I spent yesterday in Slater, Iowa. Not quite the small town I grew up in, but close enough. I spent the morning watching their annual 4th of July parade with Rog and his extended in-law family. Then I spent the rest of the day with some friends from high school I don't get to see often enough. It was a slow day in which I was able to just relax, have conversations with people I don't normally get to be around, and celebrate - in a very small-town Iowa way - the 250th anniversary of the birth of the American experiment.
In the small town I grew up in 15 miles or so east of Slater, we felt like we were very poor. I'm sure some of the folks in Slater feel that way today. But I don't ever remember a day concerned about what I would eat. And I don't remember a day when I had to search for clean water. No matter how "patriotic" you might feel during this season, or how much attention you may pay to all of America's current shortcomings and division, life here has the potential to be pretty good. That is simply not the case everywhere in our world.
In places like Afghanistan, people have been at war with someone as long as I have been alive, and you can be very happy you weren't born a female there. Or how would you like to have been destined for Iran or for Ukraine over the last months and years? Or we could have been born someplace where the prospect of the next meal isn't assured, and clean water is something one has to work very hard to attain. Like Zambia. and many other places in our world.
We at S2S believe LOVE encourages us to SHARE out of our American abundance with those that don't have enough. I'm not aware of any of our 150 donor partners giving to the point of destitution upon their own family - and we don't believe that is required. But we do believe anyone who claims to be follower of Jesus should consider what Jesus meant when He said we should LOVE GOD and LOVE OUR NEIGHBOR.
In the two-chapter treatise Paul gives on his first century S2S program, Paul seems to suggest that the way we care for the poor is a measuring rod for our LOVE. Here is 2 Corinthians 8:8:
I say this not by way of a command but rather, by the diligence of others, proving your love genuine as well.
I have argued in the past that the opposite of LOVE may well not be HATE. I think the opposite of love is SELFISHNESS. Love is giving. Love is SHARING. And for Paul, as he points out in the rest of that two-chapter section, love means allocating some of our SURPLUS to those that are living lives that are defined by DEFICIT. Food and water seem to be the most basic elements to define surplus and deficit. We have more than enough of both of those things. Most of us try to ration the amount of food we put in our bodies every day, so our bodies don't get too out of balance, as they do when we ingest too much. And most of us are a few steps from way more clean water than we need.
You might say, but how can I literally share food and water with the brothers and sisters living in deficit? Did your mom ever insist you clean your plate because there were hungry people somewhere in the world? And did you think to yourself, "How does me cleaning my plate help those people?" Ours did. And I definitely thought that. The world seemed so much bigger in 1976, when I was 12 and America celebrated its 200th birthday. It seemed like it would have been hard to make a difference for any starving people living across an ocean.
That is simply not the case today. Today communication and travel allow us to personally experience the reality of malnutrition in other parts of the world. And today, the financial systems in place allow us to easily transfer a small portion of our surplus out of our surplus storage and know that within the month it will be wired around the world to have an impact in someone's life that needs our help.
It's actually kind of amazing just how simple it is. In our short time in existence, Shoulder 2 Shoulder, or I should say the 150 donors that have to this point transferred a small portion of our surplus out of our surplus storage, have done just that. So far in 2026, fifty-seven of those donors have shared. Each with a belief that our LOVE is being "proven" every time we share.
What if this American experiment was begun 250 years ago, so that we could be in a position of surplus here in 2026, so that we could then share from that surplus to help those living in deficit around the world, so that we could demonstrate our LOVE?
That seems like an America I could be proud to be a part of. Happy birthday America! Let's demonstrate our LOVE!
