This past weekend I had the great fortune of chaperoning a group of girls at the Revolve Tour. The Revolve Tour is put on by the Women of Faith conference, but is geared towards teenage girls. Before leaving, I updated my Facebook status with a bit of a joke.
It was especially funny to read the comments of people who didn’t really understand what the Revolve Tour was and thought I was being serious.
All weekend long they kept talking about World Vision. As someone who is active in the kind of weird Christian sub-culture, I am no stranger to World Vision. In fact, I have gone to the tables filled with pictures of children and been overwhelmed by how many individual lives I was looking at. Suddenly it wasn’t just “the AIDS crisis” or “kids with nothing” but they had faces. Usually I walk away feeling sick inside of me, feeling the weight of the world.
This weekend was different. I walked up, again with that morbid curiosity we get that makes us look at the car accident on the side of the road. But as I stood a few people away from the line, a lady walked up to me and asked if I had any questions. and suddenly she was asking if I had any preference, so I said no. As she walked away, the Spirit stirred in my heart and I knew that I needed to pick an only child. The life of an only child lived in stressful situations can be very lonely and devastating. ‘Okay,’ I decided silently. ‘if I find an only child, I will sponsor them.’ She brought me a stack of kids born in September. As I was looking through them, the Spirit again stirred in me and I knew I needed to look for a child in the Philippines. My family is there, and I’ve been twice. I have given all of my money to children selling necklaces, and experienced the heartache of having no more money but the kids kept coming. With my own eyes I have seen the shanti villages and the simple living in my late great-grandmother’s village. It’s real to me.
She brought me five or six kids from the Philippines. With a heavy heart I said to her “I feel like I can’t choose one, because I don’t want to say ‘this one is important to me, but you other ones are not.'” How in the world I could choose between these boys was beyond me. Then I realized there was a little paragraph about each child, so I started to read them all. A couple children in, there was a boy whose birthday is next week. He’ll be seven. I read “Yves Saint Anthony lives with his parents and has no brothers or sisters.”
Excitedly, I held out the folder and declared “I choose him!” and nothing else mattered. There were hundreds and hundreds of kids pictures on the table and in boxes, dozens of people surrounding the table, and all that I knew was that the Lord directed me to this little boy.
So everybody. I went to the Revolve Tour and I met a very cute boy. His name is Yves and he is almost seven. 🙂
