The global map touched by your hands and hearts

Annual Appeal 2021

We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life. (1 John 1:1)

“Yes. Thank you. I’d love some.” My hands reach sheepishly for both a cookie and a candy and my lips sip a steaming half-cup of bitter espresso. “Don’t refuse anything you are offered and drink the coffee quickly,” we were told, “then return your cup to the tray. They will reuse it in order to serve all of us.” It was as if sitting among chessmen on a chessboard, the white turbans of Muslim clerics on one side and the black head coverings of Syrian Orthodox priests on the other; yet not in opposition but in solidarity. How else, but to sit in a room dense with faith and Middle Eastern hospitality, would we understand the relationships that our partnering churches share with their neighbors.

This was Syria, where potholes on the well-traveled road into Aleppo were rivaled only by bullet-riddled buildings…but only the ones left standing. My eyes glued to the smudged window in the back of the van found old men selling bread on the streets, mothers grasping small hands to cross, and young men sitting among concrete rubbish and exposed rebar, their lifeless eyes staring into nothingness. “We won’t be getting out of the bus; it's not safe…land mines, you know.”

After our three-day visit, we began the 8 hour, 70-mile drive of checkpoints and checked passports back to Beirut. Travel breaks were few, so when I took a moment to stretch my legs, the smell of freshly baked bread beckoned me to a make-shift awning, two women, and a clay oven. The hot bread that I enjoyed was quickly chilled by their tears that told the story of these now barren mothers, their cradles robbed by war.

Back in the land of almost one million Syrian refugees, we prepared to fly home from the Beirut before…before the explosion that shattered the “Paris of the Middle East”; before COVID’s rampage; before a collapsed economy that thrust the impoverished into hunger, the middle class into poverty; …before what now is.

I have described only one corner of the global map that is touched by your hands and hearts when you give to The Outreach Foundation’s Annual Appeal. When you give, we are able to cover the salaries and operating expenses of our dedicated Outreach staff so that they may lead trips like this as well as communicate and engage with partners around the world.

Friends, your gifts to the Annual Appeal enable The Outreach Foundation to hear Pentecost languages of faith, see with our eyes the visions of hope and promise in desolate places, and touch the outcast with our hands. All of this concerning the Word of Life is possible because you also heard, saw, touched, and partnered with us. Thank you and may God bless you.

Lisa Culpepper
Member of The Outreach Foundation board