There comes a point in every mother’s life when she realizes that she can’t do it all. The baby is crying. You don’t know what he needs. You feed him. You change him. You rock him. You drive him. You hold him close. You give him space. You add clothes. You take clothes away. You pace and bounce and shush him, covering miles in the space between your kitchen and bedroom, and when you cannot soothe him, you cry too.

It’s the heart of a mother to meet the needs of her children. I believe that God hard-wires that instinct, the one that makes us press into our children’s needs, to persevere, when we want to run screaming from that screaming baby.

That’s probably why mothering has changed my life so much. Because I never knew what it was to physically hurt when my child hurts, to have my heart break when they are sad, to hold my breath and watch them climb and falter and begin to walk–to soar into this world, and to eventually leave the nest.

So when I think about that feeling, and I imagine raising my children in poverty, I weep. I cannot fathom what it would be like to hold my child as they starve, to comfort them from a raging disease that I gave them because dirty water was all I could use to slake their thirst.

I–you–did not choose this time or place to live. I didn’t choose to be born into relative wealth. I didn’t choose to learn to read and write, to count, to believe that anything is possible. I didn’t choose this life.

Neither did the mother in Burkina Faso or Haiti or Indonesia or in places all around the world who is just trying to survive–to comfort her children in the face of oppressive poverty.

So tomorrow I begin–for the second time–the 5 Day Challenge. Churches around the world have encouraged people to take five days to adjust their diet and eat like most of the world–surviving on less than $2/day. Last February my family and a few blog readers took the challenge. You can read it about it here first, second, and third.

By choosing to eat like the bottom economic half of the world, I experienced a little “taste” of life for the mother whose entire existence involves finding enough food and clean water for her children.

And by giving the gap–the difference in what I spent that week ($20) and what I usually spend on groceries, meals out and coffee ($175+)–I did something to make a difference.

You can too.

Last year, my family and you fine readers raised more than $1000 by choosing to take the challenge.

This year, along with my church family, we hope to raise $25,000. It costs approximately 24 cents to send a nutrient-packed meal to those starving children. We all make small sacrifices, and collectively, we make a huge difference in the lives of so many.

Won’t you consider joining me? You can go all the way and take the beans-and-rice challenge. Or you can donate your funds from Starbucks, lunches out, or by restricting your food to what you already have in your house. It’s so easy, you can make this decision right now to make small changes for the next five days and make a huge difference in hunger relief in our world.

For more information, read my previous posts, or check out all the information at Meals With Hope. I’ll be blogging about it all week! If you’ve got that little voice in your head–despite all the objections–saying you can do this, I concur: YOU CAN DO THIS. Let’s see what happens when we say no to our own comfort, privilege and wealth and say YES to living like our lives matter because we take the stewardship of our abundant gifts seriously.