Sanctus Reality

We were lucky enough to get a night out this week - Manny went to see Jimmy Buffett in concert and I went to see Sanctus Real @ Cornerstone with the girls. It's easy to say that it's one of the best shows I've seen......and I've been to hundreds. It was so uplifting and I think they blew the roof off the place but we were too busy singing at the top of our lungs to notice.

On a serious note, there was an excellent motivational speaker named Sammy Adebiyi. He is a Nigerian immigrant who know lives here in the States. He tours the country in efforts of raising awareness about the plight(s) in Africa. He related the story about how he has seen firsthand refugees starving to death, having no access to clean water so that they actually drank mud.

He related an analogy that really made me think. There is a statistician that basically took the 6 billion people on earth and put our demographics into numbers that we can understand. He made this model based upon the entire earth summarized into 100 people. So if you start with 100 people representing the entire earth's population, 50 of those people are severely malnourished. Out of the remaining 50, only 10 have a few dollars to their name (e.g., in a bank account, in your couch, etc). So we have 10% of the world's population that are well-fed and have a small amount of money in the bank. Of those ten, only 8 have Internet access. Of those remaining 8, only 1 of those people is well-nourished, has a few dollars in the bank, has Internet access , and a computer in their home. ONLY 1!

Sammy made the point that most of us here are in the top 1% of the world's population. He went further to illustrate the point that we are in the front of the line (so to speak) for a reason. We were put here to use what we have to help those at the back of the line. It was really moving.

He has this really neat project called the Mocha Club (http://www.mochaclub.org/). He asked for $7 a month for 3 months. That small amount ($21 for the math majors) provides CLEAN WATER for 7 Africans for a whole YEAR!!! Such a small amount that does so much good. I started a team there (called Shine A Light), and if God puts in on your heart to help too, you're more than welcome.

On a fun note - thanks Jen, Robin & Ashley for an awesome night and for not laughing too hard at me singing totally off-key at the top of my lungs. Someday my hearing will come back!