Chris Payne and his wife Cari have been sponsors for three years. Chris has been a child advocate for one year. They have four boys and live in Wisconsin.
In a world of e-mail, social networks, and instant messaging, letter writing has become a lost art to those of my generation. By frequently communicating with our sponsored children through letter writing, we are able to revive this lost art and allow our own children to see the importance of an old-fashioned letter.
As a father of four sons, it is important to me that sponsorship is a family affair and not just something that mom and dad do. We sponsor one girl in Thailand, and we have correspondence sponsorships with a boy in India and another boy in Ethiopia. As a family we try to incorporate our sponsored children into our daily lives as much as possible (praying for them daily, remembering their birthdays, learning more about their countries, etc.).
We recently included our sponsored children into our weekly family devotions. This idea originated from blog postings on Compassion’s website that were encouraging sponsors to write to their sponsored children once a month. We have started writing letters on the second Monday of the month. Since we already had a time scheduled each week to be gathered around the dining room table, or in the living room, to learn about how God loves us, we thought it would be a great time for us to show our sponsored children that God, and the Payne family, loves them.
We tend to keep our letters pretty simple. Since two of our sponsored children are close in age to our own kids, we find that we are often writing about what the boys are doing in school, at church, or other activities that they are in. We also enjoy writing about the weather. It gets very cold where we live and very hot where they live. To keep our kids involved in the letter writing process we include drawings by them from time to time.
The letters that we receive from our sponsored children are precious to us. They go on our refrigerator, especially if there is a drawing, just like we do with art work from our own kids.
I would encourage all sponsors to write regularly to their sponsored children. Both you and your sponsored child will love sending and receiving letters.
