A big week of letters!

So, my last post was a Mail Call Monday post, 2 weeks ago.  While happy to receive a book, I hadn't received any letters from my sponsor children.  That was January 9th and I posted before I checked the mail.  That week I got letters on Monday (Allan), Friday (Tania, Andres) and Saturday (Allan again).  It was a deluge, a downpour of letter blessings!   4 in one week!  That has never happened before!  I was so excited!
Here are some photos of their letters:

Allan & Tania are both from Ecuador and this is their "Reciprocal Letter" paper.  Andres' is different; he's from Guatemala.

Allan's letter.  Pardon my "white out", it is to protect both Allan and my family :-)

The back of Andres' letter, with the translation.  Check out his great Christmas drawings!

Allan's drawings!

Tania always incorporates Bible verses into her drawings:  God is love (center of flower),  He is my strength and my help (left circle), I can do everything in Christ (right circle),  quietness, confidence (left leaves), peace, reason (right leaves).

What a blessing these letters have been to me.  I love these kids!!!

A Bittersweet Letter

I am a mailbox checking addict... there, I've confessed.  Here in the US we also get mail on Saturdays. When we moved from Canada and I found out about this, I was ecstatic.  I was also confused about the flag up, flag down business.  In Canada, I've either had a mailbox right on my house (no flag), a mail box connected to a mail room in an apartment (no flag), or one of those community mailboxes (no flag).  So the only flags I knew about were the ones other people had, mostly on rural type roads.  In Canada, (currently, I believe) the flag up means that the mailman has come and you have received mail.  In the US, I discovered, the flag is put up to notify the mail carrier that you have outgoing mail, and unless you have outgoing mail it stays down. (Isn't it cool that you can send mail out from your own mailbox?  I know you can do that with the community mailboxes back in Canada because there is a general mail slot... but your actual mailbox isn't two way). 

For a mail checking addict like me, this is problematic because unless I have outgoing mail, or watch the window continually (and since we're confessing, sometimes I do...) I don't actually know if the mail has come.  I have, however, developed a "highly scientific" system.  If I don't have outgoing mail (I did try to have outgoing mail all the time, but that gets expensive!) I do a survey of the other mailbox sets that I can see from my house to see if any flags are up and then monitor them throughout the day to see if they've been put down.  Not a perfect system but relatively efficient!  I'm sure a very few of you will find this fascinating and most of you will just be shaking your heads at me!

Anyhoo, because we receive mail on Saturdays, I received mail on Christmas Eve.  I wasn't sure I would, not knowing how the USPS would observe the Christmas holiday (they had the 26th off, in case you were wondering, and well-deserved in my opinion).  But there on Christmas Eve was a largish envelope for me.  In it was a letter from our sponsor child, Maria, in Ecuador.  It is a bittersweet letter because Maria is aging out of the program in January and this is the last official letter we will receive from her while we are her sponsors.  Our family has sponsored someone in Maria's family since 2003.  First her sister and now her.  As I have confessed before, I was part of the "Lame Sponsors" movement before 2010 and as such would write only very rarely, generally around Christmas when I received paper and instructions to write my child.  Thankfully, before I started sponsoring with Compassion in 2010, I learned more about the impact of my letters from bloggers like Ann Voskamp, Lisa-Jo Baker, and Michelle Wright  (if you click on their names, it will bring you to posts about the importance of letter writing). 

So when I began those new sponsorships, I also applied the same letter writing principals to my previous sponsor child Maria from Sponsor Hope.  Can I encourage you that a real relationship developed?  That in my one year of earnestly writing to her once a month and praying for her more often really made a difference.  It did.  My bittersweetness is that it came too late for her sister, and while an encouragement to her, was only a year of letters, when it could have been 4 years.  But God is gracious and we are not to worry about yesterday's regrets.  May I encourage you to start writing more if you haven't been a regular correspondent?  It truly does make a difference in the lives of these children.

I'd like to share parts of Maria's letter with you.  For some background, Maria's father passed away in 2009 and her mom passed away unexpectedly this past August.   Maria is the youngest of  6 children and is 18.

Hello dear sponsors please know I am so thankful for how you support me in my sad moments.  Thank you for your prayers, I tell you that I am doing well and always trying to get through the loss of my mother.  Thank you also for the prayers you send.  You are wonderful people, kind and nice.  I am doing well in my studies.[...]

I tell you that I recently wrote my second trimester exams and I did a really good job.  I want to tell you about a new idea I have had, I have been thinking about going into the career of being a chef.  It would be a new diploma, so I would have two.  Both would be lots of fun and I'm praying that I will reach my goal of having two professions.  I know I can do it.  I have a positive mindset and I'm working really hard.  I know with God's help I can do it and thanks to your help as well. [...]

I went to visit my mother's grave. [...] I never imagined I would ever be visiting her there but I know I must be strong and accept and try to understand that we all must die someday, nobody can live forever and so we don't suffer, God waits for us who believe in Him with open arms.  God has given me tests and I have managed them.  I know I have experienced a lot of hurt and bad things and I didn't think I would get past them but little by little I try.  Never think I forget you.  I love you like you were my second family. [...]

I hope your kids and all your family are well.  May the King of the Heavens take care of you, protect you and continue to bless you.  Blessings, Maria.

I don't think I need to make too much comment.  What a blessing our time with Maria has been. 

I am pleased to tell you that we'll be able to keep supporting her family as she has a niece who is entering the sponsorship program and we will be sponsoring her once Maria moves out of the program.

Merry Christmas to me from Compassion!

The wonderful folks at Compassion gave me a gift for Christmas.  A new photo of Andres Camilo.  I've been sponsoring Andres since October 2010 and this is the first new official picture I've received.  So excited to see how he's grown.

