The challenge...

We were at church and had an opportunity to take a box to fill it for a family on Thanksgiving, great check the box we can do that.  Well I felt like maybe this was a good opportunity to challenge our family further.  What if we take more than one box and use this week's grocery money to fill more boxes?  This is nice in theory but the family would have to be in on it since this would change what we eat for most of our meals.  Ben and I asked them after church what they thought, without much hesitation they said sure (I don't think they really got the reality of this).  We intended on taking one box for a local family and 1 box to send to Africa, this will stretch us a bit but I know that we can still be comfortable.  Well somehow we ended up walking out of there with 4 boxes for Africa and 1 for a local family and I could feel myself tense up a bit and feel the stress of this.  I knew immediately after the initial silent freak out that this is a great chance to serve other believers so that they can bless the people around them!

We kicked off our first night of the week ironically with takeout pizza to make a point to our children that you look at this as normal but this is a month worth of wages for a good part of the world.  We read them several facts about some of the African countries.

-There is a food famine in a area of Africa that includes Somolilia, Ethiopia and Kenya a child dies of hunger or poor nutrition on average every 6 minutes so by the time we finish our pizza that would mean 3 kids. 
-Nearly 29,000 children under 5 have died, and millions are at risk, kind of alarming.


(So I am not about just finding a really grafic image to display my point but it's a little disturbing to me that his took 3 seconds to find this with the google search Somolilia children)


These were shocking but I knew just as I often do they will probably just go right back to life and forget most of what we were telling them.

The plan:
-Spend $6.00 a day on food till Saturday, I'm shopping today so that = $30.00 for this weeks grocerys.
-Plan meals that either reflect a country that is in need such as beans and rice. Or keep all my meals simple with little to no meat and cheap ingrediants.
-Talk often of how God can use our family to affect those localy and those in other nations.

Day one...I was packing lunches and Kate was being extremely picky I told her sorry Kate I just don't have that many choices of things to put in your lunch today.  Jack quickly told her "Kate we are not going to be able to have a lot in our lunches this week, remember were feeding Africa".  It was such a good reminder that they were listening and God may use this, this week to impact our family.
At dinner:  Tonight I served a really simple bean soup and cornbread which was an extra.  Kate couldn't help but comment how boring the soup was and lacked flavor.  Ben quickly reminded her that this was part of the challenge to not use a lot of ingredients and keep things simple, we need to have appreciation for the food on our table.  It was very encouraging to see them eat their soup withour complaint after that.

We are all well aware that we are not going to fix a hunger crisis or we may not even save a life but I feel strongly that this is part of our calling as believers to care for and pray for other believers around the world.  Our goal this week is to help instill in our family a posture of sacrifice and giving to help others who are in greater need than us.


Welcome to our challenge this week!