Growing up, my husband and I were never exactly the first ones picked to be on the kickball team. We weren’t second or third either.
We’d languish in the line of kids with knobbly knees as it grew sparser and sparser and our humiliation grew deeper and deeper. We always knew we would be one of the leftover kids — it was a given — kicking at the dirt, pretending not to notice while the cool kids tried to decide between which of the less athletically endowed kids would mess up their game the least.
But you just hoped you wouldn’t have to bare the infamy of being the last one standing in that line alone. Often my husband, shortest kid in his grade that he was, was the very last picked.
As much as I hated that kickball line, I know that God used it to shape us into whom He wanted us to be. For both my husband and me, being the last picked made us compassionate for the underdog and empathetic toward those who don’t seem to get all the breaks.
On a recent sponsor trip to El Salvador, Jocelyn Erhardt, a sponsor with Compassion Cananda, shared another story of how God used the last one picked to show His mercy.
Rabbi is our sponsored child who is registered into Compassion’s program in El Salvador. Previously, Rabbi and the other kids who were registered with him had waited eagerly to find out who their sponsors would be.
Each child who got a sponsor would be so excited and proudly show their pictures and letters to the other kids. Rabbi kept waiting for that to be him. And he kept waiting and waiting as the line of kids who needed to be sponsored dwindled.
Rabbi asked his mom over and over, “Why isn’t anyone sponsoring me?”
Like many other kids before him, perhaps he wondered if there was something wrong with him since no one seemed to want him.
But his mom, Blanco, had faith and continually assured Rabbi, “God has someone extra special to sponsor you, and we need to wait for God’s perfect timing.”
In the meantime, Blanco privately prayed for her little son, that he would get a sponsor and that his sponsor would be a pastor.
After all that waiting, Rabbi was the very last child picked, the last one waiting in that line wondering why no one would pick him.
But although Rabbi was the last picked, his sponsor made the choice to come and visit him — the only child in his center who had ever had his sponsor come to visit! And, guess what?
His sponsor — my husband, Jason — is a pastor of 20 years, just as Rabbi’s mom had prayed for.
On our visit to El Salvador, Blanco poured out through tears how God had used our sponsorship to teach her and Rabbi about His profound faithfulness and how much He cares for them — a profound lesson to learn as a boy growing up amid poverty.
Just another way that God, even through the little adversities of life, continues to show His mercies that are new every morning to us and through us.
Now is your time to sponsor a child who has been waiting for a sponsor for six months or longer.