I sent out letters today and I have taken a photo of the letter and goodies that I am sending to Andres Camilo.  I need to also highlight some wonderful people who contributed some of the goodies that I am sending to the children in this mailing.

Take a look at this letter and these goodies.  First person I need to thank is Kelly Robey from Kelly Alison Photography.  I won a Facebook contest through Kelly's studio.  I won a photo session and so we had her photograph our family.  So the two pictures of our family were taken by Kelly. Fabulous aren't they?  

Next, as a follower of Michelle Wright's blog Blogging from the Boonies, I entered one of her contests and won 25 Shutterfly cards.  If you look at the top right corner you'll see one of the cards that I had made from those 25.  It features all of our sponsor children and then 1 John 4:11 on the back in English, Spanish, and Haitian Creole.  

Last, but not least, in my streak of winning things to benefit my sponsor kids, I entered a contest to win a correspondence kit from Jill at Compassion Family.  Guess what?  I did win it!  I chose a kit for a young boy, as I have two of those in my sponsorship family and I have a harder time to find cute papers for them.  So the paper with the animals around it came from Jill.   A big thanks to all of these ladies!   I'm pretty sure Andres Camilo, and the other children, will enjoy all these wonderful goodies!

Happy Birthday, dear Katherine!

Our Katherine in Nicaragua is 10 today!

 We are praying for her today and hoping that she will have received the card that we mailed over 2 months ago in the hopes that she would receive it today.

We started sponsoring Katherine in December of last year.  We were blessed to attend Andrew Peterson's Behold the Lamb of God concert in Richmond.  I pretty much informed Super-Awesome that we would be sponsoring a fifth child that night (We already had Maria, Andres Camilo, Allan, & Tania).  I usually don't try to tell things to Super-Awesome this way, I usually ask, we discuss, but this was something that I was adamant about.  We had been to BtLoG twice before (driving down from Ontario to NY & CT) and I knew they were strong supporters of Compassion.  I had heard Bebo Norman share very eloquently twice before about Compassion and their work, but it hadn't been the right time for us.  It was the right time this night.  Bebo was no longer on the tour, so Andrew Peterson shared about Compassion.  At intermission we headed (or rather, I dragged Super-Awesome) to the Compassion table, manned by one of the tour members, Gabe Scott, a very talented multi-instrumentalist.  Gabe and his family are very involved with Compassion.  His wife, Keely, is one of the photographers that accompanies bloggers and sponsors on their trips to visit their sponsored children.  Her photos are breathtaking!

Back to Katherine...  I surveyed the table and scanned the faces and dates.  I definitely felt that the Lord wanted us to stick to Central and South America.  None of the dates were specific to anyone in our family, no one's birthday, anniversary, etc.  Three things did jump out at me about Katherine and these made me pick up her packet, fill out the information and commit to sponsoring her.

First was her name:  Katherine.   Super-Awesome and I have had numerous discussions about baby names in the past on our many drives everywhere.  (You can ask him... it was the number one topic of discussion before we had kids... maybe even before we got married).  Catherine was/is our choice for a second daughter if that should ever happen.

Second was her sad face and eyes.  Some of the photos do feature happy looking kids, but Katherine was not one of these.   Michelle, over at Blogging from the Boonies has a post about why the children in the packet photos often don't look happy.  Click here to read about it and see a video that Kees Boer had taken on one of his trips to Bolivia.

Third was a blue box on the packet (below her name, birthdate, and country) that said: 

PRIORITY 

THIS CHILD HAS BEEN WAITING 10 MONTHS

IMMEDIATE SPONSOR NEEDED

Those three things sealed the deal for me.  This was the child that the LORD intended for us to sponsor.  I later learned from Compassion that Katherine had already had two sponsors and had been dropped by them.  So, while the usual photo difficulties can account for some of the sad faces, this was not the case for Katherine.  I believe her sadness, beyond the poverty that she lived in, came from having had not one but two sponsors who had to discontinue their support of her.  After I learned that information, I (again) told Super-Awesome (really, it's not my usual style) that if our finances changed and we had to stop supporting any of our children, she would be the absolute last one to go, I would find someway to get the $38 a month. 

Happy Birthday, dear Katherine!  I pray for blessings from God in your life!

Some Free Printables to send to your Sponsored Children

With limitations on what we can send in the mail to our children, I am always looking for printable papers that will fall under the guidelines put in place by Compassion:

"Regrettably packages cannot be sent. Because of strict mailing and customs regulations in our various countries, letters that are not flat, are not made of paper, or are larger than 8-1/2" x 11" and 1/4" thick can delay an entire shipment of sponsor correspondence in customs for weeks. View a list of items you may send your child.  Please remember to include your sponsor number and your sponsored child's name and number on any item you send."

I linked to this site in my last post, but you need to know more about them!

Calvary Curriculum is my favorite Bible/Sunday School lesson site and it has an updated webpage with lessons in English and in Spanish.  There are coloring pages, word searches, true and false questions and much more!  There are 325 lessons going from Genesis to Revelation in pdf format.  They have new 2yr-Kindergarten pages as well as the Grades 1-6 that they've had for years.  Excellent resource!


I found this next one just the other day.

Frecklebox, a company that sells great personalized products (Super-Beautiful's Lunchbox came from them with the help of Groupon), also has free customizable coloring pages where you can insert the name of your child.  They're geared to younger children and some of them do include English text that you can't customize, but there are lots to choose from.  I'm planning to send my younger girls the mermaids and boys the rockets.  There's just something about having your name right there as part of the page!





















There is a world of free printables out there, and I'd highly recommend you check out Michelle's blog, Blogging from the Boonies where she has several letter writing posts and a great list of items her family has sent to their sponsored children.

Happy writing!!!