Where My Heart Is

For you have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, "Abba! Father!" - Romans 8:15

Several years ago I watched a program during the Christmas season that profiled orphans in the US and their desire to find a family. Orphans? Most children who lose their parents are taken in by family members. Right? I mean, that's what my family would do for my four if something were to happen to me.

But something in my heart was pricked by the situation. I went onto the internet and started to search for them, these children with no parents, no family. And amazingly, there they were. Over the next year I found myself drawn to websites with photolistings of orphans all over the world: Nicaragua, Russia, Brazil, Ukraine, China. Hardly a day went by that I didn't search for them online. And there are thousands, hundreds of thousands of them. Infants to teenagers with no one and nothing in this world. Each photolisting included a small picture and blurb about them: abandoned at birth, makes caretakers smile, a favorite in the orphanage, found in the streets. I tried to imagine my Joshua in this situation. I tried to picture him going to sleep each night in a room full of other children. Whose bed would he crawl into if he had a nightmare? Who would hold him and speak to him? How would he learn how to be a dad, a father? Unfathomable.

But what could I do? I showed them to Robert who was moved by their situation as well. Hardly a day has gone by that I haven't visited a website and tried to point out a sweet face to him. He can't bear to look at them though. It makes him incredibly sad. He would say, "Let's go get them." I thought he was joking and then I realized that maybe that was a possibility.

Yes, we have four beautiful children. There isn't a hole in our family; we don't feel incomplete. But maybe this wasn't about us. Maybe this was about someone else. Why not? Wasn't that what Christ had done for me? Hadn't He taken me when I was fatherless and pitiful and brought me into the family of God. And then I saw it all as it should be. I understood the verses about the spirit of adoption and justice for the orphan, and pure religion. I felt an urgency from that point on. Somewhere in the world there was a child in an orphanage that was meant to be part of our family. Who? Where? I had no idea. More importantly, how? That's the question I am working through even at this moment. In the process I have learned patience and trust in God. He has given us stories of families that have walked this path and have claimed a lost child in His name. So we wait and watch.