The Fire!

It's SOOOOO hard for me to spend a day around a bunch of people on fire for orphans and adoption and not miss that fire and desire of the process. So many people were just waiting for referrals and that anticipation can be intoxicating! I know, I know... I just need to go read a few of those agonizing posts from the days we were waiting for Meg and I wouldn't really say that. But adoption is like pregnancy, you tend to forget the pain when you have been out of the process for a while and one whiff of a newborn can make your hair stand on end (or one conversation with a waiting mom.) Don't anyone panic or start telling me how I don't need more children (Mom!) I know all this... I'm just saying, it's really hard to be around a lot of people who "get it" and not want to DO more. Argh... I feel like my hands are tied. Liam said to me the other night, "Can't we just get ONE more child? Why can't we just have ONE more, Mom?" I told him that we COULD get one more, but that the problem is that there would still be 146,999,999 left and that we definitely CAN'T get that many more children. So we have to, as a family, figure out a way to do something bigger than bringing home one more child, right? But what? I have so many desires of my heart regarding orphans. One thing I am really really on fire about is "minority" kids in Eastern Europe. When we were adopting Meg, if I had a dollar for every time a Russian asked me if I was okay with the fact that she is "an ethnic minority" I could have paid for my adoption. Seriously? Are you kidding me? As if I care? As if she isn't the most precious little girl on the face of the planet in my eyes. As if I wouldn't have taken her if she was darker, more "ethnic", more "different"? So it breaks my heart to think of how many children are wasting away in Eastern Europe simply because they are "ethnic minorities." In fact, Meg is ours because another family wanted a blonde child. Wow, what good fortune for us that they wanted to be color coordinated for life!

Anyway, rambling here... back to the point woman! And be quick about it! But if God wants to do through me what I can't do, then I might as well think big, right? Let's dream BIG here! Katie Davis dreams big and God delivers! I believe we are partially limited by our lack of faith that God will give us the desires of our hearts that are in accordance with His will. So I'm dreaming big that somewhere, someone is able to start a program that will find homes for all the little girls like Meg, who are languishing and bound to their condition because of the color of their skin. Little girls like this one....

She's only 2! And she probably won't have a family because she is a minority and people don't go to Russia to adopt minority children. People go to Russia to adopt white children, as a general rule. People who are open to little girls who look like this go to China or Kazakhstan.

And what about this little girl? She has been waiting for a family since we were in the process of adopting Meg (I remember her face staring out at me from the database back then too). She was born in August of 2006. She has very little hope of a future because she is a minority. She looks like a "gypsy" (Roma) and this race of people are widely discriminated against in Eastern Europe.

What if these two little peanuts could have a mommy and daddy? What potential is in their life that will not be reached? What did God have planned for them that won't be fulfilled because they were meant to have a family, but that family missed their call (maybe it was even their biological family?) Is anyone with me here?

But the odds are against them, in all honesty. They are most likely condemned to grow up in a Russian orphanage and age out of the system. Maybe they don't even have citizenship. And if they don't, then what will their choices be for making a living when they are no longer wards of the State? I can promise you their chances won't be good ones!

I a little boy who was born in Russia to an Uzbek mother and an African father, neither of whom were in the country legally. Their son was left in an orphanage (the same one Liam was in) and had no citizenship whatsoever. The Russian government actually petitioned the Uzbek government to give him citizenship and then release him to Russia so that my friends could adopt him. But what would his fate have been if they hadn't followed the Call to free him? Probably very grim. Without citizenship what would have become of him? He for sure would not have been adopted by a Russian family. His only hope was an international adoption, and let's face it, not many folks are traveling to Russia and forking out the exhorbitant fees for brown skinned children! That's just the fact. It doesn't make me a racist, by all means, I would take a child of any color! Color does not matter to me! But the cold hard fact is that I would say almost 100% of the people who go to Russia are hoping for a caucasian child. Not everyone, certainly, but a great percentage. I'm not criticizing these families in any way. Certainly caucasian children deserve families as much as minority children. My only point here is that the children of ethnic decent have a much lower hope of redemption than other children because Eastern Europeans aren't adopting them and westerners aren't adopting them. So... there's a whole forgotten class of people. It's heartbreaking to me and my daughter could have very easily been one of those statistics. God is SOOOOO good! The family that turned her down was registered "out of order." Our paperwork was in first, but for some reason, they were registered before we were. If we had been registered first, we wouldn't have gotten the referral for Meg. We would have gotten the referral of another little girl who was older than their age limit who actually went to another family, from another agency. But she was within our age range... we would have gotten and accepted her referral. Meg would have gone to the other family, they would have refused her, and she could still be there, waiting. But God takes care of every single detail and He saw what we could not. Thank You, LORD, for Your goodness and for Your incredible restraint in parenting us!

Okay.... now you have got to go check out this opportunity to help a "minority" child! Ha! My sweet, dear friend, Lori, has an amazing gift of creativity and this woman can do ANYTHING! Don't you love knowing people who can make anything they see? I do! Lori used to live near me and I was constantly sending her photos or dropping stuff in her mailbox and asking her to recreate it. I am sure people who come up with their own amazing designs just LOVE when people ask them just to copy stuff... but that's what happens when you have friends who can't think outside the box! :) Anyway, Lori loves me anyway, but still, she's way more talented than just copying stuff. And secretly I think she's being called to adopt and doesn't even know it herself yet.... God told me so! hahaha (She reads the blog so work with me here!) Anyway, she has come up with this AMAZING idea. I'm giving this to myself as a birthday gift for my 40th, which is coming up. I can't get over how precious this idea is... why didn't I think of this? Oh yeah, because I'm in the box.... never mind. Without further ado, here is my favorite new idea I've seen since Gwen's blue T-shirts! Check out this necklace and get an awesome heirloom piece and help an orphan at the same time! You have to get behind me in line though, I've already got my order in! :) My necklace will not have photos. It will have maps of Russia and the US for my Russian born kiddos and my one odd-ball American-American.

Okay, I'll hush up now (and go to bed) because I'm pooped from today. But we DID have fun! And we sold quite a bit of stuff. I think it was worth everyone's time.

"In everything, do to others what you would want for them to do to you. This is what is written in the Law and in the Prophets."

Matthew 7:12