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.

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.

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.

First the good news: ten African countries are only half as poor as they were two decades ago.

Now the bad news: child mortality rates have actually gone up, rather than down, in six sub-Saharan nations. Sub-Saharan Africa holds the unfortunate distinction of being the only region in the world that has seen an increase in the mortality rate of children under age 5. That’s according to the U.N. Millennium Development Goals Report Card released on Tuesday.

What makes this report particularly relevant to us at Cross International is that most of our work in Africa is in the sub-Saharan region. One of the six countries listed in the child-mortality report is Zambia, where Cross is providing food and education for impoverished children, home-based care for the chronically ill, and safe, accessible water for remote villages.

Waterborne illnesses and other infectious diseases are leading causes of child deaths in Zambia, while HIV remains a major threat, directly and indirectly, to the health of children. In many cases, lives can be saved by simple improvements in home sanitation and by educating HIV-infected mothers to bottle-feed their infants. Good nutrition and alternative water sources also play a big role, and children must be kept in school because they are the producers of tomorrow’s wealth, which will in turn provide the food, medical care, and healthier way of life that Zambia needs. Cross is promoting all these developments through partnerships with local Christian ministries that understand Zambia’s struggles and know how to make a difference, one family at a time, one village at a time.

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.

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.

Today is World AIDS Day, and though the subject isn’t a pleasant one, there’s good news to be had. The U.N. is reporting that the number of infected people around the world is no longer increasing and has stabilized over the last two years at about 33 million.

Education has been a big factor in curbing the disease, as more people have realized the importance of avoiding risky behaviors and getting tested for the virus. The development and distribution of antiretroviral drugs has also been a great blessing, turning what was once a death sentence into a manageable (but still incurable) illness. The transformation has been called the Lazarus Effect – a reminder that God often works through natural means to bring incredible healing to the sick.

Nevertheless, there’s still a lot of work to be done, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, which accounted for a full 72 percent of new HIV cases worldwide last year. Christian non-governmental organizations have contributed, and continue to contribute, a lot of sweat, tears, and funding to AIDS-relief in Africa, and Cross International is doing its part to help.

One way we are helping is through the Reencontro project in Mozambique. The Christian women at Reencontro provide life-saving assistance to thousands of AIDS-orphans suffering from hunger, homelessness, exploitation, and disease. Reencontro puts the children in a good school, finds guardians for them if possible, and takes care of their physical and emotional needs until they are old enough to support themselves.

We also support Grace Ministries Mission, a church in Zambia that rescues AIDS orphans from the streets, provides them with food, clothes, education, health care, and loving homes, promotes abstinence-based AIDS prevention, and focuses on gospel preaching.

Join us as we commemorate World AIDS Day, by reaching out with the love of Christ and giving to one of our Africa projects today!

The United Nations World Food Programme recently reported that food aid to the world’s poor is at a 20-year low, yet the number of hungry people is at the highest level ever — 1 billion. Part of the problem is countries such as the U.S. have cut back their aid because of economic woes, leaving millions of poor without food.

Recent reports of severe food shortages in Guatemala and intense famine in Kenya and other East African countries have only reinforced the idea that world hunger has reached a crisis level.

We are responding to this pervasive need by providing tens of thousands of meals to the poor through our Christian ministry partners around the globe. We ship containers of nutrient-rich food packets, support school feeding programs, and provide food for nutrition centers and feeding programs for the sick, elderly, and orphaned.

World hunger may seem like a problem too big to tackle, but we’ve seen firsthand that sometimes just one meal can mean the difference between life and death. For Michael, a Zambian AIDS orphan, it was a handful of meals that saved his life.

Michael’s mother died when he was 2 months, leaving him all alone. At just 3 pounds, he was barely clinging to life.

Just when it seemed that Michael would befall the fate of so many innocent children orphaned by the AIDS pandemic, his life was saved by ADNZ Home-Based Care, a Christian ministry, who with our support, provides food and medical care to the AIDS-affected poor in Zambia.

Michael, who now lives with his aunt, receives a steady supply of milk through the program, which is helping him recover from severe malnutrition. He is 6 months old and weighs 11 pounds. The meals he received, though few in comparison to the millions needed around the world, meant the world to Michael. They saved his life!

Help save a life and share the love of Christ by supporting one of our feeding programs — CLICK HERE.

Bishop John M Ng’andu of the Evangelical Fellowship of Zambia has seen firsthand the devastating consequences of HIV/AIDS for children in Africa. He recently sent his sincere thanks to Cross International and our benefactors for supporting orphaned and vulnerable children in his Grace Ministries program. Click on the video below to see what he had to say:

More video footage from Zambia to come later this week!

Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize.

These are the familiar words of Paul in his exhortation of the early Church recorded in 1 Corinthians 9:24. They were also recently the center of our morning staff devotional. The gist of our talk: Sometimes it’s easy to get discouraged in life, but if we approach it like a runner does a race, we’ll receive the “prize” — eternal life and perfect joy with God in heaven.

