NUMBERS SPEAK

I'm not a numbers or a statistics guy. I don't think that more students in church makes for an effective morning or anything.... but that said, numbers do speak. They say something and sometimes they say more than pictures or paragraphs.

Here's some I've been stockpiling as of late:

• This is all about the numbers in the Olympics. 80 nations, 5500 athletes and judges, $1.6 billion in IOC budget. NBC paid $820 million for the TV rights, 6.8 tons of old computer boards were recycled to make the medals... yeah. Crazy stuff like that.

• What about a this? Someone recently paid $104 million for this 6 foot statue. The most expensive private art ever sold.

• Then if you want, somewhere in dubai, you can buy a custom water bottle for $2600.

• Or perhaps you have $1400 to throw at a Swiss Army knife with 112 functions. It's 8" wide, so I have no idea how you'd even use the dumb thing. But evidently someone must be buying this stuff.

If you want to know how those numbers compare. How about this:

• 2.5 billion people live on less that $2 a day. I would take them 2 years to earn enough to buy the knife above, assuming they saved every penny. In reverse, if you gave that money away, you could pay for 2 families budgets for a year.

• The average well cost to drill a fresh water well is about $8000. $20 can provide 1 person in Africa fresh water for 20 years. That means you can drink water from a $2600 bottle or you could provide water for 1300 people for 20 years. The 6 foot statue above could sit in some dudes entry or be sold to buy 13,000 fresh water wells. Charity Water has built 1549 wells to date that provide water for 820,000 people. That means that 6 foot statue would provide enough money to give everyone on the planet access to clean water.

That's ridiculous! Dang it. I need to give more and this is proof enough that money, greed, and social structures are completely stupid.