Joni Eareckson Tada: Sharing Hope

Guest (Female): It's volunteer appreciation week!

Guest (Male): And Joni and Friends is showering lots of appreciation on our volunteers who served with us over the past year.

Joni Eareckson Tada: That’s right, and we're taking this week to launch a new year of service, especially for our international area team members.

Guest (Male): That's right, and we are honoring all the volunteers who serve with us in Africa, Eastern Europe, South America, Central America—thank you, friends—and North Africa and even parts of the Middle East. These are the wonderful, self-sacrificing volunteers who partner with us in making every Wheels for the World outreach a success. These hardworking brothers and sisters in Christ, they store our wheelchairs, help us set up a distribution, work with our physical therapist, and best of all, a lot of them share the gospel of Jesus in their own language. And it is most often their churches who welcome these special needs families in.

Our international volunteers also help pull together our Beyond Suffering courses, where we teach people with disabilities all about the sovereignty of God over suffering. And you wouldn't believe how many churches get energized in these trainings. And also our international volunteers help us with international family retreats for disabled people and their families in countries like Armenia, Madagascar, Chile, Latvia, El Salvador—and that's just to name a few.

Oh, and these dear international volunteers, they really love the ministry. They know they are an integral part of Joni and Friends. Recently, Ricardo Diaz, whose work at Joni and Friends is to engage all our volunteers, Ricardo asked me to share in a time of prayer with all his volunteers from all over the world. They were excited to see me, but their excitement nowhere near matched mine. I was so honored, so blessed and thrilled. To tears, I was delighted to see their smiles and hear their stories—all of them in love with the Lord Jesus and reaching people with disabilities with the good news in their country.

I'm thinking of Anderson Hidalgo, who has served at three Joni and Friends family retreats. His first was in El Salvador, and since then, he has eagerly stepped forward and whenever there was a chance to serve families who deal with a disability, he’s on it—he's there! With each retreat, he told us that his calling has grown, and a very recent experience showed his heart in a powerful way.

Anderson gave up his paid time off to spend intentional time with his disabled camper, Emmanuel, as well as the boy's mother. Anderson really wanted their experience at family retreat to be special, and so he purchased gifts for them, decorated their room all fancy and nice so that they would feel truly welcomed and loved.

You know, when I hear of an international volunteer going the extra mile like that, I think of how each one personifies the steadfast love of the Lord that never ceases. To an impoverished family like Emmanuel and his single mom, a volunteer like Anderson proves the difference the gospel of Jesus makes.

And as I reminded our global volunteers on that Zoom call, we are people of the good news. We share the salvation message of Jesus. We not only portray the love of Christ, like Anderson continues to do, but we proclaim the love of Christ. So I salute our international area teams on this volunteer appreciation week. We consider it the highest honor to be co-laborers in Christ alongside not only our international teams, but all our domestic volunteers as well. We appreciate you, all of you, on volunteer appreciation week.