Eleven-year-old Rebecca, an AIDS orphan from Malawi, takes this verse to heart — literally. Our Africa projects officer, Jim Kline, met this aspiring young runner on a recent trip to Kondanani Children’s Orphanage, a home for 135 AIDS orphans we support monthly. Being a runner himself, Jim was quite impressed by Rebecca and her recent accomplishment. At only 11 years old, she had placed first for her age group, which included youths up to 17, in a big local running meet.

“She’s smart too,” Jim added, saying she had scored in the top three out of 700 people in her grade on a recent government test. He was so amazed because Rebecca first came to the orphanage as a tiny, abandoned baby. (Her family had probably died of AIDS.) In fact, she was one of Kondanani’s first children.

Jim says he tries to imagine what life would have been like for Rebecca if she had never come to Kondanani. She probably would have died or lived a hard life in the streets. Instead, he says, she’s a talented young lady with a bright future in front of her. “It’s amazing to see God work through us to produce wonderful stories like this.”

Sub-Saharan Africa is more heavily affected by HIV and AIDS than any other region of the world. The reality of this statement hit our Africa project officer, Jim Kline, during his recent trip to visit the projects we support there. He described it this way: “The extent of the AIDS pandemic in Africa is kind of like the genocide in Rwanda. Everyone you talk to has been affected by it in some way. Even if they themselves aren’t affected, they have a neighbor, or relative, or friend who is.”

With AIDS claiming the lives of an estimated 1.5 million people in the region, more than 11 million AIDS orphans have been left to fend for themselves.

We support several programs in Africa to help AIDS orphans, providing everything from housing and food to Christian counseling. Below is a hopeful story brought back from Jim’s recent trip that illustrates the impact one of these programs is having on the lives of AIDS orphans:

The six Borjes children have known much pain and hardship. In 2001, their father was murdered in front of their home by a drunken soldier, leaving their mother to support the family alone. They were already quite poor, but without their father their life got much harder. Then their mother became ill. She frequently went to a witchdoctor for a cure, but she only got worse and eventually died of AIDS in September 2007.

Left to care for themselves, the siblings, ages 5 to 18 at the time, struggled to survive without an income. One of the older girls turned to prostitution to make a little money for food. Soon after that our mission partner, Reencontro, a Christian ministry that helps AIDS orphans in Maputo, Mozambique, began giving them food, which helped — but the family desperately needed a new place to live. The leaky, crumbling cement shell of a structure they lived in was on the verge of collapsing.

In 2008, the Borjes children finally received some good news. They were being moved into a home built with funds from our generous donors. Working through Reencontro’s orphan aid program, we have been able to continue to support these children. They now receive a $200 stipend each month for food and living necessities. Three caregivers from the community, hired by Reencontro, visit the children frequently to make sure they are doing okay. For the first time in a long time, the Borjes children have hope.

Click here to learn more about the work we do with Reencontro and AIDS orphans in Mozambique.

Please keep Tom Lewis, from our radio team, in your prayers today. He will be representing our ministry on the Hugh Hewitt Show tonight.

The renowned conservative radio talk show host and author, Hugh Hewitt, invited us on his show to help us raise money for African AIDS orphans. His show is nationally syndicated on 120 stations around the country, so the broadcast will reach nearly a million ears by the night’s end!

Be sure to listen to the show, which airs tonight (Thursday, June 25) from 6 to 9 EST!

Here are the stations in Florida who will be streaming his show:
Tampa St. Petersburg – WGUL-AM
Orlando – WORL-AM
Sarasota Bradenton – WLSS-AM
Panama City – WLTG-AM

To find a local radio station streaming the Hugh Hewitt Show in your area or to listen online, click here. Also, check out our ministry’s featured link on Hugh Hewitt’s blog.q6ghxanwu8

There are thousands and thousands of AIDS orphans in Mozambique who need help. You can help right now. For just 68 bucks you can get a kid off the streets and into a family. All you have to do is call now…

Tomorrow evening nearly 1 million radio listeners across the country will hear these words — or something similar — during a national radio broadcast looking to raise funds to support our AIDS orphan projects in Africa.

Hugh Hewitt, a nationally syndicated radio talk show host and conservative author, is featuring our ministry on his show, which runs weekdays from 6 to 9 p.m. EST. The Hugh Hewitt Show is nationally syndicated by Salem Radio Network and appears on more than 120 stations across the country.

“He has never invited a ministry on his show to fundraise for them before,” said Rhonda Gonsalves, our broadcast marketing manager. “When something like this happens, it is incredibly exciting because it means our message is getting out.”

To say we’re excited would be an understatement! Be sure to tune in tomorrow (Thursday, June 25) from 6 to 9 p.m. Visit Hugh Hewitt’s website to find a local radio station streaming his show in your area or how to listen online, and check out our featured link on his blog.