“That's pretend, right?”
My six-year-old daughter L.E. asked me that question one day.
We were looking at a book on storms and came to a page about famines. In the corner was a little boy who was starving. His ribs were sticking out and flies covered his face. I kept flipping the pages but L.E. made me stop and return to that one. She asked, “What’s that?” I told her, “That’s a little boy who doesn’t have enough food to eat.” She thought for a few seconds and then responded, “That’s not real though. That’s pretend, right?”
Those are pretty simple sentences. On the surface, those aren’t deep by any means. But what L.E. was saying, what she was asking wasn’t so obvious. Here’s what I heard:
“Wait, wait, wait, are there other 6 year olds like me somewhere without food?
Is the L.E. in Africa starving?
Is the L.E. in Asia being sold into slavery?
Is the L.E. in Atlanta scared because she’s been home alone all weekend because her family abandoned her?
Are all these things happening right now dad? To little kids like me?
Why aren’t we doing something?
Why is that OK?
Where is the rescue? Where is the hope? Where is the sense of urgency dad?
If only you had a platform with hundreds of thousands of friends from around the world that could easily organize and radically change the world through the power of something like a blog. If only.”
OK, I didn’t hear that last part because L.E. is not that snarky of a 6-year old, but that thought is accurate.
I do have a platform. I have a blog called stuffchristianslike.net that 75,000 – 90,000 people read every month. But I'd never tried to raise money before. I'd never asked readers to be bigger than a blog. I'd never encouraged our community to step out like this before.
Is this the right thing for my platform? Is building a kindergarten the right thing for my brand?
Those are pretty disgusting questions, but I promise they went through my head. And I think that's one of the dangers of growing a platform.
In our efforts as leaders to protect and nurture the platforms God has given us, we can get to some pretty toxic places, pretty quickly. We get comfortable up on top of that platform. We get worried about losing it or doing anything that might make it shrink. We wrap our hands around it tightly and say, "Mine."
But stuffchristianslike.net isn't mine. God didn't let me steward it just so that I could get a book deal and get to speak at a few places. It's bigger than that and it's not OK that kids like L.E. are starving and beaten and enslaved.
So after years of my family personally supporting Samaritan's Purse I contacted them with a bigger idea. They let me know about a kindergarten in Vietnam that needed $30,000 to be built. With my own daughter falling in love with kindergarten this fall it seemed like a perfect fit.
On a Monday morning, November 9, I asked readers of Stuff Christians Like to help me raise $30,000 by December 31, 2009. I took my hands off the platform and fell into the "what if" of the whole thing.
Eighteen hours later, we had raised $30,000. That sentence is crazy to me. We raised $30,000 in 18 hours, from a blog that isn't even based on an original idea.
Now we're raising another $30,000. We're trying to hit $60,000, which is going to be harder and slower.
But I think we can do it. Or rather, I know God can do it.
The glory is His. The massiveness of raising $30,000 in 18 hours is His. And ultimately, the platform is His.
Click here if you’d like to help build two kindergartens in Vietnam