The Charity Water Story | SCOTT HARRISON

hi [Music] it's great to be here it's a real honor to be with this amazing community all the communities I know that are that are watching online and other locations I'm so excited to share my story today as a part of this series and to share what God has done in my life over the last 12 or 13 years so let's start at the beginning I was born in Philadelphia I was born in a middle-class family here's a picture of mom and dad he was in an engineer businessman my mom was a writer and when I was 4 we moved from Philly to the suburbs to get closer to my dad's new job now this was our house that we moved into not much to look at inside this house unbeknownst to us at the time the gas company had installed a furnace that leaked carbon monoxide now this is 15 years before the carbon monoxide detector had been invented as we know that so toxic invisible fumes are filling this house as we're all sleeping my mom bore the brunt of it because she was fixing up the basement during the day and on New Year's Day she walked across my parents bedroom and she collapses unconscious on the floor we take her to the hospital and after a long series of blood tests they find these massive amounts of carboxyhemoglobin of carbon monoxide in her bloodstream now mom is never the same again she didn't die thankfully but her immune system irreparably died that day so watch my mom as as far as a four year old boy go from this healthy supermom she couldn't do anything wrong she was amazing oh I should go from this to an invalid overnight allergic to the world from this point on anything chemical made her sick whether it was car fumes whether it was perfume or cologne the ink from books would make her sick I remember from this point on because she was a journalist and wanted to read my dad and I would bake her books in the oven to try to get the smell of the print out and then I would take sometimes these slightly charred books up to the room which she lived it was kind of a containment cell a tie bathroom that had been scrubbed down with special soap covered in aluminum foil and if she wore this charcoal mask and if she had gloves on her hand she could put the book in a cellophane bag and read it my parents had a deep Christian faith they decided not to sue the gas company for gross negligence my dad actually ripped out the heater and found the cracks himself they believed that God would provide for the needs of our family and they didn't want to become bitter so I grew up as an only child and a caregiver role doing the cooking doing the cleaning taking care of mom playing piano in church later I joined the worship bands and I was that good Christian kid that didn't smoke didn't have sex didn't you know swear I didn't drink I didn't try drugs I played by the rules for 18 years then 18 I had one of these moments now it's my turn time to look out for number one all these rules you know I'm missing out on the fun so I joined a band I grew my hair down to my shoulders which was a terrible idea I moved to New York City in search of rock-and-roll fame this lasted about a month our band immediately broke up because we hated each other but I learned that if you were seeking rebellion there was a way to do it in style and there was actually a job called a nightclub promoter where you could get paid to drink alcohol for free and you can get the right people inside the right nightclubs you could charge them astronomical amounts liquor people would pay $20 for a cocktail they'd spend $500 on a bottle of champagne that cost 40 so for the next 10 years I climbed up New York City's social you know nightlife letter I was a guy behind the velvet rope in the one-way glass deciding who got in and who got out there's a picture of my life exactly 10 years later I'm in a VIP room and what is so sad about this photo is that the thing I think is important in this moment is pretentiously craning my wrist so that some club photographer I've never met notice as I'm wearing a Rolex this is somewhere around midnight if you would have met me five or six hours later at some disgusting after-hours it was a much less pretty story go to dinner at 10:00 the club at 12:00 after hours at 5:00 often to bed at 12:00 or 1:00 the next day and as you could imagine a decade in nightlife I picked up every vice that would come with the territory short of heroin smoke two packs of cigarettes for ten years I had a gambling problem a pornography problem a strip club problem of cocaine and ecstasy marijuana problem and I come so far from the spirituality in the morality my heritage my poor parents can you imagine for these ten years they had little ladies at their church you know down on their knees wearing holes in the carpet for their prodigal son ten years later I'm in Punta de left I'm in South America this big party town my friends and I had rented a house with servants and horses and we bought a thousand dollars as fireworks magnums of Dom Perignon this is the good life I had gotten almost everything I've been looking for at a grand piano in my New York apartment I drove a BMW I had a Rolex my girlfriend was in the cover of magazines I had a Labrador Retriever what more could one want and I realized on this trip that I had become the worst person I knew there was no one more bankrupt in every sense of the word spiritually emotionally morally than I and if I continue down this path the legacy that I was leaving was not one at all really my tombstone would have read here lies a man who's gotten a million people wasted over the course of his life Bravo my father had sent some dense theology down with me on this trip I mean he'd been trying for ten years everything that