Teaching Kids to Give

One thing that inspires me as a mother is knowing that I could be taking part in laying the ground work for a person (one of my children) who will serve God in a great way some day. It's my hope and prayer that God will use my children; one, some or all of them, to reach many. With this in mind, it's important to me to make sure my children learn to think of the needs of others. When they get something, I want them to be thinking about passing the blessing on, not just hoarding it to themselves. I want this to be my attitude, too. And that goes for anything. Toys, money, food, a godly heritage...

So, just how do you do this? Well, lately we've had the opportunity to take part in a new organization (http://elpisinternational.org/) that my brother-in-law and his wife have helped to bring together. An Ethiopian congregation meets at their church and the pastor is originally from Ethiopia. He and his brother (who lives in Ethiopia) started a feeding center for children there. I gather that a couple times a year, this pastor flies back to Ethiopia with funds for his brother to feed children who have no parents or with only one parent. This past year, my brother-in-law flew over to Ethiopia and visited and since coming back they've been working on getting this organization together so that people can sponsor kids. Hopefully this will grow and they will be able to feed and teach more. We've had the opportunity to sponsor one of the children who is just the age of one of mine. We have his picture above our kitchen sink and pray for him, too. Since this is small scale right now, we have been able to send a Christmas package with a group from the church who are going over there. While we've done the Christmas shoeboxes for several years, this is so much more real to the boys because they have a face and a real story of the person who is getting this. Talking about it and having them take part in getting things for him has been really great. Today we grabbed lunch at a fast food place and several of the kids chose to save their kids meal toy for sending in the future (some of these will have to go in the Samaritans Purse shoe boxes)! How awesome is that?! It's a little thing but that's where this stuff starts!!