WHY OUR YOUTH MINISTRY SPONSORS KIDS

For the last 8 years as a youth pastor in San Diego, our youth ministry has been sponsoring kids around the world.  To do this, we put piggy banks on the tables and ask students to bring $1 a week to help us change the world, one kid at a time.

• We started in 2005 with a girl named Luyando in Zambia through World Vision.  
• Then we added a boy named Hector in Tijuana through a local organization that we work with called His Ministries.  We go visit Hector 2 or 3 times a year and bring his family giant amounts of food to use for the months ahead.
• Then we started sponsoring an orphanage in Uganda.
• Then we added Marvin in El Salvador.
• Then Ruby in India. 
• Lastly, we added a girl named Keke in Thailand through Compassion International.

All-in-all, to sponsor these kids, it still only totals about $225 a month we need to raise, not counting gifts we send.  Which, around the Christmas season, we send $100 to each kid- which is more than some of their families will make in months.  This special annual money we send is then used for the child we sponsor to get them something, their family, and often the area or community they live in too.  One year we sent money to India and Ruby, along with every other kid in the village got blankets.  She sent us this picture.  So rad.  

This is worth it's weight in gold to show students how just a few bucks a week can change the world in a tangible way.  It broadens their world and radically changes what it looks like to love Jesus.  

Then this year, just last week in fact, I got a letter from Luyando in Zambia.  Seriously, she lives some 10,000 miles away from us, literally almost half way around the world.  I'll most likely never meet her, but look at how the $100 we just sent her was spent.

Along with this picture was a letter that read the following:

Special greetings to you and your family.  How are you?  I guess you're doing fine.  I'm fine back here and my family is fine too.  I was so grateful and still am for the money you sent for me amounting to 100 U.S. dollars.  As a family, we are all happy for your support which will go a long way.  We thank you so much and pray that you have a long life.  With the money my father managed to buy me the clothes that I am wearing, books for school, gumboots, a few groceries, and some iron sheets to roof our house which was grass thatched.  It's rain season here so the money came at just the right time.  Now we no longer worry about the roof, no matter how it rains.  Happy Christmas and Happy New Year to you.  With love, Luyando.  

Seriously... it doesn't get any better than that.   I still cry when I realize that a group of high school students pitching in a few bucks a week fixed a roof for a young girl and her family in Africa. Amazing.  Thank God for World Vision!  What an amazing experience.  Thank God a family is not getting wet as I type this because their roof is solid now!

I really can't encourage you enough. If you lead students, please consider sponsoring a child of some kind together as a team. It will change you and I guarantee it will change a kid's world somewhere else.