When Sponsorship Ends

When we started sponsoring children through Compassion International, I never even considered what it would be like when our sponsorship ended. The first one came pretty quickly.

We sponsored Natalia in Colombia because she was just a bit older than our daughter at the time. It wasn’t too long after we started sponsoring her that we learned about her and her family moving. She ended up in an area that was not close to an existing church partner, so our sponsorship ended.

Our daughter wanted to sponsor another young lady in Colombia about the same age, so we started sponsoring Lina.

As we were able to start sponsoring additional children, we had numerous sponsorships end for one reason or another…one family pulled their daughter out of the program, one church did not have enough committed volunteers, one country ended up not being able to partner with Compassion anymore…

It was starting to seem like we were not ever going to have a long term sponsorship.

However, I have been very fortunate to have had the opportunity to visit two of our sponsored children more than once.

I was able to travel to Colombia twice. The first time in 2015, and again in 2019. I learned on that first trip that my letters to Lina helped to keep her in the program. Her previous sponsor did not send very many letters. When she started receiving letters on a regular basis, she decided to keep attending, and eventually completed her time as a sponsored child in the spring of 2022. As hard as it is not having any regular communication with her anymore, I am excited about her future. I spent 11 years praying for her and writing letters to her. For someone I have only spent a little bit of time with, that is a lot of time invested into the life of another person.

There is one other sponsored child that I have been able to visit, and did not even think about my time as his sponsor coming to an end anytime soon. There are things I learned about him and his family that definitely gave me compassion for him, and I realized why God connected me to him in the first place. I believed he still have quite a few years left as my sponsored child, so I was completely taken by surprise when I learned recently that my sponsorship of him has come to an end.

This is a situation that Compassion hopes will happen in many communities where they partner with local churches around the world.

The church where this particular sponsored child attends has reached a point where they no longer need Compassion’s support.

When I have been on Compassion trips, I have heard this many times.

Compassion wants to be there for the neediest of the needy. And when a community can get to a point where they say ‘thank you, please go help in another area of our county’, this is a reason for celebration!

But as a sponsor, this is still a hard thing.

The years of praying, letter writing, and the time I spent fundraising to earn money to be able to go visit him…I invested so much of myself into the relationship with this young man.

In my final letter to him, I reminded him that God is always with him. I reminded him that God wants to know him. I reminded him to cling to God when life seems overwhelming. My prayer is that he knows Jesus, so that one day, we can be in heaven together.

Time to Change Things Up

Here we are a couple of days into a new year and my house is all a mess right now. We have been in this home for almost 18 years and it needs a refresh. I have spent time over the last couple of weeks moving furniture, taking down our Christmas decorations, and removing some really old wallpaper. Once we have texturing done on a couple of walls, I will be ready to repaint most of the walls in our home.

My husband and I were talking about some home projects the other day and I was telling him my reasoning why the dishes have always been in the lower cabinet.

inside the kitchen cabinets

When we first moved into this home, I wanted the dishes in the lower cabinet so the kids could help with unloading the dishwasher. As the kids got older, we just kept the dishes in the lower cabinet. When our daughter got married last summer, I removed some of the dishes and silverware and moved those to another area in our home, but kept these dishes in the same spot.

As we have been spending time talking about home projects, I realized how much wasted space there is in this spot. And my husband never realized my reasoning behind why the dishes were in the lower cabinet in the first place! He thought that everyone placed their dishes in lower cabinets!

So it is definitely time to change things up!

Ideally, I would love to move the baking supplies to this lower cabinet, but I would hate to have to pull things out from the front in order to get to things in the back. So I need to start hunting for a solution before I make this change.

Are you making any changes this year? If so, what changes are you making? Are you someone who is pretty adaptable to change? Or are you pretty resistant to change?

wallpaper removed

To end this post, I will leave you all with a photo of what our living room looked like last week after the wallpaper was removed and before the Christmas tree came down. The house repainting is going to be a big project, but the timing is good with all the rain we are receiving right now in California.

Your Film Produced No Images

Last month, I decided to bring my film camera with us on our trip to Montana. I was really looking forward to seeing what I could capture using the film camera.

I was kind of surprised that I did not take near as many photos as I thought I would with the film camera though. I believe it is because you do not have an instant image show up on an LCD screen of a DSLR or one on my iPhone. Instead of shooting off a bunch of images of the same thing with digital, a little more thought goes into shooting an image with film.

Since I did not take a full roll of 36 images in Montana, I made a day trip to Yosemite last week to finish up the roll of film.

Nikon FE2 with El Capitan in the background

I sent the roll of to be processed and have been waiting for the email to tell me that the images were ready to be viewed. The message came through this morning, but it was not what I was expecting…

Your film produced no images

I believe I loaded the film incorrectly. When I was rewinding the film, it seemed to rewind a little too quickly. But I didn’t really think too much about it at the time, and just sent to roll off the be processed.

Well, at least I had my DSLR and my iPhone with me to capture photos in Montana as well! This morning, my husband suggested that we could always go back. Now that is a very tempting offer!

But I did capture some memorable shots with the other cameras I had with me…

Going to the Sun Road

This is one I captured with my DSLR from the top of Logan Pass looking down at Going to the Sun Road.

