Orphans

Ryan and Morgan, adopted a child from an orphanage in another country. They'd passed through all the legal processes in that country. Charlie was their son. But right before the day when they were supposed to pick Charlie up from the orphanage, things changed. There were some political upheavals, and the country froze the process. No more children were going to be able to leave the country.

Charlie could not come to Ryan and Morgan. So, they decided to go to him. They flew over from the US and basically camped outside of the orphanage. They spent half their time with their son and the other half lobbying the courts and meeting with government officials, pleading with them to release their son.

After a few weeks Morgan came home, but Ryan stayed. It was at Christmas time. This was not where he wanted to be at Christmas—away from home, far from family. But here was a father who loved his son. Since his son could not come to him, he was going to go to that son, and he was going to fight for that son. There would be more days and weeks of struggle, but, wonderfully, Ryan was eventually able to bring Charlie home.

That Christmas, as Ryan battled corrupt court systems on the other side of the world … he was a picture of the kind of "Eternal Father" that Jesus is for anyone who asks him to be. Jesus went far further for us than Ryan went for his son. He didn't leave a country of privilege to move to a country of poverty. No, he left the riches of heaven to come to a world of pain. He did all that because he loves us. He did all that because he wants to be with us. He came to us to ensure that we could go to be with him, and it cost him far more than a plane ticket.

Dr. Emily McGowin, assistant professor of theology, at Wheaton College writes:

When I taught high school, one of my favorite assignments was having my ninth-graders write their own Beatitudes. I asked them to speak to people the world might consider "unblessable." Here are a few:

-Blessed are drug addicts and felons, people who try everything but still buckle under the pressure of their past lives and can never get back on their feet, for even they belong in the Kingdom of God.

-Blessed are the orphans and foster children of the world because they are exactly who God wants in his Kingdom.

-Blessed are the homeless because the Kingdom of God belongs to them too.

-Blessed are the abusers who take out their anger on the weak, for even they can repent and receive the Kingdom of God." (This particular student was abused by a parent and removed from the home because of it.)

Livia Satterfield Young was a 12-year-old girl in a Romanian orphanage when her life was changed--forever--by an Operation Christmas Child shoebox. (Operation Christmas Child, uses gift-filled shoeboxes to demonstrate God’s love to children in need around the world.)

Livia was an orphan for 10 years. She described a lack of food, hygiene supplies, and no feeling of love and happiness. She said, “Some days our food supply was so low that all we had was a piece of bread that was hard as a rock and moldy. We also wore the same clothes for a week. We had only one toothbrush which we shared with hundreds of other children.”

Livia longed to feel someone’s love and warm embrace. She said, “I wanted to feel like I existed in this world.” That all changed when the ministry delivered shoeboxes full of personal hygiene items, school supplies and toys to her orphanage. The same day, an American missionary group also came and Livia met a woman named Connie. Livia said:

Before we opened our boxes, they shared with us about people who packed them because you loved us. I was so mesmerized by the word “love.” And then, they shared “the greatest news of all.” That there’s a God, and He gave His one and only son who died on the cross for me because He loves me. God made this possible through a simple gift. It sparked so much love, joy and hope in my life.

The same year Connie arranged for Livia to stay with a Christian family, and she accepted Christ as her personal Lord and Savior. She said, “I wish I [would’ve] had a mega-sized microphone to tell the whole world I had Jesus in my heart. Two years later when I was 14, Connie came back to Romania, adopted me, and took me home to my brand-new family.”

In a skills article for Preaching Today, David Prince writes:

I know a family who adopted an older child from an unspeakably horrific orphanage in another country. When they brought her home one of the things they told her was that she was expected to clean her room every day. When she heard about that responsibility, she fixated on it and saw it as a way she would earn her family’s love. In other words, she isolated the responsibility and applied it to her existing frame of thinking that was shaped by life in the orphanage. Thus, every morning when her parents came in her room, it was immaculate and she would sit on the bed and would say, “My room is clean. Can I stay? Do you still love me?” Her words broke her new parents’ hearts.

Eventually, the girl learned to hear her parents’ words as their unconditionally beloved child who would never be forsaken, not as a visitor trying to earn her place in the family. After she knew that she was an inseparable part of the family story, even correction and discipline did not cause her to question her family’s love for her; she understood correction and discipline to be part of what it meant to be in the family.

The documentary film, The Drop Box, tells the remarkable story of Lee Jong-Rak, pastor of Jusarang (God's Love) Community Church in Seoul, South Korea. Worldwide, millions of children are abandoned at birth. But in South Korea, because of a strict social code, the problem is especially acute—and it's growing.

Unwanted children are often left to die in an alley or street corner or dumped in a trash bin. But occasionally they're left on someone's doorstep. When some of those unwanted newborns started being placed on Pastor Lee's church steps, he decided to take action. He and his wife, spurred by their Christian faith and the experience of raising a son with extreme disabilities, began to take in these children. Because of the long, cold winters in South Korea, he eventually built a "drop box" into the front wall of the church. With a door that opens from the outside as well as the inside, it's like a baby-sized drawer, complete with light bulb, heater, and a loud bell that alerts his family when a baby is placed in the box.

