It's amazing that this is One Sought Me's post number 100! My New Year's Resolution for the year 2013 was to start a blog and now, 100 posts later and over 10,000 views, I'm blessed to say that this is one New Year's Resolution that I've actually stuck with past February! lol.
Thank you for stopping in and please visit again to keep up to date on our adoption of two from Ethiopia!
This post reflects the notes from today's speaking engagement at First English Baptist Church where Todd and I spoke, the kids sang, and we shared our all time favorite video, Eric Ludy's Depraved Indifference. All in sharing our hearts for the orphan crisis, child care needs, and God's heart for the children in need around the world.
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We just returned from vacation at the beach and just seeing God’s awesome creation like the vast ocean, the creatures there-in, the thought that God knows the number of the grains of sand…amazing...then we drive home to these gorgeous mountains.
PS. 8:3-4 says, “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have put in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, that you care for him?”
But of all creation, man in the most prized, most precious in His sight. We are His handi-work as is every new life brought into this world.
This church celebrates life: we sing happy birthday every Sunday morning, there are memorials of lives to remember filling the halls, we share in the joys of the children and of those who are a child at heart.
The needs of the children should hit dear to us. And that is what we wish to share with you today.
No matter where they are, children are precious to the Lord. None more worthy than another for care, and none placed more valuable than other because of where they were born on this globe. They all deserve love and are precious to the Lord.
Those little ones who do not the love and care and guidance of an adult - they are the orphans.
153 million orphans world wide- The entire population of the US East coast + OH, TN, and KY combined. In Ethiopia alone there are 5 million orphans in that country that is less than twice the size of Texas.
If the orphaned children held hands, they would circle the earth twice.
Every day 5,760 more children become orphans. Every 2.2 seconds another orphan ages out with no family to belong to and no place to call home.
These numbers prove a crisis and one that the Father of all, calls us to help resolve. He did from the beginning when He commanded in Deuteronomy for the orphan and the widow to be cared for. And when He asks us to Love all mankind as we love ourselves. In Deut. 10:18-19 "He defends the cause of the fatherless and the widow, and loves the foreigners and gives them food and clothing. You too must love foreigners, for you yourselves were foreigners in the land of Egypt."
Job mentions caring for orphans and says, in ch. 31 “if I have refused food to the hungry orphans, ( but we have always cared for orphans in our home and treated them as our own children), or if I have seen anyone freezing and not given them clothing, or taken advantage of an orphan because I thought I could get away with it- if I have done any of these things, then let my arm be torn from its socket! Rather that than face the judgment sent by God..”
You see, In bible days, a child was abandoned by being set outside of the city and placed outside of the city gates - alone. The Christians would go intentionally and with great love to rescue these children from isolation and abandonment, from hopeless and fear, and take them in as their own.
James 1:27 says "Religion that God our father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after the orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world."
Why is this religion pure and faultless? Because adoption is the love story of the gospel. It is what God our father did for us. We were lost in sin, hopeless and in need of a rescuer. We were set outside of the city gates of Heaven with no way to enter but by the coming of a savior, and that is Jesus Christ. He sought us, loved us, and intentionally came to rescue us so that we may enter into the gates- more so, into His family. Adopted by the King. This is the pure and faultless love by example of our Father in Heaven.
Romans 8:15-17 "we cry abba Father. The spirit himself testifies with our spirit that we are God's children...heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ."
Eph. 1:5 " In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with is pleasure and will."
"Adoption means acceptance- adoption is the reason we can come before God's throne and beg Him for mercy, to praise Him, to know His love." _ Katie Davis, Kisses from Katie.
God cares for the lost child shouldn't we? Remember Sept 11th when nearly 3,000 innocent people died unnecessarily? Do you remember how you felt that day? Imagine how God feels when He sees 10 times that many children die unnecessarily every single day due to the harsh realities of the poverty that surrounds them.
It is our problem. There is a world beyond us that too often we refuse to see. If you keep food in your fridge, your clothes in a closet, and if you have a roof over your head, you are richer than 75% of the entire world population. If your net worth is $60,000, then you are one of the richest 10% in all the world.
In Ethiopia the average salary is $380 a year. Over 60% do not have safe drinking water. Only 45% of the children attend school.
Count your blessings. Cost ratio: If the average income in the US is $48,620 and the average in ET is $380. One jar of baby formula costs $8 there. If we use that same cost ratio, one jar of baby formula would cost us $1,023. If schooling costs 75% of the average salary in ET, and we use that same cost ratio, school for us would cost $36,465.00 per child. It wouldn't be possible. No government assistance, no free education, no running water, no medi-care, no welfare, .....you get the idea. There is a poverty level that we can not compare by our understandings of poverty.
"God didn't make too many people and not enough resources to go around. Because we are all living in His created world, there has to be a solution." Katie Davis
153 million orphans, 11 million children starve to death, 8.5 million work as child slaves and prostitutes, 2.3 million live with HIV. That's 174.8 million needy children. And though that looks like a big number, there are over 7 billion people in this world. If only 2% of the people of this earth cared for one another...there would be no more statistics.
Too Difficult? He was sacrificed for me, sought me, loved me, rescued me from outside of the city walls, but now I have a home available to me. A place in Heaven being prepared for me. And His love, as your adoptive Father, is available to you too. Thank God He didn't just didn't care for His own, but to the ends of the earth and peoples of all nations His love will rescue the lost.
"We love because He first loved us." Our family is called to adopt, by no other way but HIS hand in this could we be this far in the process and financially provided for. Though not all are called to adopt a child, we are all called to reach out and help, help the poor, help the children, celebrate life, and be mindful of the crisis that grows around us.
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