Being an American and a sinner, I'm really selfish. I think about all things in terms of me. I don't like that. So over Christmas break, I decided to start using my money to help people besides myself. One of my youth interns in high school supported a child through Compassion International, and I remembered hearing about how much she loved it. I love children and I love the friend who told me about it, so that's how I decided that it was a good idea.
And once I had decided to do it, I realized how wonderful I was. I was so altruistic, generous, helpful, selfless, bursting with love. I felt confident that the child I would sponsor would love me more than bread. I couldn't wait.
On the Compassion website was a list of children who needed support. The list encompassed pages and pages of children: boys and girls of all nationalities and ages. I didn't know how I was going to decide on a child, but I had assumed I would have a super cute little girl. I couldn't decide between all of the cute little girls and I didn't want to pick just one child because they all need help. There was an option to classify the list in order of who had been waiting the longest, so I did that, and the person who had been the very longest was my new friend, an Ethiopian teenage boy. And I decided right there: he's my guy.
I don't think that cute little girls don't need support, because everybody on the whole list needed support (and it was a long list). Picking one person meant that no one else on the list could have my help. That was really hard because I wanted everybody to be mine. But since I am too poor to financially support every needy child in the whole world, I stuck with my guy.
He and I get to write letters back and forth, and I got my first one from him last week. I was really excited. I opened it and...he's older than me. He wrote in the letter that he's twenty, and I'm still nineteen.
I had imagined that supporting a child through Compassion would mean praying for them daily and sending them stickers in the mail and in return, they would love me more than life itself. And here I am with this boy who is older than I am. I absolutely pray for him every day but I don't know if he wants my stickers and he definitely does not love me more than life itself, because that's unrealistic and not the point at all. The point was to further God's kingdom, and I thought I knew that until I realized that he's older than me. He isn't a child, because he's twenty years old. He's a sinner, just like me. He's a sinner in Ethiopia and I'm a sinner here.
This is about more than giving money. This is about where my heart lies. Because that is where my treasure will be also.
Love,
Lauralicious
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