Thoughtful Thursdays–Compassion Sponsor

Meet Carlos David Salinas.

He’s our “Compassion kid” and we’re SUPER excited to be sponsoring him. Allow me to provide some background as to why we are so excited.

When my husband and I met, he was sponsoring a Compassion child from Thailand, Tidanai. Well, Tidanai just recently graduated from the Compassion program at 18 years old. My husband sponsored him for at least 13 years and went from seeing scribbled pictures to gorgeous hand-written letters in Thai from sweet Tidanai. While I’m sure that our sponsorship was a HUGE blessing to him, we probably only wrote to him a handful of times.

We decided this time around it was going to be different. My husband recently visited Honduras on a medical missions trip and plans to continue making trips to Honduras. So, I thought we should choose a child from there knowing we’ll be somewhat familiar with his country, and MAY POSSIBLY arrange to even visit him down the road. He is 4 years old, same as my son. Coincidence? Absolutely not!

It’s been so much fun ALREADY discussing this with my son. He now recognizes his picture and is aware of some of the differences in the way Carlos lives. Our goal is to at least write to Carlos as often as he writes to us. We wrote one letter online, and just sent this one in them mail…

Please forgive my horrible handwriting. Here’s the drawing Cooper included…

And finally, we included some Mickey Mouse stickers and a picture of the kids with Pluto from our Disneyland trip. Carlos told us in his letter that Pluto was his favorite cartoon character.

So, hopefully you see some of my excitement this time around! We’re hoping to sponsor Carlos up to his graduation from the program when he’ll be 18 years old, 14 years from now! How cool to see the change in both him and our kids, and what an eye opening experience it will be for my kids to have a glimpse into another country and someone else’s life.

If you do sponsor a child, consider “amp”ing up your communication with them. I enjoy getting letters from my sponsor child, so I can only imagine how much more our sponsor children would love hearing from us.

And, if you don’t sponsor a child currently, consider it! It’s only $38/month and it will be a huge blessing to you! You can choose from a variety of countries as well as age of the child. Here’s the link to Compassion’s website.

I hope I inspired you during today’s “Thoughtful Thursday”. The ironic thing about being thoughtful is…we, who are being “thoughtful”, are always blessed beyond what we would have thought or imagined. Would you agree?