INVITED INTO POSSIBILITY

After 10 years of developing a long-distance relationship, a family makes a life-altering trip to East Africa to meet the two siblings they sponsor face-to-face.

Before traveling to Africa, I believed child sponsorship was one way for me to engage in the work Christ calls all believers into. It was a way to care for the least among us by helping provide practical needs. School clothing, food, education, gifts, prayer and other tangible forms of support.

I still believe all of that. What I understand now, though, is that it is so much more than anything I’d ever imagined.

When my wife Michelle and I learned more about Lahash, we knew it was the organization we wanted to partner with. Its local partners often extend care to children and families whose living situations or health conditions could disqualify them from some of the larger sponsorship agencies. Our prayer has always been to build a relationship with our sponsored child and, one day, meet them.

We were told about King and Queen, a brother and sister who had lost their parents and were living with their grandmother and additional siblings in extremely difficult circumstances, and who had recently been connected to the local ministry in Rwanda.

We showed our daughters their profiles. Our oldest was only six at the time, while King and Queen were listed as 12 and 11. We wondered whether our girls might have difficulty connecting with a brother and sister who were both considerably older than they were.

Instead, they were thrilled by the idea of sponsoring two children named King and Queen. Their names immediately reminded them of the Audio Adrenaline song “Kings and Queens,” and we told Lahash that we would be delighted to sponsor them.

Soon afterward, our family was selected to appear in a Lahash video. A team traveled to Rwanda and met King and Queen and their grandmother, recorded footage of them and shared their response to being sponsored. Our daughters were still very young when they filmed the video. They talked about what sponsorship meant to them, while Michelle and I (mostly Michelle) shared why we had chosen to sponsor.

We felt encouraged, humbled and blessed to participate in Lahash’s work in a way that also helped tell the sponsorship story. At the time, the experience still felt somewhat surreal. We had been given an unusual window into the lives of the children we sponsored, but they remained people we knew through photographs, letters, prayers and a screen. I had no idea what kind of impact was being forged half a world away.

This summer, our family traveled to East Africa with a team from Lahash for their ministry conference. To our surprise, King flew from Rwanda to Kenya to meet us, and we spent the whole week of the conference with him. After nearly a decade of photographs, letters, prayers, and annual updates, we suddenly shared everyday life with this tall, strong young man whose face had been a familiar presence in our home for years.

Spending that week with King was life-changing for me, for Michelle, and for our daughters. Seeing how much he has overcome and the hard work he has done to fulfill the promise that God created within him absolutely shattered me.

King is humble, righteous, hardworking and deeply loving. Having received opportunities through the care of his grandmother, Lahash’s local partner, and sponsorship, he now wants to give back. He wants the good entrusted to him to continue outward into the lives of others. In King, I see so much of what I want to be.

I had traveled to Africa thinking primarily about what our family had helped give him. Instead, I learned from his faith, perseverance, humility, and generosity. Materially, our family had more to share, but King possessed a richness of character that confronted and inspired me.

Over the years, our sponsorship payment had rarely felt significant. It was an intentional commitment, sometimes a small sacrifice, but it never once felt heroic. It was simply something our family had decided to offer faithfully. I could understand how the money might purchase food or clean school clothing, but I could not see the full accumulation of those gifts.

I could not imagine what might become possible when our contribution was joined with the work of local ministry staff, the prayers and determination of a mighty grandmother who continues to be a fierce prayer warrior, King and Queen’s own perseverance, and the grace and power of God.

Meeting King was the closest I may ever come to seeing Christ perform a loaves-and-fishes miracle in my own life.

What seemed like a small and sometimes inconsequential sacrifice on our side of the world had been multiplied into a breadth of possibility I had never known how to imagine. Our family did not create King’s potential or determine who he would become. God had already placed promise, dignity, ability, and purpose within him. Sponsorship helped open a doorway through which more of that promise could emerge.

Sponsorship connected what our family had available with children facing barriers that should never have been there in the first place. It showed me that I had far more to offer than I ever believed, and that when something small is offered faithfully, God can make more of it than the giver may ever get to see.

“I now believe sponsorship is an invitation to participate in all the possibilities God has placed within another person.”

After our week together in Kenya, King returned to Rwanda. On our second full day there, we saw him again and finally met Queen in person.

We traveled from our hotel, left the main paved streets, and followed dirt roads into the village where their grandmother lives.

When we arrived, King and Queen were waiting for us alongside three of their siblings and their grandmother, a mighty and powerful woman of prayer even in her advanced years.

We spent hours together in the open front room of their grandmother’s home. Staff from Lahash’s local ministry partner waited just outside, and our friend Dayn crowded into the room with us and did his best to capture the magic of the moment for a future video.

At one point, Queen asked Michelle whether she would be willing to return to Rwanda someday, if and when Queen gets married, to receive a staff from her during the wedding ceremony. This traditional gesture would recognize Queen’s mother, and she was asking Michelle to be there for her since her birth mother can’t be.

Michelle was incredibly moved. Later, when Michelle embraced her, Queen whispered in her ear, “I love you.”

We didn’t get the same concentrated time with Queen that we had with King, but we were blessed with a second day together. We showed King and Queen how to blow across a blade of grass held between our thumbs to create a reedlike birdcall.

King taught our daughters how to whistle through their cupped hands. Dayn, the videographer with us, interviewed all seven of us individually, and we shared a meal that stretched across three hours.

These were not dramatic acts of charity. They were the ordinary, playful, slightly awkward, deeply precious moments through which people become family.

By the time Queen asked Michelle to return for her future wedding and receive a mother’s staff, I understood that the relationship we had entered was not flowing in only one direction. We had begun years earlier believing that sponsorship was something we were doing for King and Queen and calling them a part of our family. Across all those miles, they had made room for us within their lives and hearts, too.

When darkness finally came at the end of our second day together, it was time to say goodbye. None of us wanted to leave. We never wanted King and Queen to become merely names at the bottom of a letter again. They were no longer photographs arriving once a year or children we prayed for from a distance.

They are permanent members of our family, and in ways we had never understood before making the journey, we had become permanent members of theirs.

For ten years, I believed sponsorship was a faithful way to share what God had given us with children who had less. I now believe it is an invitation to participate in all the possibilities God has placed within another person.

It is more than clean school clothing, food, education and gifts, as vital as all those things are. It can become a doorway through which children gain opportunities to pursue more of what God created them to be. It can connect those of us who have more than we recognize with children whose futures have been constrained by circumstances they did not choose.

It can reveal that we have far more to offer than we ever thought possible.

Our family offered something that felt small. King and Queen did the difficult work of walking through the doors that opened before them. Their grandmother and Lahash’s local ministry partners surrounded them with prayer, care and opportunity. Then God multiplied all of it into something none of us could have accomplished alone.

We began with the hope that our family might help change the lives of two children in Rwanda. Now God has touched and changed our lives in ways we never dreamed.

Sponsor a child: LAHASH.ORG/SPONSOR