All weekend I have been thinking about the lesson in perspective and the object lesson we tried to teach our kids Saturday. My husband and I had an interesting talk Saturday night about the struggle of wanting to live the life God wants while also being heavily influenced by our American culture of "stuff".
We currently have 4 Compassion children, including one who is getting to graduate his program. This young man is someone that has been part of my husband's life since before we met and started dating over 10 years ago so he's seen our family change from my husband as a single man to where we are today: a family with 2 kids who will be 7 and 5 this summer. Until recently we'd never had more than 2 Compassion children at a time, but had had 4 total over the years. In recent months we added a little boy born the same day as our daughter and a little girl born the same day as our son so we can watch these children grow up along with ours, which brought our total to 4 that we currently sponsor. We've had two we sponsor leave the program: one due to graduation and one due to other circumstances.
Though we've sponsored Compassion children the entire time we've been married (as I mentioned, my husband started before we were married, so I "inherited" these kids on our wedding day) it's been in recent months that my heart has seriously been changed by the sponsorship experience. We pray for our Compassion children regularly as they each have their own "sticks" and have their pictures hanging in the hallway where we get to see their faces often. Our kids know their names and they are part of normal conversation in our home. Our kids love that they each have a friend in a different country who was born the same day as them (though my 4 year old was confused for awhile as to why she and her friend in Peru weren't twins even though they were born the same day).
This week, Edie at life{in}grace has the amazing experience of travelling to Nicaragua with Compassion International and she, along with her fellow travelers, are blogging about their experiences.
I'm not going to lie---I'm extremely jealous of these bloggers this week who get to meet and love on children that Compassion is helping to release from poverty in the name of Jesus Christ! In my dreams we get to travel to Peru (Our oldest and youngest Compassion children live approximately 100mi from each other) or the Dominican Republic or Kenya to visit one of these members or our extended family. Since I can't visit our own Compassion kids this week I'm going to live vicariously through those who can!
Will you join me in following Edie, Shaun, Traci, Kelly, and Christy this week as they get to be Jesus' hands and feet in Nicaragua and love on some amazing kids?
That's great! We just got a Compassion kid recently.
ReplyDeleteThat's awesome, Beth! Where is your Compassion child from? 5/6 we've sponsored over the years have either been from the Dominican Republic or Peru and obviously we now have one in Kenya, too :)
Delete