worked signed me up for models for Christ one's email list thinking that would work I'm hung over during the day is that something just happened on this trip and I started reading aw Tozer I started reading the Bible again I think I was confronted with the exact opposite of my life a life of virtue and purity and a search for values and righteousness and service to others I determined leaving that trip to make a radical change in my life I came back to New York and begin asking the question what would the exact opposite look like instead of Kedah mystic sycophant service to myself what would it look like to help others so it took me a few months of turmoil and about six months later I just made the move I sold almost everything I owned I remember putting up two thousand DVDs on eBay in one single lot trying to purge back when they're worth something and I began to apply to the famous humanitarian organizations I'd heard of the Oxfam's and World Vision's and Samaritan person that UNICEF's of the world I was ready to do one year of service for the the ten years that I'd selfishly wasted kind of a tithe so I put in all these applications I've left New York I've given up my apartment and as you can imagine I'm denied by every single organization I've applied to no one will touch me with a ten-foot pole you know these are serious humanitarians saving the world I'm getting a thousand people drunk every night how can I in any way be useful to their mission finally one organization said that if I was willing to pay them $500 a month and go live in a country I'd never heard of called Liberia then I could join their humanitarian mission I said this is perfect this is really the opposite I'd never heard of this country I have to pay so a couple months later I'm sailing into West Africa joining this extraordinary organization called Mercy Ships now we'd flown in with 14,000 United Nations peacekeeping troops I'll tell you by the country in the moment but this organization Mercy Ships many of you have heard of them for 25 years they failed a 500-foot hospital ship up and down the coast of Africa bringing the best doctors and surgeons to people who couldn't afford access to medical care amazing organization so I was going to be their volunteer photojournalist I'd put some pictures of girlfriends in my dog on a blog and I dusted off an NYU degree that I'd never used in communication and said look I'm going to be able to tell stories I actually have a lot of people on my list so let me be your photojournalist so I have this moment before I walk up the gangway of that ship where I felt like I had to quit it all I felt like I had to go all in so I put on a pack of nicorette or the patch I had nicorette gum I'd gone out with a bang I think I'd had six or eight beers the night before but I just kind of knew that this was it I had to sail away from my vices and leave them if I wanted to start a new story if I wanted to step into what God might have for me it would require radical obedience so I never smoked again I never gambled again I never set foot in a strip club I never looked at pornography again I was celibate for five and a half years until my wedding night and I just believed that if I gave this all up maybe something amazing would happen so Liberia was a complete disaster you guys have heard of Charles Taylor I'm sure in the 14-year Civil War he used child soldiers to destroy this country and people were living in bombed out apartment buildings that look like this in houses that were actually once beautiful but had been decimated by the war when we went into Liberia there was one doctor for every 50,000 citizens here I think the ratio is one to 180 of us before the ship hit the port a small advance team would post these flyers throughout the country and we were looking for people with giant facial tumors flesh-eating disease something I'd never heard of people born with cleft lips and cleft palates people who've been burned during the war sometimes by rebels who'd poured oil on them or their children I wondered would anyone turn up I knew that we had 1500 available surgery slots and my third day on the mission I grabbed my cameras put on hospital scrubs jumped into a Land Rover convoy at 5 a.m. and we started heading in the darkness towards the football stadium the soccer arena that the government had given us to see the patients we turn the corner and there more than 5,000 people standing outside the stadium doors and it hit me we're going to turn thousands of these people away who have come with hope many of them we learned have walked for more than a month from neighboring countries with their children just in the hope of seeing a doctor first child in line was this little boy named Alfred he was 14 years old and he was suffocating to death on his own face with a benign tumor his mother had brought him there a few days earlier wanting to make sure he got seen and through a translator she pulls out this photo and says four years ago my son was fine but then this tumor began to grow and there was no one to take him to and now my son is on the brink of death it's unable to eat properly so I realized that we were there to help people like Alfred and a couple days later I scrubbed up and got to document his surgery as these amazing volunteer surgeons removed his tumor they threw it in the bin and then a week later I said I'd like to take him home and see what it's like when someone has been written off for dead is is brought back into community and I watched as hundreds of people greeted Alfred and I got to watch him heal and this is what our life was like every day I would wake up in the morning I would go down on the ward I would meet the