouraging one another, not only in surviving, but growing as God's Church as well.
We spent the rest of the day playing volleyball and making t-shirts.
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