In the age of Facebook profile pictures and Twitter updates, it seems like so many people in this country are obsessed with their own photographs. It’s hard for most of us to imagine what it would be like to never have your picture made.

But there are people all across the nation and world in need of a good photograph, perhaps to include with a resume or just to keep as a family portrait. Photographer Jeremy Cowart had an idea of how to use his camera and connections to change the world in a practical display of love. What if photographers all across the country took one day to make portraits of people who couldn’t afford them? People who maybe had never been in front of a camera before. People like single moms or homeless families or anyone without access to a camera.

Jeremy’s idea has resonated with other artists, photographers, graphic designers, and organizers, and has expanded into a movement called Help Portrait. On December 12, 2009, photographers all across the nation and even the planet will be taking pictures, printing them, and delivering them to those who need them the most.

One of the things I love about this idea after looking at their website and checking out some of the videos about this project is how much the folks at Help Portrait stress that this is not about the photos ending up in a photographer’s portfolio or website. It’s a chance not just to take pictures, but to give them away. And hopefully, to make connections and build relationships with people in the community in the process.

Several photographers from the Birmingham area will be gathering at Jason Wallis’ studio downtown to take pictures of families from the YWCA and Jessie’s Place, and anyone else who needs a portrait. Stephen will be photographing and Jessi will be managing, so if you want more info about the Birmingham Help Portrait day, send an email to jessi@bedouinsinternational.org.

It’s happening on 12.12.09. Check out the Help Portrait Community page to find out more.

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.

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.

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.

Global Teams is a missionary-sending organization that gets directly to the heart of the Great Commission by making disciples of Christ all across the planet. Their motto is “to see the heart of Christ in the skin of every culture,” and they are using teams of missionaries from around the globe to share the gospel with the unreached people groups of the world.

In the same way that Jesus Christ came and dwelt among us (John 1:14), Global Teams sends out missionaries to dwell and live as salt and light among the nations. As they train and send out missionaries, they emphasize the importance of being culturally and linguistically connected to the places that missionaries will go. Global Teams organizes multi-cultural and multi-national teams of missionaries, as well as provides a great support base for on-the-field missionaries with their member care staff. Another branch of Global Team missionaries is made up of the mobilizers, those who recruit new missionaries from places where the church already exists.

Rather than claiming to have created a formula for disciple-making, Global Teams recognizes God’s creativity among the people of the world. They embrace the fact that the way a mission movement happens in Kenya will differ from one in Laos, though the same Holy Spirit is behind them both.

Right now, Global Teams has over 150 missionaries in 19 different countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America. They hope to start 17 more bases around the world as places to send out missionaries by the year 2020. Find out more about Global Teams by visiting their website.

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.

A syringe might not sound like a very welcome gift to most people, but if you’re a doctor in a third-world hospital, a crate full of syringes is better than Christmas day. While working with international sales, Jim Tucker, founder of the Birmingham-based MedMission, saw with his own eyes the need for medical supplies in poor countries around the world and created an organization in response.

MedMission collects excess supplies from hospitals in the U.S., sorts through them and sends them overseas to hospitals and clinics that desperately need them. Beds, microscopes, IV tubes, surgical gloves, cotton balls, operating room tables, mattresses—all of these things fill up MedMisison’s warehouse and will either be shipped out or taken overseas by medical mission teams.

Several teams from churches in the Birmingham area have connected with MedMission through word of mouth and carried medical supplies with them to various countries. In the past year alone, MedMission has helped to supply 30 medical mission trips sent out by more than 10 churches to 18 countries. Hospitals and clinics in places like Zimbabwe, Belize, Sierra Leone, Moldova, and South Africa now have more resources and the equipment to treat their sick and injured because of MedMission’s work.

 Jim Tucker told me over the phone that MedMission has three main needs:

1. Prayer support. He stressed that this was the most vital and urgent need.
2. Volunteers are always welcome and always needed to help sort and organize the supplies.
3. Donations. It costs $10,000 to ship a container to Kenya, for example.

The goal of MedMission is “to help God’s people use God’s resources more effectively, for his glory.” MedMission has been featured in a news video and article by CBS 42, both of which you can view here. They also have a blog where you can read more about what MedMission has been doing or to connect with Jim Tucker.

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.