Sojourn's Rice Challenge - by Rick Court, Associate Pastor

It started innocently when Sojourn’s worship planning team agreed to a theme during the month of April and May - “Get Uncomfortable,” based on a book by Todd Phillips. Each week, while gathering together for worship, we are discussing broad themes of God’s desire for justice, mercy, and compassion. And each week in our small groups we are discussing the more specific themes of poverty and our individual response to poverty and injustice.

This has led to the following three Sojourn challenges …

The 1st challenge – some of us have agreed to sponsor a child through Compassion International. Compassion helps over one million children in 24 countries. When you sponsor a child through Compassion International, you are connected to one child with whom you have the opportunity to communicate, offer financial support which provides educational opportunities, health care, and supplemental nutrition, safe recreation, and important life skills. To learn more, visit: www.compassion.com.
Our 2nd challenge – filling rice bowls. Rice Bowls are essentially small plastic piggy banks in the shape of a full bowl of rice. The bowls are provided free of charge and they are designed to remind us of the most at-risk children around the world - orphans. Our Rice Bowls sit on our kitchen tables, or on our desks at work, to be filled with loose change and collected on May 18th. To learn more, check out the Sojourn website: www.gatheringfaith.com or visit www.ricebowls.org.
And our 3rd challenge – the Five-Day Rice Challenge. This is the challenge that is going to cause us the greatest amount of “discomfort.” As an act of solidarity with our brothers and sisters around the globe, we will eat as they do for five days – May 5-9, 2008. And we’ll be setting aside the money we would have spent on additional groceries to be included with our rice bowls we’ll be collecting on May 18th. For five days Sojourner’s typical meal options will be:
• Plain oatmeal or Cream of Wheat
• A tortilla, rice and beans
• Rice with bits of fish or chicken and a vegetable
That’s five days – breakfast, lunch, and dinner!
Portion sizes are much smaller than a typical American meal - one cup or eight ounces is a generous portion. Meat is a luxury, with the average African consuming about ¾ ounce per day—the size of a small chicken nugget. While these meals seem meager by American standards, they actually represent diets in the broad middle of the world’s population. Half the world’s population lives on $2 a day or less, and approximately one billion people live on even less—only $1 per day.
Why are we doing this? To lose weight? NO! But to somehow connect to the global crisis facing nearly one half of the world and to acknowledge the distribution of global wealth is a landslide in our favor.
And yet, more Americans than ever describe an ache, a loss of meaning, an emptiness inside. A hunger, if you will. Could it be that, as we overeat, overwork, overspend, and over stimulate ourselves with entertainment, we are simultaneously starving ourselves spiritually? Have we so oversaturated our every physical sense, that we have dulled our spiritual senses?
And if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday.
Isaiah 58:10

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