sponsoring a child Archives | Heavenly Homemakers

gratituesday[2]

Once again, today proved that ministry and school can collide, and that no matter what we’re doing, we can learn something meaningful.

After breakfast this morning, the three younger boys and I mixed a geography/history lesson with our outreach to Gladis, the girl we sponsor through One Child Matters. We did a little research on Honduras, where Gladis is from. We printed out and colored maps and flags to send to her. We talked about the distance between our home and Gladis’ (roughly 1900 miles). And we marveled at how big God is to connect us to her in this awesome way.

maps for gladis 1

I should make something clear: My three younger boys are 9, 12, and 14. They don’t sit and color pictures anymore…ever. But when I told them we were making these pages for Gladis, they ran for the colored pencils – even discussing how colored pencils would be better than markers for this assignment because it would look so much nicer and Gladis could see the maps better. Anytime I mention doing anything for Gladis, their response is always joyful and eager.

Maybe I should ask them to fold and put away their clothes in the hallway/do the dishes/pick up sticks in the yard…for Gladis. Think it would fly? ;)

The end results of our creations are simple. We thought maybe Gladis would have fun coloring the rest of the maps, so we left a lot for her to fill in. But we wanted to show her where in the U.S. we are located (Husker red, of course). Do you see the blue shaded areas on the world map below? That’s to show her that she is there, in Central America, and we are here in Nebraska, USA. We’ll be writing a note at the top of that map, letting her know that we are praying for her, that God is taking care of all of us, and that we are sending our love from our home to hers.

maps for gladis 2

I always wish I could see her face when she receives our packages. I’m told that pictures and maps like this are a treasure to these sponsored kids as they typically don’t have many items like this in their homes. How wonderful that such a simple school lesson for our family will be such a wonderful blessing to Gladis and her family.

Want to print out similar pages to do something like this for your sponsored child? Here are the links for where I found ours:

World Map Coloring Page

US Map Coloring Page

Honduras Flag Printables

United States Flag Coloring Page

Check out this cool Distance Calculator to discover about how far away your sponsored child is from where you live.

If you’re not yet sponsoring a child, please join us! I’m celebrating this ministry for Gratituesday today, because of the blessing it is to my family. I want you to experience this too. Bless a child – be blessed. What a rich gift.

Now your turn. Share what you’re thankful for! Leave a comment on this post letting us know how God is working in your life. If you’ve written a blog post about what you’re thankful for, leave the link in the comments so we can visit your blog to read about it. We love sharing and reading about God’s blessings!

Remember way back in May when I shared about the trip our family took to Colorado? We were able to spend an entire week in the Denver and Colorado Springs area doing a variety of service projects and ministries together. It was such an awesome way to spend our family vacation! We saw God work in so many ways to make this trip come together, from opening up opportunities for us to hand out food to families in need to joining with some college friends to serve the homeless.

Now that I’ve been able to share the One Child Matters ministry opportunity with those of us here at Heavenly Homemakers, here’s another piece of that glorious week in Colorado I want to tell you about. What you have to know is that our family was already planning to be in the Denver/Colorado Springs area before we made the connection with One Child Matters. We got so excited about the ministry opportunity with OCM, then learned that their headquarters are in Colorado Springs. We asked if we could spend time with them while we were in the area and asked them to please put us to work! They did just that, and they treated us like royalty from the moment we walked through their doors.

It’s one thing to look at the Once Child Matters website and talk to the people on the phone to hear their heart regarding the ministry. That alone had made me fall in love with the children and mission behind One Child Matters. But having the honor of meeting the One Child Matters Team face to face, and then spending the day working with them? It was awesome. These people care about the children they are serving – there is no doubt.

They had our kids feeling right at home in no time.

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I loved meeting everyone, but it was a special treat to meet Kate – the one I’ve been in contact with the most. She took our family on a tour of the office so we could meet and get to know what each person did to fulfill the needs in this ministry.

with_kate_ocm

A great bonus is that my cousin works at One Child Matters, so we were able to catch up with her a little bit and steal some hugs.

with_laura_e

After a tour, we got to sit down and work together on the letters people send to their sponsored kids. This experience was so rich and so much fun. I’ll share more details about sending letters to your sponsored children in a future post, but wow if working through these letters didn’t inspire me and make me feel the love between sponsoring families and the children they are serving.

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During the late morning, our younger boys headed to the kitchen with some of the OCM team to cook up a Jordanian feast. You’ll notice on the One Child Matters Blog (written by Kate, pictured with me in the second picture above) that they occasionally share recipes from the variety of countries where the sponsored children reside. I love this feature as it can help connect us to the children there. Our boys loved helping prepare this meal and being featured on the One Child Matters Blog. Remember how I mentioned that our boys felt right at home? The pictures in this blog post featuring the Jordanian meal will prove that to you. ;)

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After we ate together, some of us continued to work our way through sponsor letters, while the younger boys headed over to create some masterpieces to send over to our own sponsored child.
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I am excited to introduce you to our sponsored child soon. It’s amazing how you can feel connected to someone you’ve never met, and how praying for someone holds so much power. If you haven’t had a chance, head over to the Once Child Matters site and consider sponsoring a child. We are so thankful for the opportunity to participate in this ministry!

Gratituesday: Connecting With Gladis By Studying Maps

Visiting One Child Matters in Colorado Springs