patients that were scheduled for the day marceline this woman told me that this tumor had grown for almost ten years and that people would stone her when they saw her face because they thought she was spiritually cursed they would throw rocks at her so she had to cover her face with his towel she needed a 40 minute surgery just to remove a benign mess that year changed my life I took more than 50 thousand photographs and every few days I was blasting my club list of the 15,000 people had been getting drunk with these photos as you can imagine that list got a little smaller people like unsubscribe unsubscribe I signed up for the Prada party not the leprosy party but people began to give money they began to be moved they began to start volunteering and I learned that images and stories had the power to move people to greater compassion to greater empathy towards action sign up for a second tour and on that second tour I got off the ship and I started traveling around in the rural areas and even to other countries and I saw during water for the first time I had never seen a human being drink dirty water in my life water for me cost 10 dollars it was called vos we would sell it in clubs to people who wouldn't even open it and as I traveled around I saw human beings drinking from ponds and from rivers sources that I wouldn't let my dog walk in I met this girl how a 13 year old girl realized for the entirety of her life she had never known any other water to drink to bathe to cook with than this pond so I'm back in forests with the villages and I'm in surgery and I'm telling the doctors what I'm seeing and they're like yeah we know so much disease in the world is caused by bad water why don't you go work on that issue so I started traveling around learning about this I learned the 663 million people right now one-tenth of the world is going to drink they're all going to drink bad water today simply because of the conditions they've been born into by no choice of their own any more than we got to choose where we were born a tenth of the planet is risking their lives every day with unsafe water now we look at statistics like this in our minds just kind of go numb can't imagine 663 million anything let alone people without water but in men are just people with names and hopes and dreams and kids like John Bosco in southern Rwanda this is his water this is the only water he knew his entire life imagine letting your child or your friend or your brother or sister walk into water like that put it on your face to drink with it or girl like this in Honduras drinking water from a river that looks more like chocolate milk as you can imagine there are a lot of diseases associated with bad water many you have heard of in this room you've all heard of cholera you've all heard of E coli maybe you haven't heard of schistosomiasis it's a fancy word for worms parasites couple hundred million people have worms crawling around in their body because of the water they've had to drink the World Health Organisation says that 52 percent of all disease throughout the developing world is caused by bad water and lack of toilets half the people that are sick in these countries don't need to be sick they just have this basic need man child was drinking from the molo river in northern Kenya every time she would drink from this bottle she would vomit on her shirt remember watching in horror with a few friends and we took the water away from her we promised to try to find a solution for her village but I wanted to know what was actually in the water and I took this bottle back to New York and I gave it to friends at a lab and I said would you put this under a microscope they sent me this video of that water and I remember you know in their estimation they said look we're not experts in all the different kinds of amoebas and parasites but you sent us water that is alive no one should be drinking water like this leeches are a huge problem we would travel to communities and the women would would pull the leeches out of the water and say look this is a big problem for us we always can seem to pull the big ones out but sometimes these little leeches will get through the cloth that we're pouring the water through through our scarves through our t-shirts and they grow up inside our bodies and they grow up inside our children's bodies and they crawl up and stick to the back of the throat and if you're a parent and you're dealing with this you have two options one is to take a stick and to try to pry the leech if you don't kill it it just crawls up again and the second is to give your child a little bit of diesel fuel just enough to scald the leech they're hopefully not enough to injure your child I learned of the huge impact and the link between water and education I learned that half of the world's schools didn't have clean water or toilets not toilets were a huge problem if you're a teenage girl you drop out of school you wind up staying home for five six days every single month because there's no toilet at your school you fall behind in your studies and then you do this for the rest of your childhood days carry 40 pounds of dirty water on your back and the hot Sun women's issue unfortunately I've been to 66 countries now I have never been in a place where it was the men that were getting the water we see women in the most undignified situations women digging in the sand like this woman in Kenya I remember asking her because she hadn't gotten any water in there I don't see many other women in this riverbed where are they going she said well there's another source it's a big flowing river but the problem there is that we get attacked by crocodiles you know the first couple times