30 Hour Famine 2009

"When you fast, don't put on a sad face like the hypocrites. They make their faces look sad to show people they are fasting. I tell you the truth, those hypocrites already have their full reward. So when you fast, comb your hair and wash your face. Then people will not know that you are fasting, but your Father, whom you cannot see, will see you. Your Father sees what is done in secret, and he will reward you." Matthew 6:16-18

I've been thinking about this lesson a lot this week. Currently I'm reading through the book of Matthew and I think I hit this story during the right week. This weekend has been amazing! My church's youth group participated in the 30 Hour Famine. We were challenged to raise $500 and ended up raising over $800. I guess a lot of people really wanted to see our youth leader duct taped to a pole and especially wanted to throw stuff at him.

For the famine, we normally stop eating after our lunch hour at school and then break the fast at six on the Saturday evening. I have lunch at 10:30 in the morning. So I went a little over 30 hours. I'm not gonna lie; I actually had a great difficulty this year with self-control. I got home from school yesterday and thought about eating a snack, but no I couldn't. And I didn't.

Last night, we did some interesting things. We were put into three teams: Brazil, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Can you tell which team I was in? Team Ecuador! We played games to earn cards and my team only got one card, so we didn't end up winning the compassion card at the end or anything, but I think we had fun. Our theme was a Survivor type theme.

The first game we played involved blindfolds and balloons. We had one teammate blindfolded and the rest of us had to give them directions to get to the balloon. It was interesting. Then we had a three-legged race to get survival items such as a blanket and water.

After that, I think we had free time, where most of us played Rock Band. I sang some mean Eye of the Tiger. It was pretty awesome! I just didn't use my church choir singing voice. I also played drums and bass for a while.

After a while, we had to play some more survival games. The first game of this set was a river game. We had to get across the bridge with having two teammates on the bridge at all times. So two of the guys on my team carried all of us across. Kinda awkward, but hey, it worked. Unfortunately we were too slow to win, but we did better than the first team that had tried. Then we had a trivia game where we listened to a story and had to answer questions about it. My team won that one. I have to thank the two guys in my team that were giving me all the answers; way better listeners than me. At that point, I was so tired. I went to bed after playing that game.

I had to get up early today to go babysit. Curfew was midnight though. I slept in one of the Sunday school rooms though because everyone was being so loud out in the sanctuary. The ground was really hard to sleep on last night, but eventually I fell asleep. Then around 7, I woke up freezing (I hate when the heat resets at the church), so I had to go grab sweats and a sweatshirt. I finally got up in time to get ready to go babysit though.

Babysitting was fun. It was my community service project of the day since everyone else did theirs while I was babysitting. When I got home, my dad told me to eat something so I wouldn't be so cranky. He said he wouldn't tell anyone. Yeah and let that be on my guilty conscience? I don't think so. Even if he didn't tell anyone, God knows.

After babysitting, I went back to the church and then we went ice skating. A lesson learned here, if you're really hungry, don't go ice skating, it hurts. My thighs really hurt right now. Normally they don't when I go ice skating. Oh and it down poured when we left to go ice skating. It did that a few times today.

After ice skating, we came back to the church and it was nice out again for a while. We filled up water balloons for a bit getting ready for torturing our youth leader. What? He deserved it. So we did duct tape him to a pole (he looked like a mummy) and we did throw stuff at him (mostly water balloons, silly string, and whipped cream). That was so much fun!

We broke the fast with Communion. Everyone grabbed huge chunks of bread, which I didn't think was the best idea, but whatever floats their boat I guess. Maybe that's how it happened during Jesus' time. I'm really not sure on that one.

We had a nice dinner until the sky started darkening and we got a call that the tornado sirens in town were going off and there was a tornado warning issued. So most of us went into the nursery, which is the safest place in the church since we don't have a basement. But then, it was just a bad storm and nothing happened, just more down pours.

Finally we cleaned up or some people did. Some of us, were a little bit more lazy and started singing random songs in one of the Sunday school rooms. I think we were all a bit loopy from being tired and just eating and stuff. But hey, I didn't randomly start laughing in the middle of the night, so it's all good. I wasn't slap happy.

You know I heard one of the girls complaining about how they had just wasted their entire Saturday counting down for the time of food. This was her first famine. It's true that as it gets closer to the time when we break the fast, we all get a bit antsy and we count down and start really thinking about food. It kinda bugs me that she said that. We didn't waste our entire day complaining. At least I don't think we did. I didn't really complain about food except when people started talking about it. If you start thinking about it, then it's just gonna make you more hungry. Plus, we did other stuff today, not just thought about food.

In times like those we need to remember why we're doing this and think about how people who are way less fortunate than us and don't get food very often. I almost wonder if kids who are fed by World Vision get as excited about food as we did when we broke the bread tonight in Communion.

The card my team won says this: In the impoverished villages of the Amazon, food and clean water are often scarce. Schools are run-down or nonexistent. And in families that are struggling to survive, children suffer the most. They are the first to be weakened by hunger, and the first to be sickened by disease.

We are lucky to live where we do and to have what we do. 30 hours without food really isn't a big deal. Think about the kids who go longer without food. We don't need to complain about being hungry because we have food to go home to.

I was also thinking about the fact that this was my 4th 30 Hour Famine in high school as well as probably my last. Geez, I'm getting closer to graduating everyday and that really makes me feel sad. I have been involved in youth group for about 9 years, as long as I've been going to this church because us older kids have always stuck together (our pastor says we're our own peer group) and never really went with the kids except to help. I might get really emotional later on. It's really cool that I got to be involved in the 30 Hour Famine all these times. That's 120 hours that I've gone without food before. All separate dates though and almost all different years. I have some great memories from those as well.