Fields of the Fatherless

I've been reading this book by C. Thomas Davis and it is changing my heart! I knew that God cared for the fatherless and widows and asks us to do the same, but did you know that caring for orphans and widows is mentioned 60 times in the Bible?? I was stunned.
Adopting isn't just about adding to your family. It's about saving a life. I've lost count of how many precious orphans we have prayed for, that they would live to be adopted. There is an interesting phenomena among families who adopt from Liberia. They almost always adopt more than one child (adopting three is actually quite common among these families), and many of the children are adopted because of medical necessity. The miracle of adoption is life.
I just received this email from a friend of mine, Jenny, a fellow adoptive Mom. Jenny and her husband have five biological sons, then adopted four girls from Liberia. They just recently had another baby- another precious girl. Jenny is so passionate, it's contagious:

Why Adoption?

Occasionally I hear people wonder out loud if adoption is really the most "efficient" way to help the orphan crisis. It may seem like a lot of time and resources are poured into a relatively small number of children, when in theory more could be helped by contributing to some type of institutional setting that could numerically care for more.

I believe Jesus was on to something though when He took just 12 disciples under His wing. I also believe He knew what He was doing when He designed the family. Relationships, not institutions, change people. And relationships are rarely efficient, they are time-consuming and costly.

Psalm 68:6 says that God sets the lonely in families. There are a lot of lonely "orphan" people in this world, and they are not looking for a ministry or an institution, they are seeking a friend, some type of family to belong to.