It's Official!

We have an orphanage! Over the last few weeks, I've been working with the guys from Red Letters Campaign (RLC) and Children's HopeChest to find an orphanage that we could be involved with. Right before Christmas we got everything nailed down. We will be working with Moses' House orphanage in Ethiopia. I only have few details right now but I know there are 70 children there in need of sponsors. Right now, we have 11 sponsors and RLC has 20 other sponsors. So we have almost half of the children sponsored!

If you are interested in sponsoring a child, please let me know. I have been emailing the people who I know are interested. If you have not received an email from me and are interested, please either leave a comment on the blog or drop me a line using the 'Contact Me' widget on the right side of the blog. I'll be posting more information about Moses' House as I get it. Again, thank you for your willingness to make a difference.

Red Letters

This video gives some good information about Ethiopia and sponsorship from some of the folks at Red Letters Campaign. Please take a few minutes to watch the video and pray about how you can be involved.





Check back in a coupe of days for information about the orphanage we will be working with. The name of orphanage is Moses' Home. I'm gathering information right now and hope to have a new post very soon!

Just Getting Started

I'm sorry it's been a while since I posted. I've been trying to figure out what to post about. I thought I would start out by letting you know where we stand on sponsors. Currently, we have 5 commitments to sponsor orphans in Ethiopia. How cool is that! However, we still have room for more people to be involved. I've added a sponsor tracker on the right side of the blog so you can keep up with our progress.

I know things are tight for a lot of families these days and I'm not saying you should take food off the table to be a sponsor but please pray about what you can do to help. Brea and I have talked about how much we can do. Right now, we are considering sponsoring 5 children. After a lot of prayer, we have decided to re-allocate some of our tithe to support orphans. I'm not saying that anybody else should do this but it is what we feel God wants us to do. All we're doing is giving back to God (whether it is to our church or to His work in Africa).

As we get closer to Christmas, please take a few minutes and ask God what He would have you do to help those in need. When you're trying to decide what to buy for the person on your list who has everything, take a minute and think about what you can give to a child in Ethiopia who has nothing. Even a small gift will make a huge difference in an orphans life. They deserve to have someone who cares about them. Someone who will pray for them. Someone who will write them letters. Someone who will love them. YOU can be that someone.

What Next

I wanted to clarify how things will work for everybody. I am just trying to determine if there is enough interest to get this sponsorship off the ground at a small orphanage. Then I would help coordinate things between us and Children's HopeChest. We would be partnering with Children's HopeChest. All payments would be made to them via auto draft or by physically sending them a check each month. The sponsorship would not actually get started until late December or early January at the earliest. There are a lot of details to get worked out and exchanging of information that needs to be done. Right now, we need at least 25 commitments to sponsor children to get the ball rolling. That could be 25 people sponsoring 1 child each or 5 people sponsoring 5 children each. I need to now pretty quickly if we have enough interest to sponsor 25 children. You can either leave a comment on the blog or use the Contact Me form on the right side of the page to send me an email (my button broke over the weekend so I have a form instead).

I appreciate everyone who has taken time to visit the blog and give me feedback. I have included an overview of Children's HopeChest to give you a little more information about them and what they do. I've also included a Franciscan pray at the very end of this post. Please take time to read that before you leave.

What Is Children’s Hopechest?

Children’s Hopechest is an international ministry to orphans, both during their time living in orphanages and as they transition into independent life. This means that Hopechest goes beyond ensuring that children without families have the basic needs of today to preparing these children for productive adult lives.

How Does Hopechest Do It?

To do this, Children’s Hopechest recruits and trains U.S. churches to care for an orphan community. Hopechest is enabling its partner churches and their members to be the hands and feet of Christ around the world. Hopechest, itself, does not operate orphanages, nor is it an adoption agency. Instead, the organization brings proven experience and resources to churches who want to develop a long-term, community-based orphan ministry.

What Does A Church Sponsorship Look Like?

Churches that work with Hopechest agree to:

1) Pray for the children regularly

2) Recruit individual child sponsors ($34/month financial contribution) for all the children

3) Plan an annual missions trip with the staff and sponsors of children

What Does the $34/month Go Toward?All sponsorship funds are combined to provide direct assistance to the children, spiritual discipleship and teaching for the children, Christmas parties, and administrative expenses. You can review the financial stewardship of Children’s Hopechest at Charity Navigator (link).

Franciscan prayer
May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths and superficial relationships so that you may live deep within your heart.

May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression and exploitation of people so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.

May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer pain, rejection, hunger and war so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and to turn their pain into joy.

And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in the world so that you can do what others claim cannot be done to bring justice and kindness to all our children and the poor.

More Details

I have received a few requests for more details so I thought I'd give more of what I know right now. I have attached a video where Tom Davis of Children's HopeChest explains in detail how sponsoring works and what all is done for the children. In the video, he refers to the church sponsoring children multiple times. I want to give you 2 definitions of church for you to ponder as you listen to this video.

1) a body of Christians worshipping in a particular building or constituting one congregation: She is a member of this church.

2) a collective group of Christians, caring about the poor for the same reason that God cares about the poor.

I believe the church is God's people not just a building we go to worship on Sundays and Wednesdays. So the church can and should care about the poor. WE should care about the poor and needy. We don't have to wait for our local church to start the process before we get involved. We are called to minister, period. Not to wait until the church tells us to minister. I'm not trying to bash the local. My family and I attend a local church that we love being involved with. I just don't believe God said you can't do something if it is not sponsored by your local church. Enough on that. If you want to talk more about that subject, feel free to drop me a note.

I've put a 'Contact Me' button over in the right sidebar if you want to contact me for any reason. If you want to sponsor a child or children, either drop me message from the 'Contact Me' button or post a comment. I will be contacting people over the next few days who have expressed interest in sponsoring already. As I said in the first post, all we need are 20 commitments and we can begin making a difference in the lives of these children.

Please watch the video and pray about what you can do to help.

We Can Make A Difference

Thank you for taking time to read this post. I'll apologize in advance for the length. There are a lot of things on my heart and I'm pouring them all out for you to read and contemplate.

Many of you know that adoption is near and dear to my family. We adopted Mary Elizabeth in 2007 and are in the process of adopting another child right now. We feel this is one way God is calling our family to care for little ones that have no home. However, there are limitations to the number of children we can adopt. For the last year, God has been showing me all the different ways to help the ones we can't adopt. There are a lot of wonderful organizations that are working to help orphans all across the world (Compassion International, World Vision, etc). I became aware of Children's HopeChest about a year ago after I read a book by the president of the organization. The book is called Red Letters: Living a Faith That Bleeds. I highly recommend it. It will change the way you think about poverty, orphans and how Christians are called to help.

I began asking God how I could help these little ones. I believe He is telling me to get moving. For too long, I've waited for somebody else to take this on and make it their cause. But that is not what God wanted. Over the last couple of weeks, I've been in contact with Children's HopeChest and another group called Red Letters Campaign. These 2 groups are working together to provide holistic care for orphanages in Ethiopia and Uganda. Holistic care means to meet the whole needs of the child - physical (food/water/clothing/shelter), medical, educational, spiritual and emotional. The goal is not just that orphans would live, but that they would thrive as productive, contributing adults. They are doing this through community to community sponsorship.

• Community - Each sponsor is matched with an orphan from the same orphan community as every other RLC community sponsor, which means that we build community together through serving orphans - what better way!
• Financial Support - Sponsorships will commit to monthly $35 contributions to care for the holistic care of their matched child
• Relationships with the children - Sponsors will be able to correspond with their children through email or through handwritten letters. We are exploring the idea of creating a password protected area of the Red Letters website that would allow you to see what’s happening with all the children in the RLC orphan community and their sponsors as well as enable sponsors to exchange emails through there.
• Visit the Children - With Hopechest, you will have the opportunity to travel to visit your sponsored child on regular trips with the other sponsors in the Red Letters community. These will be fun and enlightening trips where you can connect with these beautiful children and their historically rich land. Oh! And if you can’t travel, you can still participate by sending care packages to your child with the group and watching for pictures and video of your child from the trip taken by others.

This is very similar to what some other groups do but you are partnering with an orphanage not just sponsoring one child. The Red Letters Campaign has already received commitments from over 120 people interested in helping in Ethiopia. I talked with their founder on Friday and he told me they have enough people to sponsor one orphanage already. We also discussed the idea of taking sponsors for a 2nd orphanage. This would be OUR orphanage. Yes, I said OUR orphanage! If we can get at least 20 sponsors, we will have enough to begin sponsoring an orphanage. Some of you may think I'm crazy. I would have said the same thing about 10 months ago. All I can say is this is what God is telling me to do. I believe WE can make a difference. It only takes $35 a month to help a child. Here is one page summary of how sponsorship works.

Please take the time to pray about what you can do to help. Please send this to friends and family that you think might be interested in joining in. Feel free to leave me a comment if you want to get more information or just want to chat. I'll be posting more information after Thanksgiving once I've had another conversation with the folks at RLC. I'll leave you with a prayer from Saint Francis of Assisi.

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;

where there is hatred, let me sow love;

where there is injury, pardon;

where there is doubt, faith;

where there is despair, hope;

where there is darkness, light;

and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,

grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;

to be understood, as to understand;

to be loved, as to love;

for it is in giving that we receive,

it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,

and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Amen.

I look forward to what God is going to do in our lives and the lives of the children He is calling us to help!