Today, Pastor Lee's family and a small group of volunteers provide a loving home for more than a dozen mildly to severely disabled children at a time. Over the years, they have saved hundreds of abandoned newborns.

Some have criticized Pastor Lee. They say his compassion encourages mothers to abandon their children. But history shows that abandonment has been happening for generations. Despite the criticism, enormous cost, overwhelming amount of work, and the lack of any government funding—Pastor Lee and his family continue. Night after night, Pastor Lee stays up listening for the alarm. When a new baby arrives, he races downstairs, bundles up the child, and prays.

Both Christian and secular audiences have flocked to see the film. The Hollywood Reporter (the secular journal of the entertainment industry) was so enthusiastic about the film, it finished its report with this:

[The director of The Drop Box], Brian Ivie, was transformed by the making of the film. He grew up going to church on Christmas and Easter and considering himself a Christian "because I didn't smoke cigarettes and I watched Fox News with my mom. It was a decorative label." But witnessing Lee's sacrifice and compassion for the abandoned children changed his perspective. "These kids were helpless." he says, "and I realized I was broken and helpless too, and I also needed to be rescued."

Ivie actually went to South Korea to make a different movie, but once he met Dr. Lee and saw the work he and his team were doing, he changed his plans, produced The Drop Box, and in the process, dedicated his life to Christ.

When Johnny Jennings of Ringgold, Georgia was 18, he made a life-changing visit to a Georgia Baptist children's home. Several children ran up to him and asked to be adopted. "That took my heart, right there," he says. While Jennings wasn't ready to adopt, he promised to do everything he could to help the home's young residents. A few decades later Jennings found a practical way to raise funds for the home—recycling. For the past 32 years Jennings, 86-years-old as of March 2017, has sold 810,063 pounds of paper, $20,275 worth of pennies, and countless pounds of recycled aluminum products. Over the years, he's given $400,000 to the home.

One of his friends told reporters, "Johnny normally loads his truck by himself, and that is a job in itself, and did I mention he is 86 years old and had two small strokes just two weeks ago?" But that didn't stop him from getting back to his paper route. When Jennings' got home from the hospital, he went right back to work. The friend continued, "That is just how he is, and he will not stop until the undertaker turns his toes up, that is what he tells everyone."

Jennings son said, "My dad doesn't see the $400,000. He sees the faces of those kids."

Professional football player Demaryius Thomas' mother was arrested and sent to prison when Thomas was only 11. "[At the time] my father was in the military," Thomas writes. "My mother and stepfather and grandmother were locked up. From that day on, I was basically an orphan. I came home from school that day and I thought, Where do I go now? He eventually made it through high school and college and became a standout wide receiver. But listen to how Thomas describes what helped him:

People think orphans are kids whose parents have died, but 80 percent of orphans in the world have at least one parent who is alive somewhere. There are millions of kids just like me all across the U.S., and hundreds of millions all over the world.

We rely on the kindness and the couches of others to get us through the day. I had multiple high school coaches who looked out for me. Multiple college coaches. Deacons. Pastors. Aunties. Uncles. Friends. If even one of those people had let me slip, would you even know my name? Maybe not.

I talk to a lot of kids who have parents in prison, or who left them when they were young for one reason or another. I know the anger. The pain. The fear. Especially the loneliness. They just want somebody to say, "I care about you." But that doesn't happen enough, so they get into trouble.

As men, as athletes especially, we don't like to talk about love. We talk about brotherhood and all that, but not love. But it's the most important thing in a child's life. More important than the kind of school you go to, or what neighborhood you live in, or even if you grow up around drugs and violence. If you are loved, you'll make it out.

Imagine a single mom. Her eleven-year-old loves baseball. Personally, she doesn't care about baseball, but because her son loves it, she hasn't missed a game in over two seasons. Sometimes she has to work double shifts to make sure she's free, but when the umpire yells "Play ball!" she's always sitting right behind the dugout, cheering for her boy.

Let's suppose a man begins to date that single mom. Obviously, if he says he loves her, he must love her son. Period. The mom's sphere of concern wraps around her boy's life, and it always will. So if this man wants to tell the single mom that he loves her, without being a liar, he must be right there at the ballgame, beside the mom, cheering for her son. If he loves the mom, he'll love both her son and her son's baseball games.

In the same way, if we care about God's kingdom, we'll love what and who the King loves. For instance, we know that the King loves "orphans and widows," those who are defenseless and vulnerable. If we say we love God, we better be right there at his side loving the orphans and widows of our world.

