Yesterday was World Toilet Day

I'm not making this up.
The holiday started in Singapore, and they encourage everyone to prepare by cleaning their toilets, and then running around judging and giving feedbat on everyone else's toilet, and teaching toilet etiquette.
So it was pretty comical that our toilet cleaning outreach happened to coincide with preparation for world toilet day.

Global holidays aside, this was actually our most satisfying outreach, believe it or not. It definitely caught people's attention. They totally couldn't figure us out. Mike had the great idea to go first to the merchants who had donated products for the Teen event the night before. So we walked in, and Mike said "thank you for helping us with our event last night. And now we would like to bless you...by cleaning your restroom". Too bad we didn't have a camera to capture people's responses. Some of the expressions were priceless.

After we went to the merchants that the church already had a relationship with, we went to the New Age shop. The women running the store were very pleasant, but understandably confused as to why we were marching in with toilet brush in hand. And it puzzled them even more when we refused to accept a donation after we finished cleaning. But I felt that we made a connection with them.

Then we went to the Christian Science reading room. The woman on duty didn't feel she could let us in the back to clean, however she was actually the one person we encountered all morning who instantly grasped the concept of what we were doing. She said with amazement "oh, that's real humility. It's like Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. But people don't really need their feet washed anymore so you do this instead". And since we weren't able to clean her bathroom, we offered to pray for her instead. And there too, I felt we made a real connection.

In case anyone else is inspired by this and wants to try a restroom outreach, here are some equipment suggestions: Rubber gloves, one scrub brush, a toilet brush, a sponge, all purpose disinfectant cleaner, toilet cleaner, mirror cleaner. You need much more paper towels than you think (because a lot of the surfaces are too dirty to even want to use a sponge), and lots of the disinfectant.