143 Million Children . . . The Lord's Pleasure?

We are enjoying Buckner Camp this weekend, a wonderful ranch given in trust to Buckner Children and Family Services. It so wonderful to be around so many families who have opened up their homes to children who need the warmth of a mother's touch and the strength that tender warrior fathers offer.


Being here is restful for our family, but it also reminds me of an article link I followed from a friend's blog about a year ago. It's an article by Steven Curtis Chapman, adoptive father of 3 precious little ones from China.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/Music/08/07/chapman.orphans/index.html

A couple of things that stood out from what he says in the article . . .

• According to UNICEF, there are 143 million children in the world who have lost one or both parents.
• In America alone, there are half a million children in foster care, and approximately 120,000 of these children are waiting to be adopted. In many countries, children are too often orphaned or abandoned because of poverty, disabilities and disease; every 15 seconds, a child loses a parent because of AIDS.
• If only 7 percent of the 2 billion Christians in the world would care for a single orphan in distress, there would effectively be no more orphans. If everybody would be willing to simply do something to care for one of these precious treasures, I think we would be amazed by just how much we could change the world.
• Closer to home for us, in the Lubbock/Amarillo area alone, around 140 children each month come into the foster care system.

So many children in need . . .

I have to say that being a foster mommy is one of the hardest and most rewarding things I've ever done in my entire life. Being someone who is both a strong introvert and someone who in some ways doesn't like constant change (part of me is just a little addicted to moving every 3 years), foster care doesn't seem especially appealing. For me, however, I liken the appeal of this precious ministry to something the runner Eric Liddell shares with his sister who would rather him fulfill his calling to overseas missions than run in the Olympics: "When I run, I feel the Lord's pleasure."

I can't say I feel that much pleasure when I run anymore, but when I open my home to an orphan in Jesus' name, I feel the Lord's pleasure . . . and, it's indescribable. This probably sounds a little bit selfish in a way, but then again, I am a Christian hedonist in the line of John Piper who declares in his richly theological book entitled Desiring God that "God is most glorified when we are most satisfied in Him."