Compassion Family: January Compassion Joys

letters
we received 9 letters this month
Orm (Thailand), Rayson (Kenya), Gabriel (Kenya), Jerry (Indonesia),
Preeti (India), Jackson (Kenya), Joylyne (Kenya), Esther (Uganda) and Emanuel (Peru)

birthdays

Joseph in Tanzania was 10 on January 1st

My daughter, Sydney, and Yoselin in Dominican Rebuplic

both turned 11 on January 9th

Jerry in Indonesia turned 15 on January 28th

Antoni in Dominican Republic turned 13 on January 28th

compassion experience

We had the wonderful opportunity to go through the Compassion Experience as a family. I've been waiting for a couple years for it to come close enough for my family to go and it finally did!

I encouraged many friends to go and quite a few did, including our youth group at church. One friend at church sponsored a little girl from Peru (who happens to be a birthday buddy with her youngest daughter) before going to the Compassion Experience.

fundraising

In an effort to eliminate some clutter from our home and participate in the ACT for Brazil fundraising campaign, my girls and I went through some of our books, homeschooling curriculum and jewelry and have sold quite a bit. I posted the jewelry here on my blog, and the books I put into this box which I took to our homeschool group that meets every week. It's been highly successful and I've raised $200 so far.

fish

My oldest daughter saw this fish bowl when we were in PetSmart earlier this month. If you can't tell, it has the world map on it. She got excited and told me she'd love to get it and then name the fish after some of the countries where we sponsor children. She ended up getting a gift card to PetSmart and now we have three new pets....Kenya, Inda (short for Indonesia and India) and Peru.

and that, my friends, is a promising start to a great year!

If you haven't joined us before, please consider sharing your Compassion JOYS here each month. It is so encouraging and inspiring to see how God is blessing others through this ministry.

And now it's your turn! Here are some guidelines for you to follow for this link-up:

Link up by entering the URL to your blog post (make sure it's a link to the actual blog post and not just your blog).
Be sure to link back here to Compassion Family and tell others you are doing so. Feel free to grab the button code for your post (it's on the right side of the blog).
Set aside some time to visit the other participants and leave some comment love.
Begin taking notes and making a list for next month.