While Paul Knight, a pastor from Grand Forks, North Dakota, was visiting Fiche, Ethiopia, he had the chance to meet the little girl his family had been sponsoring through Compassion International. He wanted to bring gifts to the girl and her mother, a single mom who lived and worked in a one-room home that also basically functioned as the local bar. During Paul's visit, the place slowly started filling with rowdy men from the community. Suddenly, Paul's guide and translator took him by the arm and said, "We have to go now."

Paul looked back at his sponsor child, a ten-year-old girl, and asked for more time. The crowd was getting louder, and his guide firmly said, "It's not safe for you. You must leave now." Paul started to move, but then he pointed to his sponsor child and said, "But what about my little girl?"

"Well, this is her home," the guide said.

Reluctantly moving to the street, Paul asked, "But will she be safe?"

"It's not really safe, but this is her home," the guide said.

Paul was indignant. "What does that mean," he asked, "that 'it's not really safe'?"

"Most likely everything you think it means," the guide said.

Paul fought back tears. "What can she do?"

Gently grabbing his arm, the guide said, "We teach the girls to do this: scream and run to the church. When you get to the church, you will find love and safety. The church will shelter you. So when they feel threatened or vulnerable, they scream and run to the church."

Contact is a science fiction movie that explores the possibility of extraterrestrial life and the inevitability of faith even in a world governed by scientific logic. The plot follows the career of female astronomer Ellie Arroway. Ellie (Jodie Foster) longs for contact with life beyond this world. She is convinced that a universe with life only on earth would be a waste of space.

As a scientist, she dismisses faith in God because of the absence of empirical proof. Ironically, she maintains a belief in aliens even though she lacks credible evidence. Ellie is transformed, however, when she contacts alien beings. She travels to deep space but cannot convince skeptics that she has because she lacks scientific proof. She finally realizes not everything that is true can be reduced to test-tube analysis.

Although Ellie's mother died giving birth, Ellie has a remarkable relationship with her dad. He encourages her scientific curiosity and introduces her to long-distance contact through a ham radio. Sadly, when Ellie is nine years old, her father dies of a heart attack. On the day of the funeral, the family pastor attempts to comfort the grief-stricken little girl.

"Ellie, I know it's hard to understand now, but we aren't always meant to know the reasons why things happen the way they do. Sometimes we just have to accept it as God's will."

Because Ellie feels responsible for not getting her dad his heart medicine in time, she is unwilling to accept the minister's counsel. Her searching eyes lock on the minister's caring glance, but find no comfort. She retreats to her bedroom.

Feeling desperately alone, Ellie sits leaning forward at her desk in front her ham radio, painfully calling out for her father in heaven: "Dad? Dad? Are you there? Come back, Dad!" As the extended family members mingle on the main floor of the home, little Ellie slowly repeats her plea: "Dad? Dad? Are you there? Come back, Dad!"

The camera pulls out, revealing a little girl longing for assurance that she is not alone.

Elapsed time: Measured from the beginning of the opening credit, this scene begins at 0:23:09 and lasts approximately two minutes.

Content: Contact is rated PG for sexual content and language.

Abandonment, incarceration, drugs, death, mental illness—these are some of the reasons four million American kids are no longer living with their parent(s). In more than 2.5 million families, this responsibility has been assumed by one or both grandparents. These "skipped generation households" have increased by more than 50 percent in the last 10 years. In almost one third of these families the parents are completely absent. In other cases, parents are occasionally present but are emotionally or financially incapable of taking care of their kids.

"Contrary to the stereotype of the inner-city welfare mom who's raising her teenage daughter's baby, the majority of grandparent caregivers are white, between the ages of 50 and 64, and live in non-metropolitan areas." There are more than 700 support groups nationwide that lobby government for legal rights and financial support for grandparent caregivers. Because their guardianship is often informal, grandparents also have problems getting medical care for the kids and enrolling them in school.

The first housing facility designed for grandparent-headed households opened in Boston in 1998. Twenty-six families now live in the home. Carl Bowman shares an apartment with his wife and 9- year-old grandson. "I don't know where we'd be without this place," he says. "We're all in the same boat here. We all help one another."

Immediately after World War II the allied armies gathered up many hungry, homeless children and placed them in large camps. There the children were abundantly fed and cared for. However, at night they did not sleep well. They seemed restless and afraid.

Finally, a psychologist hit on a solution. After the children were put to bed, they each received a slice of bread to hold. If they wanted more to eat, more was provided, but this particular slice was not to be eaten—it was just to hold.

The slice of bread produced marvelous results. The child would go to sleep, subconsciously feeling it would have something to eat tomorrow. That assurance gave the child a calm and peaceful rest.

In the 23rd Psalm, David points out something of the same feeling in the sheep when he says, "The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want." Instinctively, the sheep knows the shepherd has made plans for its grazing tomorrow. He knows the shepherd made ample provision for it today, so will he tomorrow, so the sheep lies down in its fold with, figuratively speaking, the piece of bread in its hand.

I hope to grow rich in heaven by taking care of orphans on earth.