For those of you who don’t know, I’m a recovering “Lame Sponsor” with Compassion International. I have a checkered past when it comes to keeping up regular correspondence with the two boys we sponsor. To date, a five year old in Ghana has been out-writing me!
That all changed after I traveled with Compassion to Guatemala this past September. And I got asked the same question over and over again in a language I couldn’t understand by faces I could read as easily as those of my own two sons, “Do you know my sponsor? Will you ask them to write to me?”
My heart cracked into all kinds of tiny pieces on that trip – each one determined to take home the message they’d entrusted me with, “Please ask them to write to us.”
Sponsor or no sponsor, turns out what every kid really wants is a letter.
A letter to tell them they are special and loved and beautiful and necessary and that they matter much, much more than their circumstances may tell them. When you’ve stood in a corrugated iron shack that houses a family of five who barely escaped a mud slide and watched them pull an envelope of letters that stretch back for years out from under the mattress pad you know you’re in the presence of something special.
Paper and ink can be an anchor in the storm.
Often our words are more important than our money.
And we’d like to make a way to send hundreds and thousands of words of encouragement to kids who really need them in this season of Thanksgiving.
That’s where YOU come in!
All the delicious details over on (in)courage today – hurry, please, come on over!
Hi Lisa-Jo!
Will you test your link to (in)courage? It didn’t work for me…
Hope you’re doing well! I quite appreciated your recent post on un-cooking: YAY for love that pours out of our kitchen and into the hearts of the people at our tables!
-your fellow double-barreled name friend ;)
The link didn’t work for me either. :)
http://www.incourage.me/2010/11/a-christmas-card-drive-of-epic-proportions.html
Thanks for the head’s up – it should be fixed now.
Lisa-Jo, thanks so much for this! My Hubby and I have sponsored a little girl from Ethopia for three years. In all that time, I’ve wondered do any of our letters really matter? It’s hard to imagine the chasm that seperates our world. You touched me with this and I know what I need to be doing more of–writing her.
I knew this was going to make me cry, but I read it anyway…..because your heart and your words always draw me. I have nothing to add – it is beautiful beyond words. Happy Birthday again sweet girl. You are a gift.