Just a Little Bit More

I lean hard on the kitchen counter and I try to piece together my grocery list and do simple arithmetic to insure that the dollars in my pocket are enough. I go to the store and put things in the cart and pull things out and make a second list to go to the farmer's market and the discount store and I break a sweat and my stomach lurches with every beep of the scanner.

And I wonder...

I wonder...

Does anyone else feel this panic? 
Am I the only one trying to remember exactly how much is left in the account? 
Can I make these dollars and cents make more sense each month? 
Will there ever be more than enough? Enough to untie the knots in my gut?

The cashier tells the balance and there is just enough to cover the bill.

I've heard it said that when John D. Rockefeller was asked, "How much is enough?" he replied, "Just a little bit more."

Our culture piles and hoards and yet there never seems to be enough.

We fill paper sacks with the dusty cans from the back corners of our pantries and we cart them to soup kitchens to fill what is empty, but we find more often then not that we are the empty.

Hands full, but soul empty.

We hand over bags filled with fashion gone out of fad and we have no idea where it goes or what good it does or doesn't really do. 

A little more in the bank account, the closet, the stuff stuffed into the cracks of a cracked life, won't cover up our soul's need to be made whole. 

It is easy to wish away, pray away, hope away the want and the gap and our desperate need. We persist in thinking that "Just a little bit more" and we'll be free, but what if freedom isn't what God wants for us.

What if the scraping to get by is the very thing that keeps us on our knees?
What if all the things withheld are the very graces that we hold? 
What if the knots in our stomachs are an invitation to find our ends met in God when the ends don't seem to meet? 

Freedom from want and need is in finding, that in Christ, we have neither want nor need. 

Believe with every fiber that even when you dig for change in your purse, and the cushions and your kid's piggy bank and you only ever have just enough; God is for you.

He is the more when we barely have enough. 

Someone Chose Me

In a land that has known brutal ethnic war, genocide and instability the children of this generation face poverty and are in great need of the hope of Christ. Rwandan children need your hands and your heart to open to them in the name of Jesus.

How do I know?
A little girl told me once and it sounded a little like this...

Some years the sky doesn't rain for months. The ground is barren, dry and calloused like my father's hands. We grow sorghum, but sorghum doesn't fill the belly full. One season we can have plenty, but the next we might have little...not enough...not nearly enough for me and my sisters. There have been nights that I lay awake with a belly growling deep and days that the sun beat hot with no relief in sight.

There is only one thing that my family can depend on. 
This one thing is that someone, somewhere far from here cares enough to give. 

My father is a proud man. His face bares scars. Scars that he got during the bad time. He tells me he will tell me about it when I am old enough to hear. Judging by the way his hands shake and the tears that brim when he speaks of friends and family that I will never know I may never be old enough to hear.

He has worked this land like his father and his father's father. It is back breaking and though only forty he is bent and body worn. He tells us he prayed for sons. Sons that would shoulder his heavy load. Daughters have been his lot. He used to be angry, but Jesus softened his heart. He sees all our lives as gift and praises God for it all. He didn't used to do that. It wasn't until a woman from the Compassion child development center came to our door and told my father about a place where his children could go and find hope and a future. He is not a man who has known hope. He knows that for me and my sisters our future is limited. Our future might not even exist if the rains fail and our crops don't make it to market.

The woman said that we would each get a sponsor. A person who would provide the money for us to go to the center where we would receive education and learn about Jesus. We asked her how long it would take for us to have sponsors. She said, "I don't know, but I hope soon". We waited...and waited...and waited...each day long...each day wondering if someone across oceans {what does an ocean look like?} with money to spare might pick us as their children.

Someone chose me. 

I don't know how. I really don't. She started out as one person. Then one day she wrote me about her wedding. They send letters and I see pictures of their cat and now they have a little girl and she has big brown eyes like me...so, I guess we really could be sisters. They tell me in writing and a language that I can't read that Jesus loves me and has a plan for me. I eventually began to believe them and the more that I heard about this Jesus the more I got excited because it meant if they see me, these people from who knows where, then Jesus must see me too. I tell my father and he agrees and we decide to go to church and mama comes and she sings like an angel and even more beautiful when it is to Jesus and...oh, I get so excited because I know that even when my belly growls there is a God who hears and He provides and has provided and I want everyone to know it.

What I don't understand is why there are still children here in Kayonza who don't have sponsors. Jesus loved children...our teachers tell us this. They tell us that He would play with them and cuddle them in His lap and He dared anyone to turn one of them away. Still there are children who wait. I don't know if there are other people like my sponsors, but if there are...please, don't wait any longer. 

My sponsorship story:
I started sponsoring my Rwandan daughter, Charlotte, when I was 19 years old. She was 8. Since that time I've gotten married, lived in Africa (Liberia) myself, and had a beautiful biological daughter. I don't know how Charlotte would write out her story. I would love to know. She'll be 17 this coming April. She has a hope and a future because God gave me the opportunity to give and I jumped at it. I've got no regrets and I don't think you will either.

Sponsor a child through Compassion International and be the hands and feet of Christ.