Making Change

It was the day God showed up in my dining room! 

It was me – 12 high school students – a Little Caesar’s pepperoni pizza and a 2 liter bottle of Coke.    A meal not unfamiliar to that table and those who sat around it but as that cardboard box passed from hand to hand and the styrofoam cups were filled to almost overflowing, all were unaware that parsonage windows were about to be blown open and unseen matchsticks about to find flame.

It was early summer – those moments when the wet chill of spring starts to give way to days that seem endlessly awash in possibility.  Summer – when time seems to shift for a moment and what lies around each corner begs you to give chase.  It would be the season when a group of teenagers would suddenly find themselves like another twelve, once locked off from the world outside, now in a room burning with the full presence of God.

It was the summer of the Live 8 concerts.  Eight concerts, taking place on the same day, all around the world with one purpose in mind: raise the awareness of death dealing poverty and the African AIDS epidemic – to awaken a sleeping world into action.

I recall Jesus once saying that if the church didn’t act like the church “these rocks would cry out.”  Now it was the “rock stars” who were crying out and for the moment this group of young people was listening.

What was it they were hearing? 

The numbers:

· 2 million deaths a year in Africa due to AIDS
· 14 million AIDS orphans in Sub-Saharan Africa

· Life expectancy dropping from 59 to 47

 And the number that got stuck in their heads was the big one: 

23 million

23 million men, women and children currently infected with the virus. 

What does one do with a number that big?

It is a rare thing to be present for an epiphany – that sudden realization that everything from this moment forward will be painted with a different brush.  And when it came that day – it came in the form of a penny – a single penny.

The penny.  The smallest of coin.  It’s value – next to nothing.  The forgotten coin – abandoned on dressers and underneath couch cushions – unnoticed on sidewalks and parking lots.  But this single copper-faced-coin would connect this group of kids to a people and their struggle a half a world away.


No one remembers anymore whose idea it was –but that whole table was suddenly ablaze with expectation.  A mission was born – to collect 23 million pennies, nearly a quarter of a million dollars, one penny at time – one for each person in sub-Saharan African infected with AIDS.  They emptied their pockets and with a little more than four dollars in spare change on that table the Penny Project was born.


Have ever you rushed off in the pursuit of hope?  Stood at the edge of a cliff, and despite every fiber of your being telling you shouldn’t, jump anyway?  They jumped – and thank God they took me along with them. 

Over the next three years we watched as the Pennies trickled in – in zip locked sandwich bags a couple dozen at a time – in mayonnaise jars – and shoe boxes.  Collections stored up for years in back closets suddenly discovered their purpose.   Piggy banks and plastic cups.  The pennies came.  10,000 then 50,000 then 100,000 then the first million and on the weekend before Thanksgiving three years later these young people saw their dream come true – 23 million pennies.

What does 23 million pennies do?


It puts 10 students through medical school in Zimbabwe, provides food to orphans in South Africa, starts a sewing collective for women, buys medical supplies for hospitals and starts micro-lending banks in Ghana.  And it changes the direction of a group of teenagers’, and their pastor’s, lives forever.

Years later I sit and write this at that same table, the table my little family gathers at each night to break bread and share cups, our hands laced in fingers, wrapping our conversation in the humility we call prayer – waiting...

for the day God shows up here again…