Orphans

I heard today that there are an estimated 147 million orphans in this world!  147 MILLION!!!  How can that be?  No child deserves to be living their life in an institution without parents to read them bedtime stories.  When we went to meet Josie we got a very slim glimpse of the orphans we left behind.  Has a family found them?  When will it be their turn?  I pray for them often.  Their faces are etched in my mind.   

Why are there so many orphans when God commands his people to take care of them?

"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." James 1:27

"Defend the cause of the weak and fatherless: maintain the right of the poor and oppressed” Psalm 82:3

"You hear, O LORD, the desire of the afflicted; you encourage them, and you listen to their cry, defending the fatherless and the oppressed, in order that man, who is of the earth, may terrify no more." Psalm 10:17

 "Do not take advantage of a widow or an orphan.  If you do and they cry out to me, I will certainly hear their cry" Exodus 22:22

I do not hear in any of those verses, “Now, if you feel like it, and when your home is big enough, and when you have enough money, THEN you should take care of the orphans.".  NO, God commands that we as his people take care of the needy.  So many people think that they are not "called" to help an orphan but I disagree.  We as God's people are all commanded to help them.  There are so many different ways to help. For starters we can all pray for these precious waiting soles.  There are organizations that help fund adoptions such as Reece's Rainbow that can be contributed to or used to help fund an adoption.  And of course there are the 147 million children that need someone to step up and give them a home where someone tucks them in and kisses then good night.  If the over 2 billion Christians would all do just a little or maybe a lot then there would no longer be orphans. 

These are some of the faces that are forever etched in my mind.  Thankfully one of these precious angels is no longer an orphan and I am blessed to get to be her Mommy.  Our baby girl is sitting in the chair on the left end of the table.

This room was full of precious babies just moments before but the doors remain closed during most of our visit so we were unable to take a picture with the other children. 

 

We did not get to take his picture but there is a precious baby boy that stole our hearts in one of those buggies.  We went over to "talk" to the babies and he sat strait up and gave us the biggest toothless grin that you could ever imagine.  It was all we could do to not scoop him up and stash him in our suitcase. 

Thankfully our daughter spent the beginning of her life in a "good" orphanage.  There are so many children that are not so lucky.  They go to sleep every night in a cold metal crib and spend almost all their day lying on their backs in that same cold crib.  They don't ever get a warm embrace or feel a caring touch.  The little food they get comes in form of a bottle propped in their crib.  They lie in their own urine until someone gets around to changing them.  They too are "fearfully and wonderfully made" by God but yet are treated like inconveniences. 

I so often wonder "Have they gotten their turn"?