Hope For The World Intl

Not a small one, not a used one — nothing, in their whole lives. There are widows who will spend this Christmas certain that no one in the world is thinking of them.

 

Mission Christmas exists to change that.Every year we carry a small Christmas gift to abandoned and orphaned children, to children in the slums, to the poorest among us, to the families of our native missionaries, and to widows who have no one left. The gift itself is modest. What it says is not. It tells a person who has been overlooked their entire life that somebody sees them, somebody is praying for them, and somebody loves them — and that the God who sent His Son at Christmas has not forgotten their name.

 

What one gift does$30 provides one Christmas gift for one person.Every gift is chosen for the person who will receive it. A small child does not receive what a teenager receives, and a widow does not receive what a child receives. Each gift is matched to the age and the need of the one holding it, because being seen as an individual is part of the point.We hand each gift over personally. That moment opens a door nothing else opens. In the week the world celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ, we are welcomed into homes that would not otherwise open to us — and we are able to tell the people inside why we came, and Whose love sent us.A gift is how the conversation begins. The gospel is what we leave behind.

 

“Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction.”James 1:27

 

Laxmi lost her husband last year. She was left with three children and no way to feed them.By the time our Hope team heard her name, she had come to the end of herself. She was ready to give up — on her own life, and on her children. There are places a person can reach where hope is not a feeling they have lost but a word they no longer understand.

Laxmi was in that place.Our team went to her home. They brought gifts for her children, and they sat with her, and they listened.

That visit was the beginning of a friendship, not the end of a transaction.In the months that followed we were able to buy Laxmi a sewing machine and arrange her training. Today she runs her own business. She provides for her three children with her own hands, and she stands on her own feet.The gift did not save Laxmi. God did. But the gift is what got us through her door.

 

Every one of us has been in some corner of our lives where we could not get up on our own. We needed someone to come and tell us: I am here for you — and more than that, God is here for you. Laxmi is simply what that looks like when someone actually comes.SamuelSamuel was two years old when he lost both his mother and his father.He was left with his grandmother, an elderly woman near the end of her own life, with nothing to give him. She could not provide for herself, let alone for a small boy.

She carried him anyway, because there was no one else.One Christmas, while our team was distributing gifts in her area, she heard that we were there. She came and found us, and she told us about her grandson.Samuel is in our care now. He is in school. He is growing, and he is growing in the knowledge of God — a boy with a future, who two Christmases ago had almost nothing at all.

His grandmother found us because we were standing in her village handing out gifts. That is the whole reason we go.

 

“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”Matthew 25:40

 

This year, 7,500 are waitingSeven thousand five hundred people are on our list for this Christmas. Orphaned and abandoned children. Children in the slums. Widows. The families of native missionaries who serve in places where preaching the gospel costs something real.

 

Every name on that list is a Laxmi or a Samuel whose story has not been written yet.We cannot reach all of them alone. That is not a figure of speech — we reach exactly as many as God provides for through His people, and not one more.Our ministry team and more than 1,500 of our believers have fasted and prayed over this need for twenty-one days, asking the Lord to open the doors. We are asking Him. And we are asking you.

 

Celebrate Christmas with someone who has no oneYou can give one gift.

 

Whatever you are able to do, it arrives in someone's hands as proof that they were remembered.

Every dollar given to Mission Christmas goes to a gift and to the hands that carry it. Please pray with us. If you are not able to give this year, we are asking for something we value just as highly: pray with us.Pray that the Lord provides for all 7,500. Pray for the children who will open the only gift they have ever been given.

 

Pray for the widows who will learn this December that they are not forgotten. And pray for our teams on the ground, carrying these gifts into hard places and telling people about Jesus.Some of the stories we encounter are genuinely heartbreaking.

 

But we have watched God take the most broken story in a village and turn it into the one that brings Him the most glory — and we are amazed every single time.You never know how God intends to use you. Perhaps it is this Christmas. Perhaps it is one name on a list of 7,500 that He has been saving for you.Come and find out with us.