you hear things like this you say oh it can't be true you hear thirty times fifty times eighty times this was that River imagine stepping in and fear and then this is the quality of the water to you as a mom or bringing home to your family to your children the good news is and this is what I loved about working on this issue it is a completely solvable problem there's not a single person on earth that needs to drink dirty water right now it's not like some of these you know diseases that we're looking for cures in test tubes maybe decades in the future we know how to give clean water to every human being right now we don't have the will to do it we haven't allocated the resources but a lot of different things work in a lot of different contexts sometimes you can dig well sometimes you can build rainwater harvesting systems sometimes BioSand filters it's often as simple as ten thousand dollars to drill a well and the terrible irony is that so many these communities are leaving on top of the resource that could save their lives and improve their health but they don't have access to a million dollars of drilling rigs and compressors and trucks they don't have access to local hydrologist skilled at finding the water and protecting it but when you strike water in one of these communities it is one of the most amazing things it is it never gets old being there in that moment if there's anything more that's a picture of heaven than this I don't know what it is the kids rush the drilling rig clapping slap dancing smiling I'll play this a short clip put yourself in the moment imagine seeing clean water for the very first time in your life as in this village in Malawi [Music] [Applause] [Music] we've said for years water changes everything it is one of the most powerful transformative agents on earth water touches so many things things we don't even think about it impacts health if your kids are drinking clean water and not water with leeches or parasites in it obviously they're healthier the kids have clean water at their schools you get better students women they're not walking five six seven hours every single day get time back they use that time to provide for their families often selling rice at the market or peanuts earning an income I was just in Zambian Zimbabwe with women who were selling rugs for $4 that they were making some women tell us they're just better moms because they spend more time with their children less time walking what I think I'm most loved about working on this issue was it was one of the very few things on earth that every single person could agree on we fight about everything these days we fight about religion we fight about politics we fight about geography and borders I thought this is something that everybody could agree on nobody wants children to drink water that puts their lives at risk whether you're a Jew or a Christian or an atheist or a Muslim or a Republican or independent or democratic people could agree on clean water for others but yes 660 million people live without I came back after my time with Mercy Ships to New York City and I was completely broke I had given all my money to them the people that I'd met along the way and nightclub promoters are not good at saving money but I started charity water I wanted to see if I could make an impact and this huge insurmountable issue I was living a little loss of oak Club friend had taken me in I was actually sleeping on the closet floor next to this room and he said you can use my couch as your first office and I was running around telling everybody that I wanted to see an end to the water crisis I wanted to see a day on earth when everyone had clean water regardless of where they were born but as I started talking to my friends I realized this was not going to be easy because my friends were not giving to charity they were cynical they were skeptical I realized that people didn't trust charities now I found the data behind this turns out 42% of Americans distrust charities and 70% of Americans think charities waste money so that if we're going to make a dent in a problem this big we need to do something very different we need a new way to approach this to reach some of these disenchanted people who should be giving and bring them back to the table I love the idea of charity was to serve others in need charity was a virtue we needed more of that in the world charity means loved Caritas from the Latin said a couple big ideas we would reinvent charity that's what we would really do underneath it all first we had a problem deal with the money the province people I would the money how much my money is actually going to go reach these people so what if we created a way where a hundred percent of every donation we would ever take in the history of the organization would go straight to the projects and people like less than dumbest idea you clearly didn't get a business degree how will you pay for your staff your overhead I'm like I don't know face open up to bank accounts and said we'll never touch the public's money a hundred percent we'll go to projects and somehow I will personally raise money on the other side from a small group of people who can catch the vision of those unsung costs the second thing is we would prove where all those dollars went we would build an organization that was hyper transparent from day one we would put all of our water projects up on Google Earth and Google Maps so anybody from the public could go and see where they were the third thing we would do is we would work with local partners I just believed that for work to be sustainable it must be led by the locals in these countries not by Westerners like me I had no business drill