This is taken from a booklet by Shaohannah’s Hope , it is about building a bridge of adoption. This piece is about hearing the need, and Gods heart...

HEAR
“My Sheep hear from me, and I know them, and they follow Me.” John 10:27
“Pure and undefiled religion that God accepts is to visit orphans …” James 1:27
Hear the great need
There are millions of orphans in the world today. Many of these children are available for adoption, and they are all in need of care.
UNICEF’s Executive Director said that today we are facing the greatest orphans crisis the world has ever seen, and that the world’s
response has been wholly inadequate. The sad reality for so many orphans is that they are unloved, overlooked, and forgotten.
According to UNICEF, there are over 143 million orphans, ages 0-17, who have lost one or both parents in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia,
Latin America, and the Caribbean alone.1 16 million children were newly orphaned in 2003. Another child is orphaned by HIV/AIDS
every 14 seconds. By 2010, 25 million children under the age of 15 will be orphaned due to HIV/AIDS alone.2
When describing the population of children in U.S. government care, we use the term “foster children” even when these children are
living in group homes or other institutional settings rather than in traditional foster homes. There are approximately 500,000 children in
the United States foster care system at any given time (with more than 800,000 children traveling through the system each year), and
approximately 120,000 of these children are currently considered “waiting” children – meaning those which have been determined to be
available for adoption.3 (For more information on how and why children in the United States come into foster care, go to:
http://pewfostercare.org/docs/index/php?DocID=24 )
Orphans face a world without family—without hope. If you speak to those children growing up in orphanages, foster homes, and on the
street you will find that they talk of family and belonging. Many hope against hope that their parents will return for them or that someone
new will come to love them. Most significant of all is that they have no father to guide them; no mother to love them; and no one to
celebrate their accomplishments. 3
The future prospects for children who emancipate from orphanages, the foster care system, or who grow up as street children are
profoundly bleak; ironically, the outlook for American kids is almost identical to that of children around the world. Theft, prostitution,
homelessness, substance abuse, incarceration, and suicide affect the lives of the majority of those children who grow up as orphans
and never find permanent, loving homes. In short, orphans by definition are children who for whatever reason have found themselves
in need of permanent, safe, and loving families. And for such children, being taken in by a family through the “spirit of adoption” is their
greatest need!
Hear from God – His call to you (The church)
The world is in crisis – if nothing changes…nothing changes. And it is a crisis involving a population which is extremely precious to the
heart of God – orphans. The problem of over 100 million orphans will not be solved by one group, one church or one denomination.
1 UNICEF Press Release document “Children on the Brink– 2004”
2 UNICEF Press Release document “Children on the Brink– 2002”
3 AFCARS Report, National Adoption Information Clearinghouse
3 Children’s Hope Chest www.hopechest.org
The answer lies in great numbers of believers from many places gathering together, creatively finding solutions, to solve small pieces of
the orphan plight…and saving lives one-by-one! God says that He is the Father of the fatherless; orphans are part of His royal family.
He has asked us, the church, to be His hands extended and to love these children on His behalf. In James 1:27, the Word says:
“Pure and undefiled religion that God, our Father accepts is to visit the orphans and widows in their distress and to keep
oneself unspotted by the world.”
Those of us who attend church regularly have heard innumerable sermons about not living like the world and keeping ourselves
“unspotted.” However, many of us are hard pressed to remember the last time that we heard a sermon about our responsibility to care
for orphans and widows; and some of us may never have heard one. Any good Bible teacher will tell you that not only the words used
in the scriptures were divinely inspired, but so are the order and placement of each of those words. And the first thing listed in the
definition of what true religion (the practice and revelation of our devotion to and faith in God) has to do with our responsibility as
believers to take care of those who have no one to care for them and are too young to care for themselves.
The word “to visit” above comes from the Greek word usually translated bishop, a person who oversees God’s people (I Tim. 3:1.)
Orphans and widows are among the most unprotected people in any society in anytime in history. Pure religion does not merely give
material goods for the relief of the distressed, it also oversees their care.
As you can see from this scripture, orphans are the charge of the church as clearly as a family’s own biological children are their
responsibility. We know God saw Job as a blameless and upright man (Job 1:8), and in the book of Job we are told how he lived out
pure religion by bringing orphan children into his home:
“For from my youth, the fatherless grew up with me as with a father…” Job 31:18
From Genesis to Revelation the scripture mentions the importance of caring for widows, orphans, and aliens more than 60 times. We,
as the body of Christ, must take this message to heart. These children are living on proverbial “islands of loneliness,” in desperate need
of crossing over into a land of love and security. And we as His body must now be about the business of “Building Bridges of HOPE” to
reconnect these children to ourselves.
“But now God has placed the members, each one of them, in the body, just as He desired. And if they were all one
member, where would the body be? But now there are many members, but one body…If one member suffers, all the
members suffer with it; if one member is honored, all the members rejoice with it.” 1Corinthians 12:18-26
Surely we all have different giftings and roles to play, but we
all must respond to God’s call in some way. Again, from a
heavenly perspective, we must remember that if one is
suffering, we all are suffering.
Adoption is not about whether or not you can have children