Donald Miller, author of Blue Like Jazz and several other books, grew up without a father. So for him, the increasing number of children being raised without a father or a male role model isn’t just a national issue—it’s a personal one as well. In his latest book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, he talks about a movement he started so that young boys don’t have to grow up without a father figure guiding them. A movement that has turned into a full-blown organization called The Mentoring Project.

The purpose of The Mentoring Project is to connect mentors from local churches with boys between the ages of seven and fourteen who don’t have dads. Their current goal is 10 mentors from 1000 churches, creating 10,000 mentoring relationships. Mentors sign up for a two year commitment of spending one hour a week with a fatherless boy, doing anything from shooting hoops to building car models to just hanging out. Right now this program is based only in Portland, Oregon, where Donald Miller lives and works. But The Mentoring Project plans to expand into a national program by Fall 2010.

Part of the idea behind The Mentoring Project came from elephants. In his book To Own a Dragon, Donald Miller parallels the plight of orphaned elephants with that of boys without fathers, which he realized after watching a documentary about elephants in a wildlife trust. Teenage orphaned elephants often took out their aggression on other animals until older, mentoring elephants were introduced to them.

“I began to wonder if we guys were designed to have a father, whose very presence would cause us to understand more accurately what our muscle is for, what we are supposed to do with our energy,” he writes. (To read more of this excerpt, click here.) Donald Miller’s organization is helping young boys connect with older men who can provide that kind of presence and guidance in their lives.

Currently Donald Miller is on his A Million Miles in a Thousand Years tour, so if you want to hear more about his book or The Mentoring Project, check out his tour dates here. He will be in Birmingham November 19! You can also check out his blog and follow The Mentoring Project on Twitter to find out what he’s been up to.

Each week Bedouins International posts a story. Maybe it’s one we’ve helped to tell, or a story we hope to tell, or it maybe it’s just a story we think deserves to be told. In any case, we hope you find them inspiring and motivating. Read more stories here.

Christmas is a time of giving. Of cookies and warm drinks and story-telling. Bedouins International wants to kick off the holiday season by hosting a party for our friends and community, one complete with snacks, stories, and the chance to hang out with the people who helped us get here in the first place.

So mark it in your calendar/phone/planner: Friday, December 4, at 7:00 p.m. we will have a Night of Storytelling in Apartment #501 in the Phoenix Lofts. This will be a chance for us to reminisce and retell some of our favorite stories from the past two years, three continents, eight countries, and a plethora of projects. It’ll be a time to say “thank you” to those of you who have supported us along the way as well as a chance to let new friends know what we’ve been up to and where we hope to go next.

So come party with us! We’ve created an event on our Facebook fan page for you to find out more details. Hope to see you there!

As promised, here are some photos from Stephen of his first day with Bishop Chunge in Kenya!

Well, Stephen’s 2 weeks in Cairo are up, and now he’s spending the next week with some friends in Kenya before flying back to the States. He is there taking the pretty pictures for some wonderful, beautiful people and getting the chance to meet up with Philip from KISI for a preliminary visit before we go do our project with him next year.

He is exhausted and busy, but I got a chance to chat with him earlier today and he told me a story I wanted to share with you. He had the opportunity to visit a small start up school for K-2nd graders with the wonderful Bishop Chunge. The kids swarmed around him as he took their pictures. The Bishop then asked Stephen to pray for the school and all of the kids and as he finished all of the children started clapping and laughing. As they were leaving, Stephen told the Bishop how much he had enjoyed their day at the school. The Bishop replied, “This is a day in their lives that they will never forget – the day that someone cared enough to come and take their pictures.” No one had ever done that before.

Needless to say, Stephen was floored and humbled by the fact that these kids were so grateful just to have their picture taken. This is why we do what we do!

Here is a screenshot and sneak peek of some of the photos Stephen took today. More pics coming soon!

Lately this verse keeps popping out at me from sermons, books, and now, websites. Today it appeared on the very top of the Care for Children page on the Church at Brook Hills’ website:

“Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”  —James 1:27

After studying the book of James as a congregation this fall, the Church at Brook Hills began to put this centuries-old sentence into practice with their recent emphasis on foster care and adoption. When they read this verse on Sunday, September 6, the leaders and members of the church started asking what it would look like to take care of the orphans of Shelby County. Pastor of Brook Hills Dr. David Platt met with workers from Alabama’s Department of Human Resources to find out more, and challenged the members of his congregation to consider being foster parents or adopting.

To find homes for all of the children in Shelby County’s foster care program, DHR representatives told Dr. Platt it would take 150 families. On Sunday, September 20, Brook Hills held an informational meeting for families who wanted to begin the process of being foster parents. At the end of the meeting, 160 families had signed up. Brook Hills is now partnering with several adoption and foster care agencies in Alabama to provide the necessary classes and training so that potential foster parents can welcome a foster child into their home very soon.

Some of these children have been abused, ignored, and rejected. All of them have a story about how they ended up in foster care. And now, because of an ancient letter from one of Jesus Christ’s disciples and a church family willing to put those words into action, hundreds of the orphaned, forgotten, and abandoned children in Shelby County will have a story about finding a home.

To find out more about the Church at Brook Hill’s Care for the Children program, visit their webpage or send an email to careforchildren@brookhills.org. For more information on foster care in Alabama from DHR’s website, click here.

Each week Bedouins International posts a story. Maybe it’s one we’ve helped to tell, or a story we hope to tell, or it maybe it’s just a story we think deserves to be told. In any case, we hope you find them inspiring and motivating. Read more stories here.