This weekend, many Americans will express thanks for their freedom as they celebrate Independence Day. The idea of freedom means different things to different people: freedom from want, freedom from oppression, freedom to succeed, freedom to say and do as we please.

Blessings Before

As Christians, we understand freedom in a very exciting way. Ephesians 3:12 says, “In him and through faith in him we may approach God with freedom and confidence.” That means God allows us to come to him directly through prayer—we are free to talk to him, share our lives with him, and worship him with not fear, but joy.

Sadly, many people in our world aren’t free in this sense. About 78 million people don’t have access to the Bible in their native language, and about 1.2 billion people have never heard the gospel. What are we as Christians to do about this? Can we do anything at all?

Here’s a story that can help us take heart: In Malawi, Africa, thousands of children have become orphans in the wake of the AIDS epidemic. Annie Chikhwaza, who runs Kondanani Orphanage there with support from Cross International, discovered a pair of 17-month-old twins in “tragic” condition.

Seeing Blessings recover under Annie’s care is proof that Christians can make a difference in lives around the world.

Little Blessings weighed about 8.5 pounds and his twin, Hasting, weighed about 15 pounds. Blessings had large, open wounds on his body and both children looked like skeletons. Neither had hair on their heads nor could sit and stand.

Annie says that in just two weeks, the twins have gained weight and their skin has changed color from pale and gray to chocolate brown. Their hair is growing and it is black instead of orange, a tell-tale sign of malnutrition. Blessings’ wounds are nearly closed up, and Annie says she’s certain they will both make a full recovery.

God calls us to use our freedom to give in his name, to offer of ourselves when no one else will. Thanks to gifts from caring American Christians, children like Blessings and Hasting experience God’s love through us. Galatians 5:13 says, “You, my brothers, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the sinful nature; rather, serve one another in love.” God calls us to use our freedom for good, for serving each other in his name. He reminds us that we can’t understand freedom only in the sense of what we aren’t forced to do; he asks us to think of freedom in terms of what we are at liberty to do for others.

Click here to read about how you can serve others in God’s name through programs supported by Cross International.

Ask a boy who his hero is, and chances are good he’ll name an athlete, rock star, actor, or even a comic book character. But 10-year-old Joshua, who lives at the Cross-sponsored Kondanani Village in Malawi, is no ordinary boy. His hero is a charismatic Zambian preacher he watches on TV, and he’s already started to emulate him.

Joshua, 10, weighed only 2 lbs. when he came to Kondanani as an infant.

When Joshua first came to Kondanani as an orphaned infant, he weighed only two pounds. Today he is a healthy, outspoken boy who loves telling other children about Jesus and inviting them to receive him into their heart. Once a week, he also helps out with evangelistic outreaches in the local village, where they do drama presentations, music, teaching, and prayer.

Joshua’s zeal for ministry shows. He took the initiative, without any suggestion from the adults, to organize a group of friends to sing worship songs. Despite their young age, the boys are as polished as a church choir. They sing loud and joyfully, with perfectly coordinated dance moves and harmonies.

Without hesitation, Joshua will tell you what he wants to be when he grows up: a preacher! He is just one example of the many lives saved and nurtured at Kondanani, a Christian orphanage where children are rescued out of squalor, rehabilitated from malnutrition, given a quality education unlike anything else in the country, and best of all touched with the love of Christ.

Click here to learn how you can be a blessing to Joshua and all the other precious children at Kondanani.

It was obvious to Charity’s parents that something was wrong. All babies cry, but not like this. Charity was crying all the time and seemed to be in severe pain, so they took her to the doctor. The diagnosis turned out to be a common one among poor Zambian families: tuberculosis, often the first warning sign of an HIV infection.

Charity, 2, suffers from tuberculosis.

