Passion

I am an avid reader.  I enjoy reading many different styles of books.   I love the romantic books by authors such as Nicholas Sparks.  I love Christian “self-help” books such as 5 Love Languages or any book by Beth Moore.  I love informational books such as Fields of the Fatherless by Tom Davis that covers a biblical view of adoption.  Recently I read an autobiography by Conor Grennan called Little Princes.  I absolutely loved this author’s style of writing. It is about a single man who used his entire life savings to start orphanages as a refuge for trafficked children in Nepal.  His journey started out to be a trip to help orphans in Nepal to impress his friends and win the hearts of the ladies.  However, everything changed when he unexpectedly fell in love with the children (at the orphanage called “Little Princes Orphanage”) he worked with and developed a passion to find the families of some of the trafficked children in the orphanages.  The book had me laughing one minute and crying the next.  I want to share just one example of his dialogue that had me laughing hysterically.  He was describing his first meal that he ate with a family in Nepal. 

Conor writes,

After maybe a half a minute of watching my host family eat, I noticed they had stopped eating one by one and were staring at me, wondering why I wasn’t eating.  I came to my senses.  I had been with this host family for all of 10 minutes and was on the verge of causing some irrevocable offense.  I force a smile, took a chunk of rice and daal and a smidge of some kind of pickled vegetable, and placed it gently into my mouth.

It was spicy.  It was spicy in the way that your eyes instantly flood with tears and your sinuses feel as if someone inside my skull had ordered a full evacuation.  The children started giggling. They were watching what would happen next.

What happened next was that I opened my mouth to breath, but the back draft only fanned the flames in my throat.  I grasped for the tin cup of water next to me, oblivious to the shouts of the father, mother and three children and realized too late that my hand was burning because the water in the tin cup was boiling…..

You can’t go through an experience like that with a family and not become closer... 

Clearly I already have a passion for orphans, but this book really opened my eyes to what goes on outside our safe, little bubble here in America. We get so wrapped up with our lives and our own children that we turn a deaf ear to the cries of needy children all over the world.

It's easy to forget that this life here on earth is not forever.  1,000 years from now will it really matter what belongings you had on earth?  This part is just a vapor (James 4:14).  Use this life as an opportunity to serve God and earn eternal rewards in Heaven (Philippians 3:14).  I’d like to encourage everyone to make every day count.  Every dollar you spend, challenge it and do your best to give some away towards eternal things. 

But whoever has the world’s goods, and sees his brother in need and closes his heart against him, how does the love of God abide in him?  Let us not love with word or with tongue, but in deed and in truth. (1^st John 3:17,18 NASB)