Another New Compassion Sponsor’s “Cool God Story”.

This story was actually left as a comment on the previous blog post from August 28th, but I think it deserves its own post. Thanks, Birgit, for sharing! I love this: God doing His thing is very cool.

I have heard Grant share about Compassion and give an invitation to sponsor a child several times now as part of meetings where he sings and speaks. I love how he asks people to listen to the voice of the Holy Spirit rather than just calculate if they can afford to sponsor a child or people being guilt-tripped into sponsoring (which I am always afraid of when appeals like that are made). It’s really about simple obedience to God, yet that seems so hard for us some times, like it was in my case:

When Grant came to El Paso the first time a couple of years ago and I heard the Compassion invitation for the first time, he handed out child profiles to everyone in the room and invited people to pray for the child they were holding while asking God if He would have them sponsor a child at this time or not. I have to be honest: I was calculating our finances in my head and decided we couldn’t afford it, rather than listening to the Holy Spirit, so I handed the child packet of a little Colombian girl back after the meeting.

Well, two days later, when Grant did another child packet handout at a different meeting, guess what….. Out of the 200 something profiles he had with him, we got the same girl again. God knew how to get my attention… My husband and I didn’t need any more convincing and I decided to sponsor 6 year old Dersa from Colombia and it’s been one of the greatest things we have ever done. I don’t have a story like Zach where we got a miraculous pay raise or anything – finances are still tight – but we have been blessed beyond measure by getting to know Dersa and my two boys have learned invaluable lessons about caring for people and learning about a different culture. We would rather go without ‘things’ than give up sponsoring Dersa. She’s become part of our family.

Thanks Grant, for introducing us to the wonderful work of Compassion International and for (quite literally) bringing Dersa into our lives…

Birgit West, El Paso, TX