Few days go by where I don’t think of the many children that I came in contact with overseas. Some faces I remember so clearly that they might as well be standing in front of me. Many of these children lived on the streets or in orphanages that we visited. My heart broke for the children of this world more than anything else that I saw in my time on the field.
James 1:27 tells us that “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”
Notice that he starts by saying God our Father. This is probably the most important part of the verse. When you understand that God is our Father, then you will be able to understand that we are his sons and daughters. As his sons and daughters, God cares for us immensely, hence His charge to care for the orphan and the widow. God’s heart breaks for children left with no one to care for them. To date, there are an estimated 153 million of these children. Here is an illustration from Orphan’s Hope ministry to help us understand this:
“It’s hard to grasp such large numbers, so picture being on a very long road trip. If you had these orphans hold hands in a line, you would see more than 1,700 orphans per mile. If you were to follow that line of orphans holding hands, driving 60 mph, you could drive 24 hours a day seeing 1,700 orphans every mile, hour after hour, day after day without stopping for over two months.”
That’s a very disturbing picture to imagine. However, it is a reality of the world we live in, and something needs to be done. No single person can tackle this issue, God’s people need to rise up from every corner of the earth to see this corrected.
This is a cause that I have felt led to be involved in for some time. Before moving to Georgia to participate in the Fellowship Program at Adventures I had no idea where my life was headed. In the back of my mind this reality continued to linger. Prayers went to God, asking how I could serve these children. My hope was that some sort of training or experience would present itself.
What I forgot during those prayers is that God has an odd sense of humor. Not long after the Fellowship began I found myself on a team creating Sons and Daughters, a four month orphan care training curriculum. Instead of receiving training, I found myself designing the training. A few months have passed since we began, but our hope continues to be that God will use Sons and Daughters to prepare and launch his people to care well for his children.
