Inside Out People

This Saturday a bunch of us are going to be heading downtown to the Water Street Rescue Mission for FLOWING, a morning of community service - both in the sense that we will be serving the community of Lancaster and in the sense that we will be serving in community with each other. We’re really excited about it.

We plan to spend a few hours serving breakfast to residents at the mission, sorting donations in their warehouse, and spreading out around the mission grounds and into the surrounding neighborhood, picking up trash. If you’re in town Saturday morning, look for a bunch of smiling people with trash bags, wearing black t-shirts with the word FLOWING in yellowish/greenish neon across the front. Better yet, join us.

We made the t-shirts not because it seems to be some unwritten rule that you need to have shirts for Christian events, but we’re doing it as a way of intentionally rounding out the day. As we serve the community right here we don’t want to forget about those on the other side of the world, so we decided to include a shirt in the deal, with all the proceeds going to provide clean water to people in Africa through the terrific work of Blood:Water Mission. As we spread the word about this idea a couple of weeks ago, much to our delight someone surprised us by graciously offering to cover the cost of production so the entire ten dollars for each shirt will go to BWM. A one dollar donation to BWM is enough to provide one African with clean water for one whole year, and the World Health Organization estimates that 80% of disease in the world is attributed to lack of access to clean drinking water, so this is a really strategic way to be involved.

So let’s put this in perspective: we’re serving for a few hours together on a Saturday morning and we’re all pitching in ten bucks. At noon, several blocks of southeast Lancaster will hopefully be a little bit cleaner. Through the money we raise, close to one thousand Africans will have access to clean water for a year. And all of us who participate will have devoted a few hours to serving others, which really has a way of helping us grow in our walk with Christ.

But let’s be honest. By Monday morning, there will once again be trash on the sidewalks and in the parks (hopefully there will be less, but we won’t take care of the littering problem in a single morning). And yes, we can be excited that hundreds and hundreds of folks in Africa will have access to clean water, but there will still be 1.8 million people who die this year as a result of water-borne disease.

Faced with these truths, I envision a few possible reactions. We can choose to ignore the needs in our city and focus our time and attention elsewhere. We can choose to act as if the lives of millions did not hang in the balance every day. We can choose to pretend that it’s okay to live a comfortable Christian life. Or we can view this day - these few hours and ten dollars - as a catalyst. Having been stretched and shown a little bit of the world we might not have known about before, we can prayerfully consider how God might have specifically equipped each of us to uniquely invest our lives - as people being changed from the inside out - on behalf of the last, the lost, and the least.

If FLOWING ends on Saturday at noon, we have failed. But if what we are seeking to do this Saturday is still being worked out in our lives ten years from now, we might just be onto something.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 11:27 am and is filed under Inside-Out. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.