“Would you give a million dollars to the poor?” a Sunday school teacher asked her students.

“Yes!” the children shouted in unanimous unison.

“Would you give a thousand dollars to the poor?”

“Yes!”

“Would you give a one dollar to the poor?”

The room fell silent. “What’s the difference?” the teacher asked.

One honest student offered an answer: “The difference is I have one dollar!”

It’s estimated that $10 billion a year would solve the world water crisis. It sounds like a lot, but Americans spend $18 billion a year on make up! It’s a question of allocation. Most my friends have a dollar.

To all of you who took the challenge to allocate $1 a day for clean water—cheers!

You da real thang.

(Right) U.S. war heroes raising the flag on the island of Iwo Jima. Some of WWII’s fiercest fighting took place here. Thousands of Japanese soldiers hid in underground tunnels after the invasion, coming out only at night to prowl for food. Of the more than 21,000 Japanese soldiers on the island 20,703 died in battle or committed suicide. The Allied forces lost 27,909 soldiers in the battle–we salute every one of you. The raising of the flag of Iwo Jima is the most reproduced photograph in the history of the world.

(Left) Aweil, capitol city of North Bahr al Ghazal in Southern Sudan, another war zone. In a world where celebrities wear Save Darfur t-shirts and call incessantly for someone to save this battle-weary Sudanese region, a bunch of Christians from Living Water International jump in an airplane, go to this war-torn country and hit the ground to start healing people hand-in hand with Sudanese brothers.

If you’d like to support these heroes, ask someone to sing up for One Dollar Water right now and we’ll sponsor some of their work! Hats off to our heroes!

The Junior Optimists Club at Jackson Middle School in San Antonio, Texas was concerned about kids in refugee camps around Gulu, Uganda. These kids cannot go home to their villages because they don’t have clean drinking water there.

They saw the ONEDOLLARWATER.COM website and thought it was pretty cool. There was one obstacle: they’re a bunch of 6th, 7th and 8th graders with no jobs and no credit cards.

But they didn’t let that stop them. They went to work selling t-shirts, bracelets, they held a “water walk” at their school, they had a fund-raising dinner at a local restaurant. They collected, they asked, they gave and they inspired others to give. Next thing they knew they had $15,000 together to sponsor a well in Uganda.

Today, their teacher Miss Riggs, is in Uganda visiting that well and the people it serves.

Hats off to the kids at Jackson Middle School. If they can ask enough of their friends to provide $15,000 worth of hope and life to war refugees in Uganda, we can ask ours to consider giving $1 a day!

Hooray for the Junior Optimists!

Someone once asked Mark Twain if he believed in infant baptism. “Believe in it?” Twain replied, “Hell, I’ve seen it!”

Imagine if that were the natural answer people gave when we asked questions like, “Do you believe in God’s infinite love?”

That’s what I love about this work. We don’t just talk about God’s love—we get to show it.

Over the millennia we Christians have done a lot of theology about this God who is love. One great theologian, Karl Barth, wrote his magnum opus, a work called Church Dogmatics, which is 6 million words on 10,000 pages in 13 volumes.

Jesus’ instructions tended to be much simpler. Stuff like: “Go eat food with people and heal them. Wear sandals, bring a walking stick. You’re good to go.”

Try getting tenure with theology like that!

But it works. Loving other people and healing them reflects God’s love. There’s no sermon for the people in Jharudela, India (where onedollarwater.com just sponsored a well) that would have communicated God’s love like your care, service and healing has.

Ask the people of Jharudela if they believe that we can be the living, loving, healing hands and feet of Christ. Believe it? Hell, they’ve seen it!

Yo fellow Americans! I hope you had a hard-rockin’ Forth of July. Hey, guess who sprung for the hot dogs and Kool Aid at my 7/4 BBQ—yeah, you guessed it: yours truly, baby! That’s ‘cause I, ONEDOLLARWATER.COM, got a J-O-B!

Now I was pretty happy just chillin’ at my parents’ pad. Sometimes they’d be like, “You should get out of the house; go make something of yourself.” And I’d be like, “Dude, I’m just a couple-months-old domain name. Chill out. My homie WATER.CC don’t mind if I just hang. I’m only costing you like 12 bucks a month.”

Then I heard about all these kids in India dying of diarrhea. I was like, no way—the squirts can’t kill you! Then I saw the hospital and this was serious stuff. Now I’m a pretty strong guy—like nailin’ people at football practice and stuff—but when I saw what those kids go through it brought tears to my eyes.

