Jayid, revisited

Saturday morning our "replacement" child was posted. Victor filled the open spot in our list of correspondence children after Jayid was removed from the account about two weeks ago. I spent my workday Saturday rejoicing over the newest addition to our faraway family, while still feeling twinges of sadness that we had to give up one sponsor child in order to take on a new one.

When I got home from work, I ventured out to my mailbox despite the rain and ice pellets bouncing off my head, snagged the mail, and rain inside. I saw an unfamiliar-looking envelope from Compassion mixed in with the Netflix DVDs and junk. Enthusiastic Compassion sponsors develop a sort of eagle-eye for the cream-colored envelopes that carry mail from our kids, and we get other information from the ministry in the mail, but something was different about this envelope. I opened it up to find a typed letter about Jayid.

Compassion wrote to tell me that Jayid had been dropped by his financial sponsor, which of course I knew, but they wanted to offer me the opportunity to take Jayid on as a financial sponsor. They said they would essentially hold him for me for 8 weeks from the date on the letter, should I choose to take on this extra commitment. To be truthful, every day I was checking our account for news of a new sponsor child, I was also checking the list of children in India in the hopes that I would find Jayid and share him with my friends online, begging for someone to sponsor him as soon as possible. I hadn't imagined that I would be presented with the opportunity to sponsor him first!

I have been asking my friends to pray for Brandon and I as we consider taking on this commitment. We have of course looked into financially sponsoring more children in the past, but our budget is pretty tight, and we have always bowed either to fears we would not have enough money some month, or remembered that we want to adopt children and reaffirm our resolve to save more money for that effort. I am asking that you, dear reader, also pray for us. I believe that we really could make this work, but it would mean that I would need to work a lot harder to be responsible with our money, practicing frugality every week, and not just the weeks when things look really tight in our checkbook register. It would be devastating to me to commit to sponsor Jayid financially, only to let him down somewhere down the road by not being able to pay that extra $38 a month. Not to mention the impact that it would have on him and his family.

I hope that I will be able to report back with happy news soon. It is taking a lot of will power to not just go ahead and call Compassion and commit to this sponsorship. I really need to take time to pray about it and try to figure out what God wants me to do, as opposed to what I want to do.