Laura Herr Photography: 30 Hour Famine

This weekend, we held the annual 30 Hour Famine with our youth group kids.

Each person that participated, stopped eating at 8:00am on Friday morning, and then didn't eat again till 2:00pm today. In doing this, they asked friends and family to sponsor them and raised money for a wonderful organization called World Vision. Since the event spans 30 hours, we always do a sleepover at our home on Friday night, which results in this pile of shoes by our back door.

We had so many wonderful kids participate this year. Whereas they don't eat any food, they are free to drink great quantities of liquids, including juice and gatorades.

They spent the majority of the night playing games at the church, but then come over and just hang out.

This morning, we woke up to a houseful of awesome friends.

After getting ready this morning, we headed over to our church where our amazing students spent a good chunk of the morning cleaning our entire church.

They worked both inside and outside and did a phenomenal job of cleaning everything.

Afterwards, we took a little bit of downtime, considering that it's definitely hard to eat nothing and then do a lot of work.

We always finish up our 30 hours by playing the game, Bigger or Better. The idea is that each team starts with a penny and then walks around our neighborhood seeing what they can trade that will be bigger or better than the item that they currently have. The teams came back with swords, a TV (with a built in DVD player), a plant, spaghetti sauce and even some money.

But by far, the most interesting prize was this turtle. And as I write this, I just realized that I'm pretty sure that it's still crawling around in our back yard, even though the rule was that you had to take whatever you brought back. Hmm...

Anyhow, I just have to say once again, that we have some pretty amazing kids in our youth group. Not only do they cheerfully participate in this event each year, they always do an amazing job of raising money for people in need.

Yes, they spend 30 hours experiencing hunger. But the truth of it is, is that globally, 925 million people are hungry every day and that a child dies from hunger related causes every 8 to 12 seconds. And knowing that, these kids are doing something to help change those statistics. And we should be incredibly proud of them.