Last time I asked: Can You Do A Thousand Of Something?
As a teacher I saw a lot of interesting student projects. One of the coolest was devised by a group of seventh graders. They proposed collecting a million of something.
Have you ever seen a million of anything in one place?
It was a grand, audacious idea. What would they collect? They didn’t know. How long would it take? Not sure. How would they count something so big? How much space would they need? What kind of container would be required?
Being seventh graders, they hadn’t really thought through any of these issues, but that’s okay. One advantage of being a seventh grader is you don’t get stopped before you begin by fussing about details and why you can’t do something cool. Turns out there’s a lot of math involved in collecting, counting, and storing a million things.
A really good idea was a million pennies, which they’d donate to charity when they finished. This generated some funny discussions when the administration expressed security concerns. After all, a million pennies is, like, a lot of money. There was some disagreement about the exact amount, something about moving decimal points. I remember chuckling that adults could seriously worry about someone stealing a locked container filled with a million pennies.
The kids decided they wanted to keep the collection as a demonstration, so pennies were out. Made me a little sad. I really wanted to see someone try to sneak off with 2.8 tons worth of pennies. That would have been another worthwhile project, maybe worthy of extra credit.
They finally settled on those little aluminum tabs that open soda cans. Parents collected them. Businesses collected them. Grandparents collected and mailed them. Around our school it became something akin to a mortal sin to dispose of a can without first removing that tab.
They knew this was more than a one-year process. We were a grade 7-9 junior high school, so those kids were still around two-and-a-half years later when we finally accumulated one million of those silly little tabs.
The container was a Plexiglas-and-plywood marvel two meters wide, half a meter deep, and a meter high. A couple of kids designed and built it before we began collecting, an outrageous act of estimation and faith. When filled it weighed about a pound less than an elephant and was about as difficult to move. We kept it for several years, then donated it to a children’s discovery museum. Occasionally some smart-aleck kid would say, “How do you know there’s a million of them?”
“How about if you count them?” That usually shut ‘em up.
So why am I telling you this story? Well, I’m asking you to Do A Thousand Of Something to get involved with Florida Hope Tour 2013. A thousand isn’t a million, but it’s still a lot.
Can you imagine how pitiful the first handful of tabs looked when they tossed them into that enormous box? Pretty discouraging, but you don’t do a million, or a thousand, all at once.
Jon Swanson commented on Facebook that he’s done 10,000 pushups since late July. When asked how he did so many, he said he did a few at a time, and his son was doing them, too. So they just kept doing them, and the numbers started adding up.
That’s how you do a lot of something. You do a few, and then you keep going. And it helps if you’re doing it with someone else, because God designed us for relationship and community.
Suppose one of your kids or grandkids collects a thousand pennies to help Convoy Of Hope feed hungry kids. That’s ten bucks, and I believe God will use that gift, and the awareness it generates, in a powerful way.
Now imagine a thousand kids doing the same thing. That’s, like, a million pennies! With Convoy’s efficiencies of scale, a million pennies feeds about two hundred kids for a year.
Pretty cool how it works. One minute you’re tossing a few spare pennies in a jar, then you keep doing it and some other folks join you and somewhere down the road two hundred kids have food.
It doesn’t have to be about money, because God cares about ALL of our lives. Those seventh graders discovered that what they collected didn’t matter much. The project was about counting, estimating, weighing, storing, measuring, building—and you can do that with anything.
Oh, and it was about community. It was about doing something together, solving problems and supporting each other. It was about shared sacrifice. Doing a thousand or a million of something is hard. It helps if you’re not doing it alone.
So it matters if you share your 1000 commitment. It matters because you’re part of a circle, and someone might think they can’t possibly do 1000 of something but they’ll give it a try when they see others doing it.
It matters because once you write it or say it out loud you change a little. You become “the person who’s doing 1000 minutes on the treadmill” or “the dad who’s helping his son collect 1000 pennies for hungry kids.” The 1000 becomes a part of your identity, and we can all support you.
So…join us. What can you do a thousand of?
Next time…does “1000” really matter?
