Several years ago our friends Lynda and Tom added Daniel to their family. Mira, their miracle baby, had kept Lynda on total bed rest for most of her pregnancy. And so Daniel arrived from Ethiopia and transformed their family. Now they are living in Ethiopia, teaching and loving and living life as God has called them.
Today, Lynda posted on my Facebook wall about some friends of hers who came up with The Two-Dollar Day Challenge. Because about half of the world’s population lives on the equivalent of $2 a day, the challenge is for us to try to eat for one day on two bucks. They’ve chosen this Thursday as the challenge day. Here are the simple rules, directly from the website:
- You must budget out $2 for your food for the whole day, no cheating! If you eat it, count it.
- No donated food, if you didn’t add the cost of the item to your budget, you can’t’ eat it.
- Learn something! When you feel hungry, when you get frustrated, stop and think about those who must do this every day, look up ways that you can help, pray about what you can do for the poor.
- The 2-Dollar Day Challenge is about the food you eat, don’t worry about things like electricity or your cable bill. Yes those are luxuries that the poor don’t have, but the simple act of eating only food that you can buy with $2 for one day is going to be what gets our wheels spinning, and just maybe inspires us to do something.
Lynda has asked me to participate. It sounds hard to me. I tend to eat the same thing every day for a breakfast: Kashi Honey Sunshine cereal, a banana and Silk soy milk. And lunch is often PB&J, except it’s on a 100-calorie 7-grain deli flat with organic strawberry spread and natural peanut butter. Both sound simple, but with all that organic stuff as best I can figure, the breakfast comes in at around 92 cents and lunch at 90 cents. That would leave me, uh, 18 cents to pay for dinner, not to mention the usual snacks of berries and chocolate (you knew it couldn’t ALL be healthy).
I know I’ll probably use my current health issues as a reason not to take the challenge, but is it really a reason or just a convenient excuse? For Lynda’s sake, I will probably at least mention it to Les. I am pretty sure he has two meal meetings on Thursday this week, so that will scrub it for him. And I can’t see me doing this with him. Misery loves company.
What about you? Are you up to the challenge? And if you’re more likely to end up where I’m likely to end up, will you at least participate in #3 above? I’ve already learned something about what my daily bread costs me. I will at least commit to praying for those who make these hard choices every day.
Two bucks? Could you do it? Even for a day?