Charity’s father also has tuberculosis and has tested positive for HIV. He is a bricklayer, but lacks formal employment and is unable to earn a steady income. The local health clinic has provided free medications, but without the proper nutrition, the drugs are ineffective. The family of six relies on a diet almost exclusively of mealie meal – a starch-heavy African food – and sometimes only has enough to eat once a day.

Charity’s siblings are surviving on one meal a day.

The good news is that Charity and her family no longer have to struggle alone, thanks to a local group of Christians who provide home-based care for the chronically ill. Volunteers travel from house to house, giving food to the sick, praying with them, building relationships, and sharing the gospel, while helping the families overcome the sense of shame imposed on them by their society.

Cross has partnered with the home-based care program so that chronically ill children like Charity can receive the care and support they need. With your help, we can alleviate their suffering and empower them to live their lives to the fullest.

Sixteen-year-old Christopher’s village doesn’t just border the city dump – it has become an extension of it.

Cross International is providing an education for Christopher, 16, so he can work his way out of poverty.

While many poor Zambian families grow small gardens in their yards, Christopher’s neighbors fill theirs with garbage, which they dig through for expired food and recyclable goods. The smell attracts flies that seem to be better-fed than the children playing barefoot amid the filth, their tattered clothes caked with dirt. Instead of getting an education, they stay home and help their parents scavenge through the trash, because at school they will be hungry, but there’s food to find at the dump site. This is the only life they know, and the only life they even know to hope for.

The same used to be true for Christopher, whose widowed, unemployed mother has no money to pay for school fees for him or his three siblings. But with help from a local Christian ministry supported by Cross International, Christopher is setting a higher standard for the children in his village by going to school, studying hard, and dreaming big. He is now in 7th grade, his best subjects are math and science, and he says that when he graduates, he wants to become a judge! Two of Christopher’s siblings are also now in school, and the hope is that their example will motivate the neighbors to begin to break the cycle of poverty.

In addition to school fees, the sponsored children receive health care, monthly food rations, and home visits from the ministry. This holistic approach addresses the many aspects of poverty: physical, economic, psychological, and also spiritual. Click here to learn more about this life-changing project that is bringing Christ’s love to the poorest of the poor.

It can be humiliating to be treated as a charity case—the object of someone else’s pity and justification for their pride. Not being able to feed your family can be enough of a blow to your self esteem; but having food (or a house, or other basic need) provided in the wrong spirit can be almost as crushing.

Poor Filipino families participate in the solution to their housing problem by helping construct the homes provided to them.

That is why Cross International takes care to maintain the dignity of the poor. Rather than take a “Santa Claus” approach, we lend behind-the-scenes support to local churches and ministries already serving poor communities. A needy family is helped by a pastor in their own neighborhood, for example. This not only builds up a family’s self worth and sense of community, it builds up the local church as well.

Whenever possible, we also require the poor to be part of their own solution. For instance:

• Side-by-side with local Filipino Christians, poor families in Manila help build and paint the homes they receive through Gawad Kalinga.
• Villagers in Zambia collect rocks and sand to make cement for much-needed wells and latrines through the Chikankata Water Project.
• And disenfranchised Haitian families living in the Dominican Republic are asked to pay a token amount toward their children’s education at Light Community School.

As Christians, we are instructed to treat others—including the very poor—as we would want to be treated (Luke 6:31). More than that, in humility we are to consider them better than ourselves. (Philippians 2:3). It is with such humility that Cross International strives to honor the poor by helping them in Jesus’ name, and with his love.

Below is a beautiful story from one of our ministry partners in Guyana, Ruimveldt Children’s Home & Care Center (RCHCC). We support this Christian ministry monthly so it can continue to provide care to 16 AIDS orphans.

Some of the orphans at Ruimveldt Children’s Home & Care Center (RCHCC)

Micah never speaks about his mother. But at night he has fitful dreams, awaking drenched in sweat and screaming out for her.

