Many stories may be helped by a brief respite; at least you may relish an intermission from my musings!  In any case, I recently read a book which has entrenched itself in my heart and I want to share it with you with the hope it may affect you as well.

It is called Kisses From Katie and once I learn how to insert pictures I will add a book cover photograph.  Written by Katie J. Davis, it is her story on how she was called to move from Tennessee to Uganda, and begin working to improve the lives of the people of Uganda at the age of 18.  

At first I only read a few pages at any one sitting; throughout the book Katie gives God credit for all her accomplishments and I doubted her genuineness.   However, somewhere between the time she adopted 13 girls, and fed hundreds of people daily, I  was a convert!  There is no way she could achieve all she has without supernatural guidance and strength!   There is humor, sadness, and poverty in her book, but above all, love is on every page.

Katie has challenged me, and I hope and pray she will challenge you too.  One of the worst standouts (you’ll understand my phrasing in a moment) was reading how she met parents who “made cakes of mud and salt to fill their children’s bellies.”  I thank God I have never been so desperate that I have had to feed my children mud.  Also quoting from her book, “the truth is that the 143 million orphaned children and the 11 million who starve to death or die from preventable diseases and the 8.5 million who work as child slaves, prostitutes…and the 2.3 million who live with HIV add up to 164.8 million needy children.  2.1 billion people on this earth proclaim to be Christians.  The truth is that if only 8 percent of the Christians would care for one more child, there would not be any more statistics.”

Wow!  Now, I am not good with math or statistics, that was Joe’s forte (among mechanical engineering, history, writing and most everything else), however what I get from this is that if we would all sponsor one hungry child upon this earth, we would make a BIG improvement in world hunger!  It doesn’t matter if the child is from Uganda, Haiti, the Appalachian Mountains, or Raleigh.  A hungry child is a hungry child.  

Imagine what we can accomplish together; I sponsor a child and you sponsor a child, and your friend sponsors a child and so forth and so forth.  Katie has begun an organization called Amazima and for $300 (or $25 a month), you help provide for 600 children.   For the cost of a few mocha lattes, 600 people can eat. 

But there are many other charitable organizations to choose from if Amazima doesn’t speak to you!  For help in selecting one, Charity Navigator (www.charitynavigator.org) researches hundreds of charities and provides free ratings.  I have used it and found it very helpful in my decision-making.