I don’t much care if you breastfed your kid until they started kindergarten or if you fed them formula from day one. I don’t really care if you turned your infant car seat forward-facing prior to age 2, or if you homeschool, or if you send your kids to daycare while you go to work. Do you cosleep? Did you circumcise your son? I DON’T CARE. Do you “babywear”? Push your kid around in a stroller? Use a leash for your kid at Disneyland? Whatever. Good for you.

When it comes to issues of motherhood, there is one issue I care about: some kids don’t have one. All of these petty wars about the choices of capable, loving mothers is just a lot of white noise to me. Quite honestly, I’m often astonished at the non-essential parenting issues I see moms getting upset about. Particularly when there are so many kids in this world not being parented at all.

If that got your fired up, you’ll probably also enjoy What I Learned about Motherhood by being an Adoptive Parent, another of Kristen’s post the Huffington Post published last week.

We’re thankful to Convention Media Solutions for making this all available at a cost that provides them just a modest profit above the expenses they incurred to capture it.

LAKE FOREST, CA — A growing movement among Christians to combat a global orphan crisis should not just be a passing fad, an evangelical pastor insisted during the opening session of a two-day summit.  Instead, caring for orphans should reflect the heart of God as shown in the Bible.

“Sometimes we can be faddish about justice issues, where it becomes the ‘in’ thing to do,” said Crawford Loritts, the senior pastor of Fellowship Bible Church in Roswell, Ga. “We need to see how profoundly, deeply rooted this (orphan care issue) is in the very heart of God. The Gospel is about justice, and justice is rooted in the Gospel. You cannot speak about the Bible without speaking about justice.

“The heart of God is a heart of inclusion. It’s all about bringing people together. People were meant to be a part of something that’s inclusive. People were meant to belong,” Loritts explained.

A worldwide online audience and about 2,000 people in attendance at the Christian Alliance for Orphans’ annual summit at Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., were asked to take a step closer toward helping mobilize churches to end the crisis.

Jedd Medefind, president of the Alliance, urged Christians to help connect orphans to families “not from guilt, or from duty, or even idealism, but from the simple truth that He loved us first.”

“That’s why we say justice and mercy flows from the Gospel,” Medefind added….

READ the FULL ARTICLE HERE.

I’d highly recommend the entire article, Unto the Nations.  It’s a vital topic thoughtful Christians must engage seriously.  For although Christian giving and service knows no national boundaries, love for the world means little when it doesn’t include sacrificial love for our neighbor nearby.  We must be very wary of the fact that “liking” a cause on Facebook or sending funds overseas or even a 1-week missions trip are far easier than spending time with the widow who lives across the street.

But thankfully, I don’t believe these two callings are contradictory.  In fact, everything I see reveals they can strengthen each other.  As I shared with Zinsmeister, Christian interest in foreign and domestic giving are often mutually reinforcing.  Donors, volunteers, and families who take an interest in overseas orphans will often simultaneously get involved in the foster care system in their own back yard.

The upcoming Summit VIII underscores this reality.  At Summit, themes of adoption (both domestic and international), foster care (domestic) and orphan care (global) are continually intertwined.  Each is a vital expression of Scripture’s clear call to care for the orphan.  And often, the people raising funds to support churches in Africa or Ukraine in caring for orphans there are also engaged in local foster care and adoption support here at home.  When Christian concern for the orphan comes as a response to God’s heart, we become passionate to see the church caring for vulnerable children — whether they live on the other side of the world or the other side of tracks.

“These past months have shown me, more than ever, how feeble our human attempts are to solve the issues of poverty. God MUST move for lives to be transformed and the debilitating effects of extreme poverty to be reversed. We must pray much more than we do. We must seek Him much more than we do…”

What wise and profoundly true words.  When we come face to face with the vastness of the need, and the tangle webs formed by poverty and its many interwoven struggles, we would be foolhardy to merely try to “dig deeper” from our reserves of idealism or duty or guilt.  These will all ultimately prove unequal to the task.  To persevere, we must draw from the true Source:  the love of Christ that compels us.  (This is why, as Summit’s theme states, justice and mercy flow from the Gospel.)  As we draw from this deeper wellspring, we also begin to grasp the spiritual weight present in even the most physical-seeming issues.  And so we pray.  We pray that God’s grace and power will flow into each task He has called us to.  We pray that He will deal with those subterranean issues our best efforts could never hope to touch.  We pray that He will work even as we sleep and take needed rest.  We pray that He would take the humble loaves and fish we offer and multiply them to the nourishment of many.

Please join me in praying these things for Lisa and her family, and for all who serve the orphan across the globe.  Please join me also in praying these things for Summit.

“There is a grass-roots movement of Christians to recapture the historic vision of the church in caring for orphans,” Medefind said. “It is growing significantly at this point. The Alliance is a rare model of Christian unity among groups that could be competing with each other. It speaks with a united voice, inspiring and equipping Christians to care for orphans through adoption, foster care and other global initiatives.”

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