National Orphan Sunday

National Orphan Sunday

It's more than a day. It's a call for compassionate living

I haven’t blogged in a LONG time. Several things have happened to us in the past few months, but that blog is for another day. Today, I wanted to share with everyone what National Orphan Sunday has done for our family.

For those who don’t know, National Orphan Sunday is a day in which churches around the world come together to recognize the need for Christians to be involved with foster care, adoption, and orphan care. A few years ago, we had heard of National Orphan Sunday but never really connected with its importance. Two years ago, on National Orphan Sunday, Joel approached me saying that he wanted to adopt. We had always talked about adoption, but he had been moved by what had been said in our worship service and wanted to act. He said that he believed children needed families, and we could provide that to a child. I was hesitant at first, but God revealed the importance of adoption in our life. By the end of the month, we were informing our families of how we planned to start our family-through adoption.

When we first decided to adopt, I felt like I was a “good” person. We went to church, we were involved with different ministries, we tried to be kind to people, etc. However, I recognized that part of me that was judgmental, critical, and angry. We all have that in us…I just think it is more prevalent in some people than others. The first thing I prayed to God when we decided to adopt was “Please help me not to judge our birth mother.” My initial reaction toward people in hard places was to criticize how they got there and talk about all the things “they should have done to be better people and make better decisions.” I knew that this mindset would be detrimental to our relationship with our birth mother (and our child) so I prayed….and prayed….and prayed….

Slowly, I started to feel a shift in my emotions toward people. When I started to reflect on the adoption process and what it meant for our lives, I started to realize that loving people is the only way to make this work. Loving people for who and where they are in life, not for what “they bring to the table.” Josh, our preacher at church, has always emphasized that everyone is made in the image of God and that everyone has access to His love and grace. If we are supposed to be the hands and feet of Jesus, then doesn’t God call me to love people like He does? From all walks of life, race, income level, and religion?

This sort of love is not just about adoption. I read a book called “Orphan Justice” by Johnny Carr. It is a good read but an intense one. In his introduction, he sets the tone for his book by saying this: “We can’t say that we love orphans while failing to address the social ills that directly affect their lives.” In his book, Johnny encourages Christians to step beyond the adoption and address the social injustices that can create and/or affect orphaned and fatherless children: poverty, racial tension, slavery and/or prostitution, hunger.

Fighting social injustice is hard. There are so many dynamics that affect society it is hard to only address one at a time-these injustices interact and plague our society in such a way that it is impossible to do it alone. And I think that’s the point. If we have a “God-like” love to others, where we love people for who they are and not what they do, what would our society look like? If we stopped putting these emotional barriers in our lives…if we stopped giving excuses for why we can’t be involved in people’s lives (especially those who aren’t like us)….if we opened ourselves up to God JUST ENOUGH for us to be able to hear Him into our hearts and say “yes,” what would that look like?

This is what our “yes” has looked like. I think that God was waiting for us to open our hearts just enough to let him in. He used National Orphan Sunday as a catalyst in our lives to not only start our family with adoption, but to answer a calling that God asks all of us to fill-love your neighbor with the kind of love only God can provide. Live a life of compassionate living.

We are all God’s children….we are all made in the image of God…..WE ARE ALL WORTH IT. My prayer is that individuals and families alike open themselves to God, hands up and hearts open, and say “Father, what does your yes look like for me and/or my family?”