a little well in Bangladesh India or Malawi I could help raise awareness and get people to care and raise resources but the work must be led by the locals to be sustainable believe it or not this is so different than the way people are doing things that just began to grow started with a birthday party now it feels so uncreate ofnow but the only idea I had was to throw a party in a nightclub on my birthday so I got all my friends to come i lured them there with open bar seven hundred people came and I said just throw twenty bucks in on the way in and this time instead of putting 250 thousand dollars in my pocket we took every single penny to a refugee camp in northern Uganda where we did our first few projects and then we sent the photos and the GPS back to those seven hundred people that attended the party and they couldn't believe something had actually happened people were drinking clean water because they'd thrown twenty bucks in a bin we said let's just keep doing this on repeat keep showing people the impact of their donations and maybe this thing can continue to grow we try to get people to think differently about the issue imagine giving your kid death in a baby bottle getting donated media on buses and on taxi tops we built a digital only business we never direct mails we just didn't know anyone that was responding to that stuff we thought the movements of the future would be built online on Twitter on Facebook on Instagram and we are always looking for ways to celebrate our community the amazing things our community our diverse community was doing to raise awareness and money for others in need we partnered creatively with brands even luxury brands we went to Saks Fifth Avenue and said you guys have figured out how to sell women $5,000 handbags that is amazing we have some $5,000 water projects and we're both header headquartered in New York we should totally be working together I think this is a craziest thing they'd ever heard so they did not throw me out of the CEOs office and they wound up giving us the windows on Fifth Avenue for a week after mr. Armani took his down and the windows in Beverly Hills in Chicago and they got their employees involved and their customers involved and their vendors involved and they raised over $700,000 to bring clean water to over 100 communities American Express came to us and said we'd like to talk to our customers about what you're doing and see if we can raise awareness they put us on their homepage for three months they took out a huge print campaign raising awareness of the water crisis things just started to go really right people were responding to this new business model we got invited to open up the Nasdaq know we're a non-profit but when companies wouldn't be able to get it together at the last minute they would call us and try and give us this awareness same thing with the New York Stock Exchange we've done this collectively five or six times now this is amazing moment early on a few years in things had been growing and I was invited down to the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington DC and I don't spend time in DC I don't really have a network there someone had invited my wife and I and I'm sitting there the very back of the room and President Obama starts making his remarks I'll just play them for you back home your churches your temples synagogues your fellow congregants so many faith groups across this great country of ours I came upon a group recently called charity water a group that supports clean water projects overseas this is a project that was started by a former nightclub promoter named Scott Harrison who grew weary of living only for himself and feeling like he wasn't following Christ as well as he should and because of Scott's good work charity water has 1.7 million people get access to clean water and in the next 10 years he plans to make clean water accessible to a hundred million more that's the kind of promoting we need more and that's the kind of faith that moves mountains and there's stories like that scattered across this room of people taking it upon themselves to make a difference so the organization began to grow and grow and then we stumbled on this idea a very very simple idea but we said what if we could do more with the birthday what if we could get people to give up their birthday to donate their birthday in the service of others now birthdays have become about us it's a time to celebrate our selves we get gifts we throw ourselves parties so what if we could turn them into generous moments about others so I got the idea to have people ask for their age in dollars but that would be a sticky idea I was turning thirty to everyone I know has 32 dollars they could donate it 100% of the money went and they could see the photos and GPS of those projects so I raised a bunch of money with my amendment 7 year old kid in Austin Texas starts knocking on doors asking for $7 donations I'm not going to lie he lived in a nice neighborhood raised $22,000 so this idea starts to take off Tony Hawk's donates his birthday Jack Dorsey who created Twitter and square gives up three birthdays raises almost two hundred thousand dollars Will and Jada Smith donate the birthdays then they ask their fans to spread the idea they actually came with us to Ethiopia to see the impact that their birthday had made all that was cool but what we were fired up about was six year old kids that were not famous 16 year olds like Maggie Moran one of my favorite 89 year old Nona we have you look at our mission statement it's quite beautiful she says I'm turning 89 and I'd like to make that possible for more people she's live double the life expectancy in so many these