She entered this world like Skylar, two pretty little summer babies born the same day. She went home to a simple wooden house with a thatched roof, while Sky came home to her carpeted, pink bedroom, with 10 fancy wooden letters announcing “Skylar Kate” on the wall above her crib and monogrammed dresses in her closet. Worlds apart, these two, under the same blue sky.
These birthday buddies run around outside in dresses and love to play Mommy with their dolls, to play games and create crafty masterpieces. They help wash laundry, make their own beds, ask loads of questions, and they dream.
Angelie runs errands and keeps the house clean while her Mama works farmer’s fields for less money each month than we make in a day. And not only us, but most all of us over here.
It’s a hard life there, on the hillside, with just a Mama and baby sister, needing clean water, better nutrition, steady employment, and education. We have these in abundance, these life-changers that could turn their lives around.
In pictures, Angelie wears little pink flip-flops and a red plaid sundress, and a smile that turns my life around.
Poverty voids hope, yet Angelie has the sparkle of hope in her eyes, the twinkle of dreams.
Compassion International presents this little angel with the gift of hope. The center she attends each week feeds nutritious meals, and teaches her how to brush and care for teeth. There she plays soccer, memorizes Bible verses, and gets tutored in her schoolwork. She learns to write letters, and we get to be the lucky recipients of these, along with her drawings, little pieces of her world we treasure.
At this center run by Compassion, and the local church across the world, she is safe, she is loved, and she learns about God.
God, who wrote a plan for the whole world and chose her to be a part of it.
God, who knit her together inside her Mommy and hung the heavens and told the ocean how far it could go.
God, who created Angelie, created you and me, for such a time as this.
When I look at this little girl, the words of Isaiah 58 sound off inside me again,
If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness…
It is this that brings me low, turns my thoughts away from the cruelty of poverty I’ve been staring at, brings me face down before God. I’ve been praying for this girl and her family and for the church there, these brothers and sisters of mine, to love our “little sister” well.
But some days it strikes me how much more WE, as in me, myself, and the great big church of Jesus, need the prayers~for we hold the Power and the resources to come together and loose the chains of injustice and set the oppressed free.
But we are just so darn busy, living lives we have been given. Yes, we love people around us and give money to the church and share the gospel when we think someone is interested~but how many of us would say we spend-ourselves-for-the-needy? How may of us could say it?
This is the call I wish to live up to. To live out the whole gospel, not only the part that is easy to accept and build a pretty life around.
There’s more for me to do, more for all of us to do, and I am praying we will come together and care and stick our necks out for the oppressed and prove Who we follow with our checkbooks and credit card statements or lack thereof, and with our calendars and our attention, and spend our lives on their behalf.
If you, too, wish to spend yourself on their behalf, this is one amazing and life-changing way you can do this: www.compassioninternational.com.
Sponsor a child today, and begin a relationship that will rock your happy little world. 🙂