Before Micah was brought to RCHCC, he wandered the streets, unattended for days on end. Though he was appeared to be only about 4 years old, his face was sunken and his eyes hard — the marks usually carried by a weathered adult. His body also wore signs of malnourishment. His front teeth were completely black and his small belly was distended due to severe malnutrition.

“We knew very little about him and still have not found his parents,” said Angie Hemric, a volunteer who cares for Micah at the Children’s Home. “He has never shared any memories of them with us.” It is entirely possible that his parents are dead, victims of one of Guyana’s top killer: AIDS.

At first Micah was wary of the help he received at RCHCC. “He was very independent for such a young child,” Angie said. “Every time the gate opened we had to watch that his little body did not slide through it and run off.”

Soon, however, Micah began to let his guard down as he received loving care from the staff at the orphanage. He had never known such selfless kindness. Because Micah was HIV positive no one would help him, and he went without the treatments that would have helped him grow and thrive. During his first weeks at the orphanage, he could hardly eat and his speech was very underdeveloped for someone his age. “Much of the time he was unsettled,” Angie recalled. “He would scream out in the middle of the night and have terrible dreams.”

Micah recently celebrated a second birthday with RCHCC. Though he is still small for a 6-year-old, he has made much progress. His smile is now electric and his body strong, Angie said. “He loves to be held close and read to. He can write his name, color in the lines, count, and say his ABCs.”

The biggest evidence of Micah’s transformation from sick and abandoned AIDS victim to loved and nurtured child of God comes at night. He no longer wakes screaming from fitful nightmares.

Click here to learn more about the life-changing work of RCHCC.

This week, Cross staff met with Haitian mission partner Gladys Mecklembourg, who runs the Togetherness in Christ orphanage, to learn how her ministry is coping with the earthquake crisis. Cross supplies the orphanage with weekly deliveries of rice, beans, oil, and other food, and has provided addition funds to help Gladys meet emergency needs.

Togetherness in Christ orphanage is providing space for earthquake victims to stay while receiving post-operative care.

By God’s grace, all the children and staff at the orphanage were unharmed. But Gladys says the kids are afraid to sleep at night because of the aftershocks, and they are worried about relatives they haven’t heard from since the quake. The children will need a lot of counseling to recover emotionally from what has happened.

Gladys told us that four nurses are currently staying at the orphanage to provide post-operative care for medical patients who are being brought in from an overcrowded hospital. Gladys has an on-site clinic, and she has turned the boys’ dormitory into a temporary hospital where amputees and other wounded and ill patients can recover in safety and comfort. The boys have been relocated to other facilities on the 93-acre property. Gladys said there is also possibility of setting up a tent camp on the grounds for the many refugees who have no place to go.

Despite the challenges facing Haiti and our Cross mission partners in the aftermath of the quake, Gladys expressed a positive vision for the future, applying the words of Isaiah 61:3.

“We trust in our heavenly father to raise up a new Haiti, to bestow on us a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair. We will be called oaks of righteousness, a planting of the lord for the displaying of his splendor. This is the word the Lord had given us at Togetherness for Christ, and we believe in this, and we know there will be a change in Haiti. Not only in the structure, but in the heart – the heart of the people…. There is solidarity among us.”

For the latest news on how we are supporting our Cross mission partners in Haiti, visit www.crossinternational.org/relief

We received some good news from Mike Henry, our projects officer who has been coordinating relief in Haiti since the earthquake. He and one of our partner organizations were able to get medical supplies to a hospital we support near Port-au-Prince. Below is an excerpt from his field notes a few days ago:

With the road cleared, I was able to get further into the field to do some more work — work that will have a true positive impact on people’s lives.

The staff and volunteers at Hospital Espoir offer a prayer of thanks as the medical supplies from Cross International arrive.

I got started early by heading over to the office of a ministry we’ve partnered with during this crisis to pick up some medical supplies to deliver to Hospital Espoir, which is run by one of our long-time ministry partners.

