Orphan Sunday is November 3rd this year. If you haven't gone to the website yet, I would definitely check it out--including the videos and other resources they have. And if you're a leader in a church--or even attend church, you should speak with someone about showing a video/having someone speak about orphans/printing out the bulletin inserts/etc. Some of us attend church each week with people constantly checking with us on how our adoption/fostering stuff is going, and we have a deep desire to include people in our passion for our little ones (whether we know who they are yet or not). This is a great way, not only to be able to show off our love for the kids placed in our families, but to get people excited about helping orphans all over the world. This isn't a day to celebrate adoption or fostering specifically, but to point to orphan awareness and the need to help, and provide ways to protect these sweet little lives. Plus an entire day devoted to attention and prayer for orphans by hundreds of churches all over the world is a pretty powerful weapon!
And here's where I have to stop and get off track a little to add that the the deeper I get into adoption, the bigger I see the horrible problems of this world that bring these kids to the place where they are without their parents to protect and care for them. I obviously love adoption and think it is beautiful, but with that beauty comes pain. I love being able to raise awareness for orphans, but these children would rather not be orphans in the first place. It breaks my heart that many, many of these little ones are orphans for reasons that would have been preventable if we would have stepped up before orphan care was needed for each individual child. There are parents who want to be able to feed their child but know they can't, or the parent is physically sick with AIDS or other health issues and they die because they don't have medicine to keep them healthy as long as possible, or the child was born with a special need and their culture deemed them unworthy and/or their parents knew they could not afford to pay for their care no matter how minor or correctable their disability might be. And there are hundreds of other reasons these little ones are in orphanages or on the streets, and it hurts to know that so many of those reasons are because of things that we could help with just by providing money, time, and prayer to some wonderful organizations that would prevent families from being torn apart and childrens' little lives being broken.
I don't believe that the little one that will someday be a part of our family was put in another woman's womb, torn from their first family in whatever painful way, placed in an orphanage all so neatly just so they could be adopted by us. Adoption is not about me, families were originally meant to be kept together. None of us, including innocent little children, were meant to have so much pain in our lives. This world is full of ugly things, including poverty and addiction and abandonment, and those ugly things unfortunately transform happy, content little ones who should be living with their first parents into needy, heartbroken children. These little ones in some way need to have us reach out and help whether it be through prayer, financial assistance, a voice, encouragement, support for someone adopting or fostering, or giving them a home. Help starts before families are torn apart and follows through to orphan care. And it's because ugly things turn children into orphans that makes orphan care so extraordinary. It's people stepping up and saying they will help in ways that go beyond themselves to children who may or may not ever even know about each individual person that helped them. So without listing the hundreds of different ways to help families and orphans I would encourage you to pray about how you can use Orphan Sunday--and every day for that matter--to bring attention to these sweet children, both for yourself and as a community.
(It's actually really hard for me to stop there because I do want to start linking to different organizations that provide a way to keep families together or work to support orphans in special ways. I think I'm going to have to start a weekly spotlight....)
Since we meet as a church on Saturday nights we will be celebrating Orphan Saturday, November 2nd at
Providence Community Church. Kyle will be talking about
his book and we'll show an Orphan Sunday video and he'll also be talking about our adoption. So if you're in the Dallas area and you want to come learn more about Indian and/or adoption you should visit!
