Hey friends and welcome to the happy hour with Jamie Ivy podcasts. I'm your host Jamie and I'm so glad you're here.

Each week on this show, I invite a friend to join me and we chat about the big things in life, the little things in life, and everything in between.

Hey friends and welcome to the Christmas Eve edition of the happy hour podcast. I'm your host Jamie and let me be the first to say Merry Christmas to you and your family.

Today is Christmas Eve if you're listening when this podcast releases and I just want to say we're spending the entire show today talking about Jesus and Christmas and what that means and I have a great guest on today.

Dan Darling and him and I spend some time not long because it's Christmas Eve and you're traveling or wrapping presents or whatever you might be doing. Maybe you're on a walk, whatever it is.

We just wanted to talk about Jesus' birth and the characters surrounding his story and I know that by our conversation today you're going to be encouraged.

Before we get to that conversation, I want to remind you about something that we've been doing and talking about over the happy hour since Thanksgiving basically and that is compassion international.

I've told you the whole month about how my husband Aaron and I and our entire family have been supporters of compassion for about 15 years.

We really believe in the work that they are doing to release children from poverty in the name of Jesus.

They do this through local churches which I will say again and again is my most favorite thing about compassion international is it on the ground in the different countries where they have schools and programs.

They work everything through the local church and I just love that because I know that the local churches how lives are changed in my own personal life potentially in your life as well and also in kids' lives around the world.

As I told you, we've been sponsoring children for a long time and at the happy hour, we really want to see hundreds of children in the Dominican Republic get sponsors this holiday season.

We're going to be talking about this through the end of this month and I really would love to encourage you if you've never thought about it to think about now.

What would it look like for you and your family or you and your roommate or you by yourself to sponsor a child in the DR?

There are hundreds of kids who have been waiting for longer than 12 months to have a sponsor and don't forget for just $38 a month the children receive necessities like access to education proper medical care nutrition and clean water, gospel centered discipleship program all through their local church.

Like I said, your sponsorship means that your sponsor child isn't orphaned by poverty, sold and slavery or traffic.

You get to partner with a church in the DR to really help children have a different trajectory for their life. So right now, would you consider going to compassion.com slash ivy?

That's my last name ivy. Y is $38 a month. This would be a great thing to present to your family on Christmas day or even for you to present to yourself as a gift saying I'm going to allocate some of my money every single month to a child in the Dominican Republic.

Now, as a thank you for this because we want to thank you for doing this with us using that unique link of compassion.com slash ivy.

We're going to send you a wallet from able. Yes, able is one of my favorite companies that do such good work in the world and we're going to send you a wallet as a thank you.

And we're also going to send the child that you sponsor a copy of my new kids book and yes, it's in English and yes, the DR speaks Spanish, but they learn English in school.

And so we're going to provide every single child there with a copy of my book. So don't forget you can make a difference. Many of these children families live on less than $2 a day.

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