As I drove through Delmas and down Rue Freres, I couldn’t believe how many down homes and buildings were out there. There were only a limited number of cars on the road, but people were walking in every direction, many carrying their belongings.

Dr. Antoine Fadoul, one of my contacts on Haiti, had agreed to provide us with enough supplies to keep Hospital Espoir functioning while we worked on getting supplies to them through the Dominican Republic. By 8:30 a.m., we were able to supply the hospital with a truck-load of items such as gloves, syringes, antibiotics, and pain killers.

Gladys Thomas, the director of the hospital Espoir, was on her way home from India, so her daughter, Natalie, had been left to coordinate activities. Natalie had been overwhelmed by emotions for the past couple of days. I could see it in her eyes. The hospital had all but shut down a few days after the earthquake as they had quickly run out of supplies needed to care for trauma patients.

I was happy to be able to deliver the supplies, and she was relieved to receive the help. Her eyes lit up a bit. Hospital Espoir would now have enough materials to open back up to the public. More importantly, Cross International had a lot more help on the way.

Cross has since provided Gladys with funds to buy more medicines and supplies from the Dominican Republic to keep Hospital Espoir up and running. Please continue to pray for them and all of our other ministry partners in Haiti as we continue to support them in this time of crisis.

Haiti is still reeling from the devastating earthquake that shook much of Port-au-Prince and the surrounding areas to their foundations on Tuesday, but there is hope. People continued to gather in the streets of the capital today, singing hymns and offering prayers to God, as help began to arrive.

A father and child wait in the streets for help to arrive in Port-au-Prince. (Photo courtesy of Matt Marek, IFRC.)

We are distributing millions of ready-to-eat meals to the victims of the 7.2 scale earthquake that demolished much of Port-au-Prince. The meals are part of a 10-container shipment that we have on the ground in Haiti today.

The shipments include, nutrient-packed Vitafood meals, shoes, canned foods, and nutrition drinks. We have established a staging post on the ground and are now able to receive outside aid through the airport in Port-au-Prince.

Cross President Jim Cavnar said that cash donations continue to be the greatest need. These will allow us to wire much-needed funds to our partners in Haiti for the purchase of food, clean water, and fuel for rescue efforts.

“As we continue our emergency response, we are also planning for the long-term needs of our partners,” Jim said. “A lot of rebuilding will need to take place once the dust settles. Cross International will be there to meet that need and help the vital ministries we support rebuild.”

Please continue to pray for the people of Haiti and join us in the relief efforts.  Click here to donate. Also, visit our disaster relief page for updates from our staff in Haiti.

Disney’s 3D adaptation of A Christmas Carol is introducing a new generation to Charles Dickens’ classic holiday tale of greed, poverty, and repentance. This is good news for parents concerned by the avalanche of materialistic messages that too often overwhelm the humble story of Jesus’ birth and the value of giving.

Even if the latest incarnation of Dickens’ cautionary tale doesn’t hold a candle to the previous Disney effort in which a duck played the lead role, the theme of a sinner repenting of his greed and finding compassion for the poor remains as relevant as ever.

Lisa Toland at Christianity Today reminds us to think about “today’s Tiny Tims”:

For a great percentage of the world—and especially for children—the current recession is not a new experience of real need; many have lived in poverty for generations, even centuries. Theirs is an unending recession….

Scrooge’s newfound compassion pushes Dickens’s readers of every age and culture to pursue their own courses of charity. For there will always be faces pressed against our windows.

When those faces appear in our windows, as they inevitably do, our instinct is to close the curtains. We want to shut out those unpleasant images that threaten the comfortable world we have built around ourselves. But God’s way is different. He wants us to open our doors and welcome in the hungry and the homeless. He wants us to remember that we too would be beggars on the street, but for the grace we did not earn.

Cross International needs your help to reach out to today’s Tiny Tims. You can feed a hungry child at a Sunday school in Peru, support a Christian home for abandoned infants in Malawi, or check out some of our other great projects today!