Our byline at Partners International is: Real Hope. Real Change. Real Partnership.
To me, these words grab the essence of what we want our organization to be known for. But words like hope, change, and partnership can be easily get overused, and lose their significance.
Yesterday at breakfast, my wife and I were reading in a devotional book by J.I Packer and came across this outstanding quote on the concept of hope:
While there’s life, there’s hope, we say, but the deeper truth is that only while there’s hope there is life. Take away hope, and life, with all its fascinating variety of opportunities and experiences, reduces to mere existence—uninteresting, ungratifying, bleak, drab and repellent, a burden and a pain. Hope generates energy, enthusiasm and excitement; lack of hope breeds only apathy and inertia.
I believe what Partners International has to offer brings hope at several different levels. First, it’s positioned as an organization that is ready to seek out and enable national, indigenous leaders, especially emerging leaders, and come along side them with resources and training that specifically gives them hope of fulfilling their God-given visions. Second, when those visions take on substance as mature, national ministry organizations they, in turn, bring hope to so many other people struggling both physically and spiritually in the hard places of the world. Finally, the bottom line of all this partnership and ministry effort is that many more people would come to see and know Jesus Christ as the ultimate Real Hope both today and for all Eternity.
As Packer says above, where there’s hope, there’s life. What a privilege it has been to see people, leaders and ministries alike take on new life as they experience renewed hope that has resulted from caring partner relationships.
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