For something like the 7th or 8th time in as many years, I’ll be participating today and tomorrow alongside youth & friends from my church in World Vision’s 30-Hour Famine. From 7:00 this morning through 1:00 tomorrow afternoon, we’re joining together in a period of fasting to raise money for World Vision’s hunger and poverty initiatives, and to raise awareness of these important issues in our community and schools.

What’s really awesome about this year’s 30-Hour Famine is recent news from the One Campaign that programs and initiatives like 30-Hour Famine and many others are making a difference. Extreme poverty worldwide has been cut in half from 1990-2010, and with continued efforts could be eliminated from the face of the earth by as soon as 2030.

Tonight during our midnight worship service I’ll be speaking from Romans 12 about our call to unity. We are not just privileged middle-class Americans helping poor kids in the two-thirds world. We are neighbors on earth, all part of God’s great human experiment. When we stop seeing ourselves as collections of individuals and rather as integral members of communities, that’s when the gospel really comes alive.

I hope you’ll keep our group in your thoughts and prayers during our journey of worship today and tomorrow. Meanwhile, I urge you to take 14 minutes out of your day and watch what Bono had to say in a recent TED talk on the progress that’s being made in the war on extreme poverty: