It all started about five years ago when someone asked me to sponsor a child through Compassion international.  My answer was no.  I really did think I meant no when I said no, but instead of just saying no and forgetting about it, suddenly I felt drawn to Compassion’s website and I couldn’t get those children out of my mind!  I would go online to do other things and the next thing I knew I would find myself on Compassion’s website going over the child pictures and reading their stories over and over again.

This went on for several months and then one night as I was looking at the child pictures once again, I saw her… A little girl with a big giant smile, beaming out from among a sea of unsmiling faces.

Suddenly I began to feel a tug in my heart that I should sponsor her.  I had a million excuses why I couldn’t sponsor her but no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t let this go and I knew sponsoring her was what God was asking me to do.  I clicked the ‘Sponsor this Child‘ button underneath her picture.  Her name was Walkiris,  she was from the Dominican Republic and she was 4 years old.

The date was May 4, 2010 and that day was the beginning of it all.

I would love to tell you that I was all in on the sponsorship thing from that moment forward but if I told you that I would be lying.  The truth is I was really nervous and feeling all kinds of reservations.  I kept thinking things like how would I be able to afford paying the sponsorship fee every month?  Was Compassion really a trustworthy organization? I also worried about what I would write about to this child I had never met and knew nothing about?

About 3 months after I sponsored Walkiris a cream colored envelope arrived in the mail with the words “Message From Your Sponsored Child” written on the outside of the envelope.

The letter was written in Spanish and then translated to my own language so I could read it. The letter was written for her by a grown up because Walkiris was to young to write,

Hello Dear Sponsor, How are you? I hope you and your family are fine, my family and I are very well thank God.  God has given me a lot of friends and their names are Yasari, Mikali, and Yasi. I think that a good friend knows to play and share his or her snack.  I learned in the Bible story that Jesus thinks that a good friend should be very good and not fight.  I thank you for loving and praying for me, do you have many friends? I want you to pray for my grandmother Manuela, her hip hurts her.

The letter was signed with a tiny blue finger print.

The moment I saw her finger print I melted to mush. I also know that was the moment I was truly all in.  Her tiny blue finger print was like the seal to the deal, her seal of approval stamped on the letter.  Her fingerprint stirred feelings in my heart I never knew I had. Feelings I had never felt before.  This child was a real live little girl, not just some smiling face on a page.  I said I would sponsor her when I clicked the sponsor button and now she was depending on me to do what I said I would. The day I got the first letter was the day I really became a child sponsor.

Over the past 5 years her letters have kept coming and she has shared her life with me and I have shared my life with her.

She has shared that she loves to sing and dance.

Her best friends are Yasari, Mikali and Yasi.

Her favorite color is pink

Her favorite animal is a dog

She does really well in school and she really loves math

A few months ago she told me she was voted president of her class at school and that she wants to be a doctor when she grows up.

We share prayers with each other.

She has asked me to pray for her grandma whose hip hurts, her grandfather with high blood pressure, her uncle who broke his leg in an accident and her teacher whose newborn baby died.

One time she asked me to pray for the children in her country who were getting sick with Cholera, which is something I don’t think even exists in my own country.

No matter what she’s written to me to pray about even if it sounds bad to me she still always tells me that she and her family are good and she always gives thanks God for everything.

She has went from being  a little girl that I knew nothing about to becoming a member of my family and I can tell from her letters that I am part of her family too.

Also over the past 5 years 3 more children have also come into my life. A friend once asked me why do you sponsor those kids? All I can say is I did it in the first place because God nudged to do it.   But now as the letters have went back and forth and the relationship with these children has formed I can see now that I did it also for reasons that were unknown to me at the time I sponsored them.

Reasons like the boy who wrote, “you are my mother and I am your son.”

The little girl in the lime green dress on an island in Haiti who latched on to my hand and picked me to be her sponsor.

The little girl who told me this past week in her letter that Dios (God) is her favorite  hero.

The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me ~ Matthew. 25:40

I do it for the least of these that I used to not see.

In one of Walkiris letters she asked me to pray for the poor children. As I read that suddenly I realized that she doesn’t think she is poor.  Could it be that she is really not poor and instead she is really rich in what truly matters?  Could it be that Walkiris is actually rich because she knows Jesus and because she knows she is loved  ❤

As I was writing this today it occurred to me that though unknown to me at the time, I think maybe somehow sponsoring and advocating for children has somehow been for me too.  For the little girl who is now a grown woman who grew up in America thinking money and things were what it meant to be rich.  But by sharing in the lives of these children I have been able to step into the shoes of families who live lives way different than my own and finally see just what it is that truly makes a person rich.

Thats how it all started….A tiny finger print nudging me into the right direction and God has now put a passion inside my heart for children and their families, to know, and experience the love of Jesus.

I am pretty sure that passion is here to stay.

I am curious what passion has God placed in your heart?  How did it all start?  Tell me about it in comments below or if you have written about it on your blog leave the link. 

Thanks for reading,

Terri