We’re adding two more sponsor kids to our family in the next few months.  We’ve held off on choosing those kids for a while now, wanting to sponsor children in countries we knew we’d be visiting.

On Monday I head to Ethiopia for a week with Brian and Wess to be part of a very special graduation ceremony.  More on that when it happens.  While I’m there I’ll meet our first new sponsor child – a five or six year-old boy.  I don’t know his age.  Or his name.  Or where he lives precisely.  Because I didn’t know what projects exactly I’d be visiting while in Ethiopia, I asked the folks at Compassion International who were planning our trip to pick out a child for us to sponsor from one of the projects we’d be visiting as soon as they knew.  So, sometime next week I’ll meet an Ethiopian boy around Gresham’s age who’ll be part of our family for years hopefully.  We’ll put his picture on our refrigerator and pray for him every night and Gresham will be in charge of making sure he gets letters from us full of lots of encouragement and artwork. Then, in February, I’m headed to Uganda where, once again, we’ll meet a new sponsor child – this time a little girl for Penelope to write and learn from when she gets old enough to.

The hope is that while our money and words rescue these kids from poverty, their words written back to us will rescue my kids (and me) from affluence.  It’s like Paul wrote in 2 Corinthians 8.  I’d never seen this verse until recently and it’s an amazing description of what happens through our relationship as wealthy Americans with the poor in the third world and across the street.

13Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you are hard pressed, but that there might be equality. 14At the present time your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need. Then there will be equality, 15as it is written: “He who gathered much did not have too much, and he who gathered little did not have too little.”

With our plenty we’re headed to the store today to buy a kid without a closet and a room of his own something very small to play with, something to wear and something he can brush his teeth with.  And with his gratitude and joy (I’ve never met anyone in the third world who doesn’t possess those two things in abundance) he’ll teach us over the years how to be content with little, how to persevere, how to dream and he’ll inspire us to let go of (or hold loosely) what few people in the world have.

Next week, if we have any internet access at all in Ethiopia, I will post video here, pics and audio of our trip and introduce you to the latest addition to our family.  Link your readers here for that and I bet together we’ll save a few lives.