Stories to Connect You With Compassion & Grow Your Faith

We cry together. We laugh. We share. And we work. Every day. And sometimes we have to go the extra mile. They don’t have to come but they are willing to do it. They have the calling to serve.

This week, we are in Bolivia with two young men who have a fiery desire to do the Lord’s will and share about releasing children from poverty in Jesus’ name, Cole LaBrant and John Stephen Grice. And the whole idea was inspired by you!

The relational aspect of sponsorship is not just important in getting people to become sponsors. It is important throughout the sponsorship journey because love is best shown in a relational context.

What would you say if someone asked you the question, “What do you know about Brazil?” Could you spout off some fun Brazil facts? Share a little about the community the child you sponsor lives in?

In my eyes, the trade-off of tan lines for résumé lines wasn’t worth it if there wasn’t any eternal value, purpose or opportunity for growth in summer internship assignments. My advisors stressed the importance of interning, but I kept shying away from surrendering one last summer in the sun to the corporate world. That is, until I started looking within the nonprofit sector.

Even sponsors who have been writing for years still ask, “What should I write about?” Well, instead of us giving you ideas of what to write this month for the Second Friday Letter-Writing Club, we decided to share from a trusted source what children really want to hear from their sponsors and the importance of letter writing.

A tragedy at infancy plunged Mutabazi into a life of uncertainty and fear. “I learned that my mother died two months after I was born and shortly after my father was poisoned by a neighbor,” he recounts. This unimaginable crime changed the course of Mutabazi’s life and that of his three elder siblings.

In their new book Small Matters: How Churches & Parents Can Raise Up World-Changing Children, Greg Nettle, President of Stadia Global Church Planting, and Compassion President Jimmy Mellado, explore Christ’s command to take care of children, share extraordinary stories of kids they’ve personally encountered around the world, and offer tips on caring for children in your home, church and community.

It’s human nature to use generalizations. We compartmentalize information about the world as we view it through our own tinted lenses of experiences and interactions. And if we’re not careful, that compartmentalization can shape what we think about a group of people into a singular story.

With no money, a drunken, violent father and a community plagued with malnutrition, one little girl found comfort in the words of her sponsors. This powerful story reminds us once again of the importance of letter writing.

Provider. Protector. Hero. There are a lot of titles you can give the dads in your life. This Father’s Day honor the man in your life who’s always been your hero by letting him be a hero to children in poverty too!

“Colors come to my mind in waves. They fill my sight and overflow my senses. I am not okay until I let them out…they only come out through my paintings,” twelve-year-old Hector the artist explains. This is because Hector has a condition called synesthesia which enables him to see plain things as colors. Things like numbers and letters appear to him in color, even when they are black on a white page.