Why We're Sticking Crosses in the Ground

19,000 children die every day due to poverty-related causes.

That's a difficult number to grasp, isn't it? 19,000? Every day? We had trouble wrapping our minds around it when we first heard it. How do you visualize 19,000 dying children? How loud is the sound of 19,000 heartbeats and how silent is it when those heartbeats stop?

We believe that one child dying of a poverty-related cause is too many, and that 19,000, repeating every day, is an atrocity. We believe that this is the defining issue of justice that faces us today--our slavery, our Holocaust. We are a group of Christians, and we believe that our God commands us to care for those who are in poverty. We believe that, as Christians, poverty is an area we can find common ground with those who don't believe in our God, but share our desire to see this world made better. We believe that poverty is unacceptable.

With those things in mind, we set out to create a way to express the immediacy of the problem to those around us. Our idea is to build 19,000 simple wooden crosses from paint sticks and staplers, and to stick those crosses in the ground where people can see them, so maybe we can all start to wrap our minds around the magnitude of the problem. We think that when 19,000 becomes more than a statistic, but something we can see with our eyes, the tragedy of poverty will become personal. We think that people who take the problem personally will do something about it.