This is awesome stuff. Michael Redd, of the Milwaukee Bucks, who recently signed a maxed out, $91 million, six-year deal, fulfilled an old promise and bought his dad a church. And it wasn’t just lip-service with financial backing…doing what he said he would do and blindly writing a check. It’s a kingdom-building thing.
"The Lord, he gave me life. What I did was to give it right back to Him. That’s the least I could do, is buy a church. The very least I could do."
Very cool article. You should read it. I like the slant the author takes by sarcastically blaming Redd for raising the bar too much. Now everybody else looks like schmucks.
No, you had to make us all look bad, including the rest of your multimillionaire peers in the NBA. At least they have the decency of being predictable. They buy their pops one of the five crown jewels of big-ticket items: car, boat, vacation, fractional jet ownership, house. Didn’t you get the e-mail?
You bought your dad a house, all right, but it was a house of worship — the newly named Philadelphia Deliverance Church of Christ in your hometown of Columbus, Ohio.
Read it all here: Church is Redd’s gift to his grateful father.
To slightly transition topics…
This reminds me a bit of the article snippet I read over the weekend at Eric and Amy’s. It was a feature on Bill and Melinda Gates in Time magazine’s special look at global hunger. I guess they’ve given over $6 billion toward research and development of drugs to fight the diseases and conditions that ravage third-world countries–diseases like malaria.
These are often overlook by the developed world because we for the most part don’t struggle with them. When the Gates’ got into philanthropy, they researched where they wanted to pour their money. And they found considerable lack of government and private funding for such initiatives. So, they started leading the charge.
$6 billion is a lot. Spring Arbor University’s annual operating budget is roughly $50, maybe a few million less. Our university could be run for over 120 years on that amount of money.
But that is just the start of it. The $6 billion is literally the tip of the iceberg. While Gates’ fortune rose from $46 billion to $48 billion in 2003 (keeping him the richest of America’s 313 billionaires), it could be a lot larger had he not given away over $28 billion to charity.
Are you kidding me? $28 billion? That’s 1/3 of his fortune! That’s a WAY higher percentage than our nation’s other top philanthropists. The editorial In Defense of Bill Gates talks about that.
One article even claims that the $6 billion given toward third world heath is "more than any other charity and almost every contributing nation combined." That’s just sad.
So…any plans to give away 1/3 of your small fortune?
Interview with ABC news here: Why Bill Gates Is Giving Away His Fortune
Time article I mentioned is available to premium subscribers here: Riches to the Poor
