Making God Laugh

My friend Ron has said, on many occasions "If you want to see God laugh, just tell her what your plans are for tomorrow."  I'm sure that there has been a lot of heavenly giggling going on this past year.

At the end of last year, I figured that my Compassion family was complete, with 19 children, 9 of whom I sponsor and 10 of whom were sponsored by other people who didn't want to write letters, so I was the correspondence sponsor.

I'd cleared off a whole shelf in my bookcase for the individual binders I keep for each child.  The 19th was kind of a last minute thing.  I thought I was set with 18, but then I read a book about the horrible conditions for children in Honduras and I wanted to do something to help.  The 8 kids I sponsor are paid for out of my Social Security check and I couldn't see how I could add a 9th, so asked Walt if it would be OK to take the monthly payment for a boy in Honduras out of our joint account, and Brayan joined the family.  He is turning out to be one of my better letter writers and has started talking about how difficult life is in Honduras.

So I was all set.  19 kids.  That was more than enough.

But then came the Kenya 1000.  Some corporation decided to sponsor 1000 kids in Kenya, but they were not going to write to them, so the call went out for people who were willing to write to some of them.  I took on seven of them.

These are little guys, mostly around 6 years of age.  In truth, I kind of like the older kids because they communicate better, but it will be fun watching this group grow up.

But that was IT.  26 kids was more than enough.  But then they talked about the greater need for correspondence sponsors and I took on three more kids.  Then came the plea for people to financially sponsor older children, that there were hundreds without sponsors and most people like the little guys, so the older ones often may wait as long as 2 years for a sponsor.  There was no way I could afford to add another one.  But it wouldn't hurt to just look, would it?

I sorted the available children in order from oldest to youngest and one of the oldest was Eunice from Tanzania.  She was a lovely young woman and I clicked on her just to get more information.

Guess what her middle name is?  Gilbert.

GILBERT?????  How could I close the page?  That heavenly giggling was ringing in my ears.  Well, I rationalized, she is almost 20 years old so she will age out of the program in 2 years so it's really only a 2 year commitment.  And if I stopped buying "miscellaneous sundries" I could afford it.  Just.  What the hell.  So I have now added another financial sponsorship to my family. 

I hope those heavenly voices will go and giggle at someone else for awhile...