places where we work because of the privilege she was born into and if her birthday could help other people have more birthdays live healthier lives then she didn't want anything people said I got to do something right now my birthday is 10 months from now people started climbing mountains trying to raise $1 a foot we've had skydivers for charity:water we've had people make sales and sail the Atlantic we've had people take the $10,000 like Sid that he saved up for an engagement ring and buy a water project in Indian say I want to start our marriage with an act of radical generosity instead of a ring jesse is here in Atlanta listen to Nickelback for a hundred and sixty eight consecutive hours was rewarded for his pain $38,000 exist a lot of kids five-year-old kids painting for charity water Riley ate rice and beans per month this is actually quite a profound photo her mom sent this to us and said Riley went on your website and saw that 4,000 kids die every day a bad water Riley asked her mom for paper and pen and she begins to write down 4,000 lines because she wanted to know how big the number was and feel it Maddie and Vancouver has done 12 lemonade stands at her 12th lemonade stand she convinced a local band to perform next to her stand to attract the lemonade virus she's now over five thousand dollars in sales this amazing community of people bringing so themselves their talents their ideas their inspiration begins to spring up their birthdays Rachel this incredible story from Seattle I'd spoken at her church and I'd asked everyone at the end to donate their birthday and Rachel was about to turn nine so she gives up her birthday and she only raises $220 her goal was 300 tells her mom I'm going to try harder next year she actually felt like she'd let people down and right after her birthday she's killed in a 20-car pileup the only fatality word spreads of Rachel's last wish which was for people she'd never met across an ocean to get clean water instead of gifts or a party and people begin to donate nine dollars spreads through Seattle spreads across the country spreads across Europe people in Africa start donating nine dollars over 37,000 strangers come together and give 1.2 million dollars in her honor didn't stop there so many of those 37,000 people donated their birthdays they raised another two million dollars Rachel helped over a hundred thousand people get clean water from $220 the purity of her heart inspired so many others well you realize the charity water wasn't our story it certainly wasn't my story it was so much bigger than that it was the story of Mattie and Nona and Max and Rachel it was the story of John Bosco's the story of our local partners working 29 out of 30 days to drill in Ethiopia taking one day off a month because they wanted to maximize the eight-month dry season and help as many people as possible and if we could continue to tell this is the story of others and continue to invite people in and get out of the way maybe this thing would continue to grow in 10 years now more than 1 million people have made this a part of their story and they've generously contributed over a quarter of a billion dollars funding projects for now 7.1 million people 7.1 million people across 24 countries currently employing over 1,500 locals who get up every day with the resources to lead their communities forward with integrity and with passion as we look ahead this is the beginning of our next decade in year 11 that we realized seven million people okay it's a lot it's a lot of people it's a thousand times the space capacity of the Georgia Dome but it's one percent of the need and this gets me on about 90 flights a year this gets our team out there passionately advocating on behalf of the poor because we believe in a world where everyone has clean water to drink and we want to go faster we want to help more people if you're sitting here wondering how you can help there are three main ways the first is you can pray for us you can partner and pray for our work we are believers in miracles I have seen so many miracles over the last 10 years we had a moment early on where we'd raise millions of dollars in the water bank account but we were about to miss our payroll than the other bank account people were praying complete stranger walked in off the street wrote a million dollar check we've had miracles of office many many answers to prayer over the last decade would you remember us in your prayers the second would be to donate your next birthday I can promise you no one wants to get you more stuff if someone's going to organize a big party you can save them a lot of time and expense consider using your birthday in the service of others consider inviting your friends and your family into this the amazing thing about this is the average person involves 15 people in their inner circle and raises over a thousand dollars helping 30 people get clean water through their birthday the third and final way is something that's brand-new for us that that we did to mark year 11 and it's a new community we're growing called the spring we've had a million people give once and that's amazing but we said what if we could get a bill grow a community people who would show up for us month in and month out giving just a little giving what they could every month a subscription for good now we subscribe to a lot of things these days the average person in this room would have 11 subscriptions Spotify Apple music Netflix Hulu HBO Cinemax magazines newspapers Dropbox we are used to this we get benefit from all of these all these subscriptions benefit us or we turn them off so what if we could create a community that benefited others were a hundred percent of