If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

“Mom, when you were little, did ice cubes look like this?”

My soon-to-be 9yo, Hannah, is always asking me questions like this.

Searching for her place in our world (maybe because she’s the middle child?), she wants to know how her experience compares to mine.

“No. Our ice cubes were really CUBES, not those crescent-moon shapes that make water splatter all over when it hits them.” (Does anyone else have this problem?)

“Did they come out of the door, or did you have to reach in and grab them?” (She’s obviously been studying her ancient history.)

“Yeah. And the freezer didn’t make them FOR US. We had to MAKE our own ice by freezing it in trays.”

(I would’ve added that I walked fifteen miles to school in knee-deep snow, but she’s smart and knows I grew up in California.)

“Oooooooo… Did you have to buy bags of ice sometimes?”

“No, they cost too much.”

“Wow. You must’ve been poor.”

Even as I laughed at how old my child made me feel, I almost agreed with her. After all, when I was a kid, we qualified for food stamps for a time. And when we lived in the country, I always felt like we lived on the lower end of middle class. And although dad did a lot better when we moved to “town.” I think I still only went to college through the grace of God and scholarships.

But this conversation happened yesterday, so fresh in my mind was a reminder I’d gotten about today’s Blog Action Day. For this annual event, thousands of bloggers from around the world commit to talk about one subject to bring attention to it and possibly make a difference.

This year’s subject? Poverty.

Having to make our own ice? Not poverty. Or at least not Poverty.

I’ve seen Poverty. Most of us have, at least on TV. But I don’t live it. Poverty, especially the third-world kind, is outside of our experience. Even having seen it myself on a few short-term mission trips, I don’t think about it on a daily basis.

In fact, in many ways I don’t feel qualified to participate in Blog Action Day. I too easily forget how difficult life – and by that I mean actual survival – is for people in a large part of the world. But Blog Action Day is one way to intentionally focus on REAL needs, not our family’s “need” to cut back on the Christmas budget.

There are other ways. The donation, prayer and service of individuals does make a difference in individual lives.

One way our family has participated is through partnering with Compassion International. Through child sponsorship, they offer children in desperately impoverished areas of the world the chance to break the cycle of poverty. An added blessing to us: the ongoing reminder of greater needs than our own and what we have to be thankful for.

We chose Compassion because they have a solid reputation as an effective and ethical nonprofit organization. They fight hunger, illiteracy, and hopelessness in dozens of third-world countries. Here’s how:

.

Click on the link if you’d like more information.

In eleven years, we’ve sponsored two children through to graduation from Compassion’s program. We now sponsor Daniel, a boy in Tanzania who was born in the same month and year as my daughter Hannah.

With a very small sacrifice, we’ve been able to participate in the eradication of poverty in three lives.

Maybe you share my sense of inadequacy or guilt for not doing “enough.” I hope you don’t let that paralyze you.

You may not share my calling to help internationally through Compassion. You may feel compelled to serve locally, to donate some of your excess, to pray or raise money or demonstrate.

The how doesn’t matter. What matters to God, and should matter to us, is the WHO.

Do something.

Make a difference. Let God use you to meet the needs of the impoverished and give hope to the hopeless.

Join me.
.