When I was doing Young Life we would sometimes take off a week or two during the winter and go and work at Wilderness Ranch. We did the dishes for a hundred or so ski trip campers in exchange for a place to shack and a couple of lift tickets.Hovering over the kitchen was the ultimate of dares called the Pit Challenge. Only the most courageous or stupid would even consider taking up the Pit Challenge. For those bold enough to accept the dare required one to scrape into a single glass all of the food (and God knows what else) from the bottom of the Hobart, add water and then chug.
The reward, we were told, was immortality.
Well, we young evangelicals have grown since then and now some of us are taking on more meaningful challenges. One of Bread for the World's regional organizers and her husband have accepted The Food Stamp Challenge.
Elise and Mark are limiting themselves to $3 a day in food expenditures - the average amount of assistance Food Stamps recipients actually receive. They have some great stories recorded on the BreadBlog.
I suppose the point of the Food Stamp Challenge is two-fold. First it is raising awareness about how little assistance Food Stamps recipients are actually receiving. (Here in VT the per meal amount is about 87 cents.) But more than that, The Food Stamp Challenge also shows us how much the rest of us actually overconsume.
I never felt bad about not taking the Pit Challenge. Other peoples' wet seconds was never my idea of a good time.
But it is only with a severe sense of discomfort that I look at what Mark and Elise are doing and say not for me. I have read the words of the prophet Ezekiel too many times for it to be any other way:
"And this was the sins of your sisters Sodom and her daughters: They had pride and excess of food and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and hungry."
