What Limits Your Perspective?
Perspective is in low supply here in the States. I don’t mean this in a derogatory way. It’s just a fact. We live sheltered. We don’t live without heartache. We don’t live without pain. We just live with limited perspective.
Continue Reading ›How Can My Church Help Open a Child Development Center?
Churches that wish to open a child development center will go through an application process, and maintain a continued relationship with local Compassion staff who provide training, support and accountability to their child development programs.
Continue Reading ›
How Uncomfortable Do the Poor Make You Feel?
To communicate with those who are skittish, or those who genuinely want to say “I am uncomfortable around kids” or “I don’t know how to relate to the poor,” we need to find a bridge.
What Power Do Actions Give Our Words?
What matters — what really matters — is how I live each and every day. If my everyday life is not a shining example of the care and nurture and love and respect due a child, all my words will fall on deaf ears.
Life Without Shoes Stinks
How many people do you suppose stay inside and can’t go to work on days filled with rain or storms, all because they don’t have a pair of shoes? How many kids end up with diseases that kill or seriously threaten their health, all because of a disease or fungus they picked up while navigating the streets in their bare feet?
Rebuilding a Broken Heart
This week I received a letter from Ada, my 13-year-old sponsored girl in Honduras. Compassion had sent me a note a couple of months ago letting me know that her father had passed away.
How Do You Stay in Your Child’s World?
As a Compassion sponsor I don’t want to only connect with my child when I get a reminder from Compassion. I want to be a sponsor who consistently prays for her children.
From Tragedy, Make Something Beautiful
How many of us have managed to escape tragedy in some form or another? All of us, at some point, struggle through heartaches and experience moments that threaten to tear us apart. But there’s something else that is also true.
Purifying Fire: Burning Away Our Impurities
This work is imperfect because it involves people. Compassion is not program-focused (though program models are used) – it’s intensely, insanely, beautifully child-focused. And sometimes, all of the questions in your letters don’t get answered. Sometimes a child drops out of the program and you don’t get an explanation. Sometimes, you feel frustrated because you want something to work better.
This Christmas, Tell Your Story and Give the Gift of Hope
I’m guessing that since you read this blog, you also have a Compassion story. A story about what caused you to pick up a Child Packet or visit Compassion’s website and sponsor a child who lived in poverty. Maybe you have a story about why you have continued to sponsor your child even in the midst of an economic recession, or why you have chosen to sponsor more than one child.
The Importance of Respecting Children
Each of us needs to take seriously the call to be an advocate for children. Kids watch us, and we have a responsibility to model fully the life we encourage them to walk.
Grace Stops Violence and Heals the Wounds of History
As the gospel exemplifies the power of redemptive grace, people are given the power to break not only the cycle of poverty, but also the cycle of violence.
