As I was taking a shower this morning it occurred to me what was spiraling down the drain. Water. Clean water. I could drink the water coming out of the shower faucet if I wanted to and I would be fine. More than fine—refreshed. And it dawned on me that it’s a privilege to have clean water as an abundant resource.

More than a billion people in the world have no access to clean drinking water. Most of their water comes from dried riverbeds and even puddles. And, oftentimes they have to walk several miles just to reach the tainted water. That’s crazy.

What’s even crazier though is that machines have actually been invented that purify water with surprisingly little energy needed, and fairly quickly. But there’s not very much money in providing clean water to developing countries. So, as of yet the technology project hasn’t picked up enough funding. Or course, I could be mistaken about all that. I saw it on the Discovery Channel, but can’t recall the name of the project.

So, for now, drilling wells is about as good as it gets. It costs about $5,000 to dig a well, which provides clean water to an entire village.

Reading over their website, I think that The Water Project may be the best place to donate money to provide clean water to folks overseas (although Water:Charity would be a cooler, though not necessarily better, option). TWP connects givers to various projects already, or soon to be, in progress. When filling out the donation, they give you the option to designate where your money is going. It even gives you the option to designate that all of your money be used for the actual building process. In other words, none of it turning around for various organization operating costs.

Being that water, just after air, is possibly the most taken-for-granted thing we have, and knowing that so many people don’t have it, I think TWP may be an really excellent way of giving some of our abundance to solve a really serious problem. I’m planning to give. You should think about it too.

A woman in Massachusetts is being charged on murder and manslaughter claims of two children. Both were stabbed to death. That’s pretty hard to read. It’s pretty hard to write too.

Well, today was the annual March for Life in Washington DC where prolife supporters from all over the country come and show their disgust for the brutal legislation.

What does that have to do with a murderous mother of two deceased children? One of those children wasn’t even born yet!

What kind of a ridiculous double standard is this? A woman can walk into a doctors office and have her child dismembered and vacuumed out of her body. In a lot of places, your tax dollars will even help her do it. But, if she walked into her bathroom and plunged a blade through her abdomen into the child, she’d be convicted as a murderer.

Is there a reason our country doesn’t see the double standard? Ridiculous.

This young girl commands an impressive speaking presence for her age. I hope that she did as well delivering it to her class mates as she did for YouTube. This is worth watching, both for the content, and the encouragement of a young girl taking an unpopular stance on a crucial issue.

Join me in praying for more young people with her heart for the unborn.

Just two pages into the introduction to Tim Keller’s The Reason for God and he’s already stimulating my mind. I can’t wait to get into the real meat of the book.

In his introduction, Keller is recounting his early years as a college student battling over the questions of moral relativity and social justice. In the church he saw two “camps”. The liberals, who seemed to have a looser, amorphous sense of morality, but had a burning passion for the oppressed all over the world. And on the other side, the conservatives, who seemed to have less concern for social justice, but a strong moral foundation.

Keller explains:

I was emotionally drawn to the [liberal] path—what young person wouldn’t be? Liberate the oppressed and sleep with who you wanted! But I kept asking the question, “if morality is relative, why isn’t social justice as well?”

Keller’s question, I think, is just one of the many logical problems that faces the church today. I don’t say that only because I occupy a more conservative position, but because it really is illogical. There isn’t a satisfying way around the question.

If the church is going to stretch God’s word to demand less of us, why can we not stretch our social standards to demand less of us? In fact, if we believe the bible loosely, then couldn’t we also believe life loosely? For example, if God produced a person into a dreadful situation, perhaps he wants them to be there? After all, if God creates homosexuals, then he must want them to be homosexuals and therefore the lifestyle is okay, right?

So Keller’s question is poignant, I think. If our morality is relative, so our justice should also be relative. Maybe even more so.