They were drinking from this dirty hole. I found out amoebic dysentery is one painful sickness. Not that I thought it was a walk in the park. Then I found out it would cost less than $5K to provide clean drinking water for this whole village! I also found out that Indians don’t live in tepees.

They were praying for water. So I got on my knees and started praying for water for them too. Then I remembered those dollars you guys have been sending me. I got out the calculator, put two and two together and decided we were on a mission from God!

Man, those kids’ smiles and laughter—you’d have thought every one of them just got a Nintendo Wii. It turned my life around. I spent my last dime on those kids and it was worth every penny. No more piddling around for me. I’m a workin’ man now. Every penny I get I’m going to go out and drill water wells with it. Meanwhile, do me a favor. Scroll back up and look at the kids in this picture. They’re real people. Their suffering is real. Their hope is real. Your help is real. That’s awesome. Thanks.

ODW.C

‘Twas three months and a week ago that ONEDOLLARWATER.COM hatched from a chocolate Easter egg. He rose the following morning to World Water Day. On the third day he rose again. Easter. The peeps and cheap chocolate were awful. So he vowed to do something, to somehow make life new, to redeem.

People in the village Jharudela, India were praying for help. There were 30 people from their village alone in the Sewbhawan Hospital, dangerously ill from drinking contaminated water. Their only source of drinking water was this open well. During the rainy season it fills and turns as brackish and dirty as the puddles around it. So at the wee age of three months, ONEDOLLARWATER.COM went to work providing a new water well!

Manoj Kumar Nag reports a resident of Jharudela saying, “You gave us new life and there is no diarrhea, no water born disease and no child death!”

No child death–how’s that for your dollar today?

“The feet of the community’s children were on air” Manoj adds, “when they saw the water they started dancing. The people are very happy. They said, ‘We consider this the greatest gift of our lives. It will change our lives in many ways.’”

A 78 year old man from Jharudela, in the state of Chhatishgarah, told Living Water International staff: “Now I can die without any burden as my next generation will get safe water. Thank you ONEDOLLARWATER.COM for the unforgettable greatest gift!”

We’re so proud of our little ONEDOLLARWATER.COM! The kid’s got spunk.

Please join us in dreaming of a web community that can change thousands of villages like Jharudela all over the world, and send your suggestions to info@onedollarwater.com. The more people sign up, the more of these stories we’ll get to hear.

Get someone to sign up for ONEDOLLARWATER.COM today. We’ll show them where the dollars go. They’ll love it.

Thank you for this unforgettable greatest gift!

I took some friends to El Salvador to see a well they’d sponsored. It was at a church made of palm fronds. People gathered to meet the gringos, and a little Salvadoran girl named Flor (which means ‘Flower’) stood out, somehow more radiant than other people.

We asked an old lady what they drank before the well was drilled. She led us down a road to a river. Flor came along, holding my pinky finger. We stopped at a pathetic little hole in the riverbank. Further landward they couldn’t dig through the rock. Their drinking hole shared water with a river lined by women washing clothes.

That very moment a gigantic sow came sloshing toward us in the shallow river, her mud-crusted teats stirring the water. I had wanted to show the donors how bad the water situation was before the well, so the timing could not have been better when the hog (I’m not kidding) stopped just upstream from the sad water hole—and urinated! I thought, “If this pig pukes then God’s messing with me.”

A moment later I sat on a rock and Flor said to me, “You really can pray for something and it can happen.”

I thought, “What if we’re all here because of this little girl’s prayer?” Is that possible? Is it true? Is it a fact? Even if it were not a fact—would it be beautiful to see the world that way? What if we always inclined our thoughts and hearts towards the prayers of kids like Flor? Would the beauty of that somehow ring more true than its factuality?

Hey, I gotta go, sounds like there’s a prayer coming in. Area code looks like it’s from… India…

Meet Pesky the Parasite. He kills babies. But we love our enemies.

If you’ve ever met an impoverished kid who craves eating dirt for months on end, it was probably because of a parasite like Pesky. The child’s body needs iron. His desire to eat dirt is called “pica” from the Latin word for “magpie” (a bird that’ll eat anything).

He’s anemic because a little critter like Pesky is sucking blood from his intestinal walls. Kids with parasites in their bellies become anemic, lose protein, and suffer intellectual, cognitive and growth retardation. Pesky eats potential.

