Orphan Sunday

Sooo...many emotions are going through my head today. Today is a day where Christians around the world celebrate adoption, teach about God's heart for orphans and share God's heart for orphans.

Over the last couple of months as we have been preparing to become foster parents God is opening my eyes to many, many things. Yes, I fight for adoption almost every day of my life. I advocate for children constantly and adoption and God's heart for adoption is something that comes up in about any conversation I have with people. The thing I honestly don't talk about much is that adoption isn't easy!

I wise man once told me that that if God calls you to something that chances are it is not going to be easy. If it were easy then you wouldn't need God to get you through it would you? If God calls you to something it is going to be bigger than what you think you can handle. I also learned that God didn't call the people in the Bible to big things that were already equipped to handle big things. God called the fisherman, the man with a speech problem and he said "just follow me."

An exercise our trainer had us do was to write down everything in life that was important to us like family, spouse, computer, car, church, food, house, health. These were all on separate pieces of paper and then he told us we had to choose 2 of them really fast to give up and then he kept going until everything we had was GONE in an instant. He explained how for many, many kids in the foster system this is what happens. In an instant a child can get off of a bus to find police at their home, their parents are being hauled off to jail, they can't go in their house or take any clothes because of evidence that might be in the house and then they are taken by strangers to another strangers house and told they will be living there for awhile.

Did that just break your heart? It did mine! Think of how upset you get if you lose a family member or a friend and these children are losing everything the have in an instant and we fear bringing them into our home because they might have some anger issues. What if they world turned away from you if you just lost everything in the world you had and yet your were upset about it? What if it was just too hard for your friend to give you a hug so instead your friend chose to just look the other way and ignore you? Isn't this what people are doing every single day? Aren't we choosing to walk away from Jesus? I did for many, many years because I was too scared of the foster care system.

Don't let Satan use your fear to stop you from giving love to these kids!!! Yes, I will cry if and when we loose children and they go back home but I also know that when Jesus comes to knock on our door and he is hungry, needs a place to sleep, needs a full tummy, needs someone to cry on, needs someone to let him get his anger out we will open our door to him.

It's hard! The thing is that Jesus didn't spend his time on earth doing things that came easy. Jesus spent his time with people that were suffering. Jesus came to set an example so that tells me that he didn't ask us to take the easy route.