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When I drive around Oahu, I’m often saddened by the rubbish I see polluting the aina. What amazes me even more is how often I see those nickels lying around. The legislature passed the 5 ¢ bottle bill in hopes that if people didn’t care about the aina, at least they would care about their wallets. But it looks as if they were only 75% right. That’s the current recycling rate. Why is it so low?
We don’t think much about 5 ¢ because a nickel really won’t buy you much these days. But when you multiply 5 ¢ by 12 cans in a case, you get 60. A case a week is $2.40 per month, with a yearly grand total of $31.20. Would you throw away $30 every year? And that’s just a case a week. Most of us spend more. If you drink three sodas a day, that’s 21 per week, times 52 weeks, you get $54.60. If there are three people in your family drinking soda, that’s $163.80 per year.
But we don’t see the treasure in these bottles and cans, we only see the discarded waste of our lives. And the same thinking that lets us throw away cans and bottles lets us drive past the rubbish littering our highways, complaining about how someone has to clean it up.
What if, instead of grumbling about it and expecting the government to do something about it, our churches started sponsoring the clean-up of the aina? We could work with the government for safety sake, but do the work of the clean-up ourselves. (And return those bottles and cans for the deposit.)
It’s not so different with our homeless communities.
How many of us look at that apparent rubbish cluttering our beaches and parks and refuse to see the treasure hidden among those tents and old cars? What we don’t see is that many of those people living along the beach are there not because they were drug addicts who couldn’t hold a job, but because they could no longer afford their housing and got evicted. They are treasures waiting for someone to recycle them. All they need is someone who cares enough to help them afford housing again.
They don’t need government programs for the homeless. They need someone who will help them pay for their housing but let them keep their dignity.
What if, instead of grumbling about it and expecting the government to do something about it, our churches started sponsoring some of the homeless to recover their lives? We could work with the government to avoid legal issues, but do the work of restoring lives ourselves.
Would you be willing to send a team from your church to Blaisdell Park or Waianae and find a family that you could help “recycle” their lives? With over 600 churches on Oahu, we could make a major impact on the homeless “problem” without a dollar of our taxes being spent, just our tithe, our “God” dollars.
Is your church too small to sponsor a family? How about a single person? Or maybe you can team up with another small church.
Will your church help 2007 be the year that saw Hawaii move from 4 th worst in the national homeless assessment to among the best? Will you help Hawaii restore all those treasures to our community? Will you help us exceed a 75% “recycle” rate in Hawaii? Please don’t see the homeless as a problem, but rather as an opportunity for your church to serve God in a real, tangible way.
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