And here is one I capture with my iPhone out the car window on the drive up Going to the Sun Road…

Glacier National Park

Right now, I have four rolls of black & white film sitting on the shelf. I am determined to shoot a roll of film with one of those rolls and get back a successful set of prints.

Stay tuned!

Our Very Belated 30th Anniversary Trip

Back at the beginning of 2020, I had started planning our 30th anniversary trip. I thought a trip up north to Canada would be a good trip since I had not been to Canada before. And I really wanted another stamp in my passport. So I started a Pinterest board, exploring coffee shops to visit and things to do on the trip.

As the year 2020 dragged on, we began to realize that a trip out of the country was not going to happen. After traveling just about every month with Compassion to volunteer at events, it was a very hard year for me to not travel at all.

2021 ended up being a crazy year for us with many topsy turvy things happening in our life. It was going to be impossible for us to try to get away with all that was going on.

As we entered 2022, I knew we really needed to plan a trip away, and I really wanted to go to Montana to Glacier National Park. The reservation system was back in place which made it a bit of a challenge to do a lot of planning until the reservation was secure. But I started a Pinterest board, read a lot of posts, watched a lot of videos, and started figuring out some of the details.

Here was our basic itinerary:

  • Day 1 - fly to Bozeman, drive to Helena, stay in Helena for the night

  • Day 2 - drive to Polebridge, check into AirBNB in West Glacier

  • Day 3 - Drive Going to the Sun Road over to Many Glacier, hike a trail in Many Glacier

  • Day 4 - Drive Going to the Sun Road, hike a trail

  • Day 5 - Alpine Slides in Whitefish, drive to Helena

  • Day 6 - Gates of the Mountains boat tour, Montana State Capitol Building

  • Day 7 - drive to Bozeman, explore Bozeman

  • Day 8 - fly home

We did have to alter our itinerary a little bit and be a bit flexible when we were in Glacier National Park. Many of the trailhead parking lots fill up very quickly and early! We were hoping to go to an alpaca ranch (too far away) and a bear encounter park (closed on the day we would have been able to visit), but overall, I am very happy with all that we were able to do and see on this trip!

We stayed in two of the cutest AirBNB spots, saw a bear, mountain goats, and a couple of bald eagles. We ate elk burgers and bison burgers at two different really great restaurants. Found a couple of wonderful coffee shops, and drove over 1200 miles in a state that has a population that is 25% of Los Angeles.

Do I love Glacier National Park more than Yosemite?

I kept hearing that many people do love Glacier National Park more than Yosemite. But I don’t know if I do. I believe being able to visit Glacier gives me a better appreciation for what I have access to right in my own home state. It still amazes me that people travel from all over our country and around the world to visit an incredible place that I can drive to in less than three hours.

Have you been able to visit both parks? If so, which one do you love more?

If you haven’t been to Glacier, I will share a few photos below. But the photos just can’t capture how beautiful this place is:

I have many more photos I could share here, it was hard to narrow it down to just a few. It still amazes me how incredibly lucky we are to live in such a beautiful country!

You went to Yosemite how many times?!?

Between June of 2020 and June of 2021, I went to Yosemite National Park twenty times.

Yes, you read that correctly, twenty times.

Of course, gas was a whole lot cheaper then. But that is a whole other topic…I have been meaning to write and post something about all my trips to Yosemite, but I am finally making time to do so…

Once the national park system decided to open the parks back up after being closed for almost four months in the spring of 2020, I was dying to make a day trip to one of my favorite places. They had implemented a reservation system, and I did my best to take full advantage of using it as often as possible.

After months of being told by the government to stay home (not that I stayed inside my home that whole time), I was beyond ready for a full day outside in the sunshine, getting lots of fresh air and exercise, spending time in God’s beautiful creation.

From June of 2020 until June of 2021, I explored parts of Yosemite I had never explored before. I hiked more miles in one year than I had probably ever done before. I kept track of my steps on each visit and figure I hiked about 90 miles in the park that year. I took 12 people to Yosemite for the very first time.

There were two hikes that have to be my absolute favorites from that year. The first one is Lembert Dome. My daughter-in-law and I did this hike in August of 2020. The whole time on the trail we probably saw no more than 25 people. The view from the top of the dome looking out toward the eastern sierra mountains was incredible!

And believe me, no photo is ever going to do this view justice. There is nothing like hiking up a trail at over 8000 feet above sea level and seeing an almost 360 degree view of Tuolumne Meadows and the surrounding area. This is one hike that I would definitely do again!

My other favorite hike from that year has to be Columbia Rock. This trail is the first part of the Upper Yosemite Falls trail. As I was making my way up this trail, I almost didn’t think I was going to make it! It is a brutal 1000 foot elevation gain in just one mile! But the view is so worth it!

I loved this hike so much that I brought my daughter-in-law with me to hike this same trail the following month.

It amazes me that so many people live within driving distance of this incredible place and have never been. I spend $80 for the National Park Pass and it is so worth the price. It you live in the state of California, you are within driving distance of at least one national park, given that we have nine national parks in our state, the most in all of the United States. I have been to five of the nine national parks in California, so I need to make time to get to the other four.

Do you have a favorite national park in our country?