Yesterday, as I was packing up my car to leave Massillon and come back to Columbus for Thanksgiving with the Fredericks, my dad gave me a sermon series to listen to, called “Too Small to Ignore” from RiverTree.  “It’s good,” he said, “It’s about kids.”

I was thinking, kids… parenting…. hmm… I guess this might come in handy in the future.  And then I put it in my CD player.  It wasn’t about parenting, at least not in the way we might think of that word.  It was about taking care of the world’s children, especially those on the fringes of society, and the great responsibility (and privledge) we have in that.  Looking through the Bible, we see that it must be something that’s very close to God’s heart. 

I was suprised at this statistic: If every church in America helped one family within that body to adopt a child, there would be no children without families left in our country.

Rivertree is starting an adoption ministry and over 100 families are going through the adoption proccess.  That’s awesome.  Adoption is something that has been really close to to my heart for a while now, and it’s something I am going to to continue to pray about.

The last sermon in the series, really kicked my butt.  A couple weeks ago, Wes Stafford, the president of Compassion International came to Rivertree.  His testimony is so heartbreaking and so amazing.  His parents were missionaries in Africa, so he grew up in a small village there and saw poverty first hand.  As a little boy, he watched the children in his village — his best friends — die, one by one, from poverty and diseases that are hardly considered serious here in America.  He said that poverty broke his heart as a little boy, but that God was preparing that heart for the ministry that he is now the head of.  He also endured terrible beatings and abuse in the “Christian” boarding school that children of missionaries attended.  All the little children were silenced and the teachers told them that in speaking up about what was going on, they would be destroying their parents’ ministries, which in turn would cause the Africans they loved to go to hell, unsaved.  Wes was the one that finally spoke up, although at quite an expense, but knowing God’s will was not for His precious children to live in fear and abuse.  At age fifteen, Wes’ family moved back to the United States and he was in shock by the way people lived with an abundance of food, when he had just come from a place where little children were starving to death.  But he soon discovered that it wasn’t that the people here didn’t care, they just didn’t know.  And he knew that he wanted to spend his life fighting that.

His sermon is here, if you would like to listen to it.

So on Thanksgiving, I was reminded how lucky I am that I’ve never experienced or seen the things that Wes did.  I also was reminded that I have been blessed and God wants us to bless others with what we’ve been given. 

When there are people starving to death, how can I be buying new clothes and going out to eat?  An $8 movie ticket could buy two mosquito nets, that could potentially save two children from Malaria (a disease that kills 1,500 children a day).  The $40 I spend on a new outfit could feed 40 children for a day.  

My prayer is that I will feel the urgency of the world’s problems and that my heart will feel a burden to help.  I hope that one day, the word “compassionate” will describe me.

“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being pollited by the world.” — James 1:27

This entry was posted on Friday, November 24th, 2006 at 10:32 am and is filed under amazing grace, undeniable truths. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.