Someone who went to Ethiopia with my oldest son, Trey, sent him this video on Facebook & I thought it well worth sharing :

The Forsaken Children/ The Children’s Home Ethiopia is one of the orphan/ street children works that Trey visited & he is interested in going back to. If you are not familiar with their work, click on the link. It is worth finding out about.

And, if you want to get full dose of understanding the Father’s heart for orphans and a Gospel-based, Christo-centric, Biblically & theologically sound approach to orphan care & adoption, why don’t you join our family & attend the Together for Adoption Conference in Franklin, Tennessee this October

http://www.togetherforadoption.org/?page_id=11

Here’s an segment of a recent Together for Adoption blog post that really should get our attention :

The External Challenge of Church Practice. God has called the church to care for orphans. But the practice of caring for orphans is fraught with massive challenges. Allow me to overwhelm you with some staggering numbers.

There are 143 million orphans in our world. If all the orphans in the world were moved to the country of Mexico, Mexico’s population would more than double, growing from 108,700,000 to 251,700,000.

Over 16 million children were newly orphaned in 2003.

There are approximately 17.5 million orphans who are ages 0-5.

There are approximately 47 million orphans who are ages 6-11.

There are approximately 79 million orphans who are ages 12-17.

87.6 million orphans live in Asia.

43.4 million orphans live in Sub-Saharan Africa.

There are as many orphaned and vulnerable children in Ethiopia as there are people in greater NYC.

12.4 million orphans live in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Almost 1.5 million children live in public care in Central and Eastern Europe.

That’s our world.

What about the United States?

More than 800,000 children pass through our country’s foster care system each year. There are over 500,000 children in our foster care system right now. 129,000 of those children are waiting to be adopted from foster care right now. That’s how many people live in the capitol of South Carolina. Approximately, 25,000 children age out of the foster care system each year, many with no support system and little to no life skills. There are currently over 5,400 children in South Carolina foster care. Over 1,500 of them are waiting to be adopted. So far this year only a couple hundred of them have been adopted.

This brings us to this question: How many children are adopted each year? Between 118,000 and 127,000 children have been adopted every year since 1987. More than 50 percent of all adoptions are handled by public agencies or come from countries outside the United States. More than one-third of Americans have seriously considered adopting, but no more than 2 percent have actually adopted. Only 4 percent of families with children (1.7 million households) contain adopted children.

With this many orphans in the United States and in the world, the church has a monumental task before it if it is to practice true religion.  James 1:27 says, “Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction.”  Clearly, the church has its work cut out for it.