For those of you here at the Summit, this weekend I asked an important question: who among us is climbing the mountains of poverty, homelessness, and lostness to tell the good news? As the writer of “Go Tell It On The Mountain” knew, hearing the message of salvation should move us to tell the message of salvation.
Over Thanksgiving, my oldest two daughters and I took a mission trip to the Dominican Republic. (It’s a tradition we’ve established, to take each of my daughters on a mission trip when they turn 10.) We went to the DR because our family supports some children there through Compassion International, a group that works with churches to get children out of poverty. We have been sponsoring these kids for years, writing back and forth with them, and were finally going to meet them.
The trip was an incredible encouragement to my daughters and me. We were able to meet and talk with our sponsored kids. We were able to hear stories of those who had been rescued from the sex slave trade, whose lives had literally been saved by Compassion. But what surprised me was the story of one of our translators.
This young man, in his twenties, had been translating for us the entire trip. He was articulate, smart, and successful. But just before we left, he shared his story. He was a Compassion child, whose father had left when he was just a little boy. He took his father’s abandonment as proof that no one could ever love him. “But then someone I had never met decided to sponsor me,” he told us. “And my Compassion sponsor was the first one to ever tell me that I was loved.”
As Mother Teresa said, “The poverty of being unwanted, unloved, and uncared for is the greatest poverty.” Who is climbing the mountains of poverty to tell the good news? Don’t they deserve to know?
We aren’t all called to everything. But as Christians, we’re all called to something. Maybe that first step for you is joining up with Compassion International. You can make an eternal difference in life of a child—a child who is every bit as worthy of love as you and me. To learn more about Compassion International (and our other missions opportunities), click here.
