Hot Tuesday night at the Franks' Pad....

I'll be sleeping on the couch tonight. Our room gets really hot when it's been toasty outside. Jeni's all snuggled up under the covers and it's 75-80 degrees back here. I don't get it. So I sleep on the couch in front of the air conditioner.
So I just finished watching the Republican National Convention. I've begun taking more interest in world events and political things. It was very interesting. A former congressman named Joseph Lieberman was the keynote speaker tonight. Lieberman is a lifelong Democrat, only just recently has switched to an Independent. He talked about why he was breaking ranks to lobby for a Republican to win the White House. He said he wants to see things get done. Now, I didn't see the Democratic National Convention, so I don't know what the mood was. The mood at the RNC was one of optimism. Of service to country. Self sacrifice. Put the country before your own self interest. Lieberman echoed those sentiments.
People get excited when they have a strong cause to rally behind. Something to get involved with. I believe our world is so void of good, righteous causes. So many live in the swamps of self-serving motives. How sad it is for our world. And we are suffering for our self-serving attitudes.
So I've been thinking about something. We now have $1150 in our account to send people to Chicago. That doesn't count the can depost which will happen tomorrow. We'll add another $40 or so. After this trip is over, what if we were to continue collecting cans and change and we choose to put that to building wells to provide fresh water to villages in African nations that are ravaged with drought and AIDS. It only costs $1500 to dig a well. We're almost to the point where, just by collecting change and turning in pop and beer cans, we could sponsor the digging of a well to provide clean drinking water to an African village. We've raised almost $1200 in four months. Doing that math, that's $300 a month. Know how much it costs to sponsor a child? Yep, about $30 a month. That means at this clip, we could be sponsoring 10 children around the world a month. On what? Recycling aluminum cans and the change people use for coffee or Pepsi. I'm just now beginning to wrap my mind around this. For the money we're raising in people's aluminum cans and change they don't really want to carry around, we could be providing clean water. Which we just go to our faucets for.
Or let's keep things closer to home. What if there were 20 people doing what I'm doing to get cans. Promoting it among those they know. Getting others to respond. What could we do? What if 10 people cared enough to bring in $300 a month in pop cans? Could we do something like the Extreme Home Makeover and find people in our own community that are living in awful homes? Could we begin after school programs to build into our own Holland/Springfield children. Preparing them for futures in college? Providing scholarships for underprivileged students? Shoot, one of our church members is asking her place of business, which has two branches, to put garbage cans out next to their pop machines and give the cans to us. Could we fund other Youth for Christ chapters to open up in other schools?
I'm particularly fond of an after school program where churches could work together to help tutor children in our community. From there, we begin investing also in the lives of parents who have significant needs. Teach families how to be strong, values based families. Teach them how to handle money. Hold down a job. Train in basic job skills. Geesh! What a vision! This transforms our community!