Hate the sin, love the sinner, some people say. But the truth is, when Pesky latches onto an intestine and slurps away, he’s not doing anything wrong. For Pesky that intestine-blood is manna from heaven. He’s just enjoying his God-given bounty. If there’s a sin in Pesky’s life it’s ours, for letting kids live in conditions where they have to drink water that rascals like Pesky live in.

Well it turns out that hating the sin doesn’t really help much, no matter how worked up we get about it. Having the right opinion about the sin doesn’t help either. In fact, $1 will do more good for that kid’s anemia than a whole lifetime of sin-hating. $1 will give him clean water for a year.

We’re getting really close now. It won’t be long before we’re celebrating our first ONEDOLLARWATER.COM well. We could use your help. Maybe you could e-mail this to someone who might care to give a buck a day so kids can have clean water. Someone who can help us set Pesky up for life in a nice dung-hill or cow-gut, so he doesn’t have to gnaw on the insides one of our little munchkins. Would you do that for Pesky? If not for him, how about for some kid who’s trying to suck iron out of fistfuls of dirt?

“I am thirsty.”

John says those were some of his last words from the cross. (19:38)

What was he to drink?

Or eat?

Or wear?

Jesus died thirsty, hungry, naked, and imprisoned—all the same conditions he said to respond to in the “least of these” so we don’t become like goats. (Matthew 25:31-45)

The question is: Would you give Jesus a drink in his dying hour?

Let’s suppose you could toss those Roman Centurion guards aside with a Jedi mind trick and give Jesus a big glass of water from your Frigidaire. Would you? Would your friends? Would your kids? Would Yoda? Would your pastor? Your mailman? Would Chewbacca? What if you could simply ask a neighbor or relative to quench Christ’s thirst? What if it would save his life?

Jesus had a curious opinion about this. He said you can give him a drink of water. It’s strange. Jesus doesn’t distinguish between himself back then and the poorest kid in Africa today. What you do to the least of these, Jesus said you do to him, for all time. It’s a weird way to think. Could that be what it’s like to see things through God’s eyes?

Be honest. You answered “yes” when I asked if Chewbacca would give Jesus a drink. And you’re as nice as that hairy old lug.

If you’re not signed up to give a buck a day for clean drinking water, go for it.

If you’ve already taken the one dollar challenge, send this to all your friends who are also as kind as Chewbacca.

Love,

Uh . . . Chewbacca, actually.

Because they have large litters in early spring, the ancient world associated bunnies with the season’s fertility. Bunnies can even conceive while pregnant and have two separate litters (yow!). So it is that those furry critters came to symbolize the earth’s rising fertility at the vernal equinox. The Alexandrian Church decided that Christ’s resurrection would be celebrated the Sunday after the vernal equinox, which is why when someone asks when Easter is we never have a straight answer. And it’s why the Easter bunny hides eggs (more fertility symbols) in your back yard each spring.

It’s cute. Adorable. Maybe even beautiful. Reproduction is great. It’s how I got my kids. The Easter Bunny is nice. I enjoy the eggs. I love the rabbit, I want what’s best for him. He’s cuddly. He’s cute. . . but he’s just not compelling. Bunny, eggs, chocolate, peeps. Ho-hum. Yum. Whatever.

So this year we are excited to be an active part of telling a more compelling story. We set up this funky little website and invited people into a really practical way to see beyond reproduction this Easter, beyond reproduction to resurrection. Now there’s a story. Eternity, presence, mystery, oneness. A guy dies, then remains mysteriously present to his people. He walks with some, appears as light to another, people hear him, see him, feel him, then they start talking about being in him, and him in them.

It all rings of something very true and beautiful. None of us really just is. We all inter-are. And we inter-are with that risen Christ. He pointed to that when he said the righteous would see him thirsty in the least of these and give him a drink.

That is way more beautiful than a rabbit in suspenders leaving eggs under the dog bowl. So we invited a bunch of friends to behold an empty tomb and to see Christ resurrected and present in the poorest people in the world. We said, let’s all give $1 a day to offer them a drink of clean water. Let’s tell this story with our deeds and actions all year long.

As a result, hundreds of moms will already sleep more soundly, knowing their babies won’t die from drinking mud. How’s all that for compelling?

$1 a day. Life. If you haven’t already taken the challenge, do it now. If you have, invite someone into our story this very moment.

Or, I guess there’s always the Vernal Equinox Rabbit…