the subscription the benefit was passed on to others around the world and we could show people what was happening month in and month out cost us 30 dollars to give one person clean water or some people that could do that every month some people could do more people started enjoying from 80 countries and if it's something you'd like to learn more about it's probably the most important way people can partner with us going forward we set up a link just for this community to be able to track the impact this is an incredibly generous community I know you guys support many many things you go to charity what about org slash Atlanta to learn more what I'm sure of is in the kingdom of God no one is drinking dirty water no one is walking five hours no women are giving their children water with leeches in it I told you about John Bosco earlier his story is this clear a picture of what happens when everyday people reach out their arms across the notion when they reject the apathy that is so easy to succumb to when you hear a number like 663 million people what could we ever do well a million people said a little something John Bosco went from drinking this water was entire family why are we wouldn't let our dogs drink water just so Unsinkable to us and then because everyday people heard about a story and cared and reached out across an ocean drilling rigs started rolling towards his village he got to watch local Rwandan jump out heroes to him and look for clean water underneath the village they found it a couple days later they started building the well and by the end of that week he was drinking clean water for the very first time in his life we've been back to see him over the years and the story is now eight years old and when we first met him he was very much a boy and now he's a man and he has gotten married in he has a beautiful daughter named jean-marie and we realize his daughter will never have to drink from that swamp the psycho has been broken in this village and that's worth doing that's what gets us up each and every day to continue fighting for little girls like Jean Marie for fathers and mothers like John Bosco and his wife I'll leave you with two final thoughts the first may be there are people in this room that are haunted or hounded by your past maybe you've done awful things worse than me maybe all I don't know that that's possible let me just tell you something that I am sure of something that I have learned God can absolutely redeem anything and anyone and it's one of the things yet so much fun doing I'm walking proof of that if you had met me 14 years ago you would have met this guy filled with rage and anger viewing obscenity you would not have invited me to speak at your church stepping out in faith and obedience God's blessed me with an amazing amazing life's work a beautiful wife an incredible family a three-year-old boy named Jackson who is already driving as you can see our one-year-old daughter named Emma my life is unrecognizable from those days of the clubs from those days of running away from God I love this verse and Jolla says I will restore to you the years that the locust of Eden and then there's a locusts and worms and just you get this idea of a desolate barren clear-cut area there is nothing left there is no hope that a crop would ever grow there again God says you will have plenty to eat until you are full and you will praise the name of the Lord your God because he has worked wonders for you it's true in my life I'm sure it's true in many of your lives I'll leave you with my favorite quote guy ten years ago was walking by a bodega sent me a picture and it was this do not be afraid of work that has no end it's from ancient Jewish texts I love this do not be afraid of work that has no end if your work is in the service of others if your work is intentional ending the suffering the needle is suffering in the world it will have no end that's okay you see when we see an end of the water crisis we're not just going to drop the bike and go get rich we're going to go and turn our skills our community on another area of need maybe it would be shelter maybe it would be health maybe it would be hunger do not be afraid of work that has no end and I would ask you to ask yourself for me its water maybe for some of you too this resonates maybe for others it's it's slavery its justice issues its hunger it's any of the things that you see in the world you say not on my watch it's just not okay I encourage you use your time your talent your resources you will not regret it I hope some of you might join us I'd like to end in prayer God thanks for this unbelievable community this is a community of people who care about others to generous community for all the people watching would that you would stir up in their hearts compassion and generosity that you would show them they are greater than their pasts would show them the things that you want to do in and through them through their time to their talents through their resources that we thank you that you like to restore things that you care about the poor living around the world and we pray that you would continue to use this Jesus name Amen

Channel: North Point Community Church

Views: 20,764

Rating: 4.9419088 out of 5

Keywords: Scott Harrison, ScottHarrison, CharityWater, Charity Water, North Point Community Church, North Point, NorthPoint, Andy Stanley, AndyStanley, Andy Stanley church, voices, clean water, water solutions, Scott Harrison story, charity, charity: water, charity water, charity water story, charity water scott harrison story, the charity water story

Id: w8QdFdtsmbs

Length: 45min 42sec (2742 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 26 2017