Widows’ Fund—God’s Promise Fulfilled to the Widows and the Fatherless

For close to 150 single-mother families, the World Challenge Widows’ Fund has been the avenue God has used to express His heartfelt love and concern for them and their children. This fund helps to pay the rent before the family is evicted, or the utility bills before they no longer have lights. Yet what these funds really mean to these mothers is that God has not forgotten His promise to care for the fatherless and widows in their time of need. As important and appreciated as the check is, so much more important is the tangible evidence of God’s commitment of love to them and their children. Tears flow freely as these mothers say how they needed to know someone cared for them, would listen to their needs, pray for them and express the heart of God to them.

God’s Faithfulness to a Committed Grandmother
Today, an out of work grandmother, who’s on disability and in continual pain, brought her eighteen-month-old grandson into our offices to ask for help. The child’s mother was ready to give him up to foster care, but God put it on the grandmother’s heart to raise him in the fear and admonition of the Lord. She had not known the Lord when she raised her own daughter, she said, and in fact had struggled with addictions, depression and homelessness. But this time she would “raise her young a place near your altar, O Lord Almighty” (Psalm 84:3). What a joy to pray with her—for God to give her the health and strength to fulfill this responsibility—and then to be able to help her with the expenses needed to raise this precious boy. She left not only with some bills paid, but with joy from the reassurance she was loved by God and by the family of God.

“Pure Religion Is This...”
Many of the mothers we assist need only short-term help to get them through a crisis. But there are others whom God has placed on our hearts to help for a longer time. For example, some mothers are unable to work full-time jobs because they have disabled children and can’t find or afford suitable childcare. We supplement their income so that while they’re caring for their child’s special needs, they don’t have to worry about food on their table or a roof over their heads.

We pray over every request for assistance, and the Lord directs us how best to meet each need. God is using this fund to soften hearts that have been hardened through worry and stress, and to uplift the spirits of mothers who have never given up hope but couldn’t envision how they could survive without a miracle. For many, the Widows’ Fund has been that miracle, and tangible evidence of a God who is the husband to the widow and the father to the fatherless. He has specified that we reach out to the single mothers of New York City as the mission field for these funds, and by His grace, we are “visiting the fatherless and widows in their affliction” (James 1:27).