Over the past few months, two of the kids we sponsored through Compassion Canada, dropped out of the projects in their respective countries and hence our sponsorship of them was terminated. We lost Paula from Columbia who we had sponsored for 8 years, and Tasya from Indonesia who our daughter had communicated with for the last 5. We were especially sad to lose Paula, as her family had pulled her out of the program after converting to Judaism.
But today we went to the Compassion Canada website and picked up two new little 5 year old girls — Narm, from Thailand, and Kimberly from Honduras. I wanted to sponsor a little boy from Ecuador whose name was “Jesus” but fortunately when I went looking for him today — his birthday — he was “gone”. Someone else gave him a wonderful birthday present :).
Narm (her full name being “Nongnapat Nawpraison”) lives with her mother and father in Thailand. Her mother and father are sometimes employed as farmers. There are 2 children in her family and she is in kindergarten where her performance is average. She likes to play house, do art, and play with dolls.
Kimberly lives with her father and mother in Honduras. Her father is employed and her mom maintains their home. She also has 2 children in her family and she loves singing and playing with dolls as well. She turned 5 just 2 days ago.
It will be great fun hearing from them. The letters we receive are always so much fun (and sometimes the translations make it even more fun). It is wonderful to hear just how much they are able to buy with the extra Christmas and Birthday gifts we send (and the things they spend it on). They are SO appreciative of the support they receive and knowing that we are helping not only the child, but also the family, brings many smiles to our faces.
We now sponsor 9 children all over the world in ages varying from 5 to 21. Over the years, we’ve had the pleasure to sponsor 19 different children. I don’t say that to brag, but to encourage you to consider sponsoring your own kids. We cannot recommend Compassion Canada (or Compassion International) highly enough. They operate with immense integrity (two of the projects we sponsor kids through were actually shut down temporarily while their operations were checked out by Compassion, but are now back up and running again) with as little overhead as possible on the funds you send. Above all however, is the fact that the children in the project are exposed to the gospel. Compassion in unabashedly a Christian organization. Their motto is “Releasing children from poverty in Jesus’ name” they don’t sway from that (see some of my earlier posts).
I encourage you to consider sponsoring a child through Compassion. The joy it brings to you is immeasurable, and the joy it brings to the kids and their families is invaluable.
God bless as you consider your role in enhancing the lives of the poor around the world.
TTFN
The temperature is dropping and so are the leaves.
I’ve been working downtown on a contact for over a year now and I’m amazed I haven’t seen more accidents than I have. Every day, in my walk from Union Station up to Queen Street and back again in the evening, I have witnessed hundreds of “near misses”, but surprisingly few accidents. That, in itself, amazes me.
Well, Canada Post, in their infinite wisdom, have decided that we don’t change our address often enough (we’ve only had 4 addresses in the last 33 years), so on August 15th, 2016 they decided that our Postal Code would change from the old L0G 1E0 to the new L4A 1Z3. As of today, THEY still haven’t updated their postal code lookup site 🙁 and they’ve told us we’ll have mail forwarding for a year, but you might want to update your Christmas lists now, before you forget.
[BTW, the one very curious thing was that when I called the insurance company to let them know of the new address/pcode, they informed me my house insurance would like drop a bit. Huh? Apparently the L0G 1E0 was very generic and covered a wide area, whereas the L4A 1Z3 code is much more specific. Makes no sense to me, but I’m certainly not going to argue.]
As some of you know, it’s been a very ‘interesting’ few weeks for us in the Lahn household with some ups, and some downs.
On Saturday, Feb 27th, Nancy’s favourite Aunt, and her Mom’s only sibling, passed away after a lengthy down slide. The grief, combined with the tension of explaining this to Nancy’s Mom, who’s memory hasn’t been good, was certainly a strain, and a strain that was majorly aggravated by the fact that Nancy pulled a muscle in her back on the Sunday, Feb 28th somehow. She’s had chronic back problems, but this one was/is bad and with the added tension and the strain of the visitation and funeral in Hamilton on the Thursday and Friday, has meant a very slow recovery.
We want to wish all our friends a Merry Christmas, and we pray God’s blessings for a great coming year!
Christians are often accused of being unfriendly to outsiders. We often treat church like a ‘club’ that you have to join in order to be accepted. When we were ‘church shopping’ a number of years ago we based a lot of our church choosing on how welcome we were made to feel. Sometimes the welcome was good. Other times, a little ‘off-putting’.