Dates

I've written several posts including dates. There are so many special "dates" in our family that have common themes. I have come across another special one.

In my last post, I shared increments of 9 months that are too interesting to me.

I like to read MckMama's blog. Right now, she's over in Kenya with Compassion. We have a Compassion boy. I decided I needed to sit down and write him a letter. I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to share on here of the boy we sponsor, so I'll keep it simple. He is a 10 year old boy. His birthday is September 20.

Let me tell you about how we came to sponsor this boy. I wanted to have a baby. I wanted to badly. I desired to be a mom. We tried. It did not happen before my husband deployed like we hoped. One of our last days together in our hotel room before he left, we looked through the Compassion website. A man my dad roomed with in college comes to our church about once a year to share what Compassion is doing and encourage others to sponsor a child. He sent us a Christmas card, and it was on my heart...we needed to sponsor a child. I knew I could be a bit of a "mommy" through sponsoring a child who so needed it. We looked through the pictures. How do you pick just one child? It was so hard to "choose." We decided to narrow it down to a boy, since I knew Matt would really like a boy...a boy to sponsor, and also a son of his own one day. I decided I wanted to find an older child... how often the little ones get chosen first. That's when we chose Iradukunda. He was an older boy, on the list waiting for a long time, in and HIV/AIDS affected area, and seeing his face...we knew he was the one.

We received his information. His interests? Soccer and running. Matt's? Soccer. Mine? Running. Grin. Like I said before, his birthday is Sept. 20. On his birthday the year we chose to sponsor was the day our family and church had a send off party for Matt. Our sponsor boy's birthday the year after? Well, that was the day we found out we were expecting our own little boy. What a blessing to have "sponsor brothers." Had we gotten pregnant before then, we may not have chosen Iradukunda. God certainly weaves lives together into a beautiful patchwork. I am often amazed by His timing and the blessing of shared days. I really believe He can and does often use the little things to make them big things, or at least important things. I think that's one of the reasons I love children so much. :)