Monday, May 2, 2011

A Message from Jhude

In October 2009 we started sponsoring Jhude, a little boy from the Philippines through Compassion International. His mother Analyn writes us every 2-3 months and we have all of her letters on our refrigerator. Jhude is now 7.

Today, we received a letter.

Today is also the 1 year anniversary of the flood.

Last Spring, our creative team picked an incredible song to close our Shattered Dreams series at Cross Point. That song was "Beautiful Things," by Gungor. We sang it on May 9th, the Sunday after the flood devastated Nashville.

Lyrics from the song would pop in my head as we were rebuilding our home. This flower bush bloomed for the first and only time a few weeks after the flood. 

"All this earth
Could all that is lost ever be found?
Could a garden come up from this ground at all?"

I kept all of the cards we received and put them in this photo album.
"You make beautiful things."

And on the anniversary of the flood, I read these words from Analyn,

"Jhude will graduate this coming April 1, 2011. And this coming June he will be in Grade I. And Jhude had recited some of their poem but just two sentences,
'You make beautiful things out of us,
You make beautiful things out of dust.'
And he is very happy about it because even if he goes to sleep he would gladly recite it."

God, we hear You. We see You. We feel You.

Thank you for speaking to us through a sweet little boy from far away. 

You can watch our service from May 9th, 2010 here:

4 comments:

  1. How amazing how he works, in the smallest ways but they mean the biggest things to us! Thanks for sharing!

    ReplyDelete
  2. goosebumps... absolutely amazing, miranda. so glad you shared this special story with us!

    ReplyDelete
  3. This is absolutely a beautiful story and blog post. I cried when I read it. Your spiritual dept and insight is amazing.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thanks to all of you for taking time to read this. I still get emotional thinking about when I turned the page of that letter and saw those lyrics.

    ReplyDelete