According to UNICEF, there are 132 million orphans in the world — children, by UNICEF's definition, who have lost one or both parents.
13 million of these have lost both parents.
And this number — it doesn't even take into account the hundreds of thousands of children who have been abandoned, including the more than 600,000 abandoned reported children who now dwell in Chinese orphanages. (NGOs inside China report that number of children closer to 1 million.)
Because those children, though they LIVE like orphans, technically have living parents who abandoned them and thus, don't meet the criteria to be counted as "orphans." (With no parents present to call their own, we identify them as orphans on this blog. Because no child chooses to be abandoned.)
And yet, we in this country of luxury where even our vehicles have their own homes often cover our ears and turn the other way and pretend like this isn’t a crisis.
That it’s really more of an orphan inconvenience.
A problem.
A challenge.
One that governments and agencies and countries around the world should really begin to solve.
All while 13 million double orphaned children — more children than the entire population of the country of Haiti — wait.
Some of them starving.
Some of them dying.
All of them waiting for those of us who claim to be the Church to start acting like Jesus’ hands and feet on earth.
I don’t care how the world pretties this up or spins this.
This, Orphan Warriors, is a crisis.
And if we’re going to flip the script for the 13 million double orphans and the 437,000 foster children in the United States who deserve the hope and encouragement and security and love of FAMILY and the raw and real and unconditional love of Jesus, we’re going to have to do it as a team.
Because it takes both an army and a village to change the orphan story.
We need warriors running to, loving on, equipping and supporting first families — warriors with hearts for birth parents and bio parents who know that the BEST way to stop the orphan crisis is to prevent it before it ever begins by spiritually and emotionally and financially and logistically and medically and in every other way supporting families who might otherwise feel ill-equipped to care for their own superheroes in their homes.
We need warriors running to cities and countries where abuse and abandonment abound. We need passionate advocates and inspirational educators and patient people willing to dig in and change minds and change cultures and begin to establish the new normal — one where abuse and abandonment and a low view of those whose special needs are superpowers in disguise are no longer socially acceptable.
We need warriors giving of their time and talents — medical warriors donating their skills and services to orphans and families who could otherwise not afford them, social workers and educators offering training to those who currently care for waiting superheroes, people of every background and skill level offering what they have to children who many times don’t have access to any of it.
We need financial warriors giving to the surgeries and education and basic needs of orphans who would otherwise live without them.
And we need frontline fighters willing to GO and do the same hard and holy work that God did for US when He made US His sons and daughters.
We need them ALL.
But this month, for National Adoption Awareness Month, we’ll be focusing on this ONE aspect of orphan prevention and care — adoption.
REAL adoption.
The really hard and holy work of adoption.
Because while our fellow Orphan Warriors love and serve and provide for and treat the superheroes now living in orphanages across the world and others work to prevent the orphan crisis before it ever begins, we still need those who run to the ones who no longer have a choice.
For 600,000 mostly special needs children in China, it’s too late for orphan prevention.
It’s too late for family preservation.
These precious, priceless, deserving children of God are orphans already. And we’re not okay with their lives being viewed as collateral damage.
Up until the last year, some of the most medically needy abandoned children had the privilege of living inside healing homes run by incredible NGOs like Love Without Boundaries and Morning Star. But because of new 2018 NGO regulations by the Chinese government, most of those foster facilities and healing homes have now been downsized or closed, including the Beijing facility run by Morning Star.
Which means that nearly all of these 600,000 precious, priceless image bearers of God are not living inside well-run healing homes where they are receiving therapies and medical care and one-on-one intervention and attention; they are now all essentially living in orphanages and institutions, many without access to the therapies, surgeries and medical care they desperately need and deserve.
As orphans in China, they bear the cross of social outcasts.
They age out of the international adoption system at age 14.
And, without a family running to them and pursuing them with the same grit and grace and gut that God himself exemplified when He pursued US, they will remain orphans — most of them without the education or medical care they need to survive in their society — forever.
In the last year, so many of our dearest friends in the advocacy community, some because of restricting laws inside China and some because of the urgent need to stop this crisis before it even begins, have shifted their efforts to orphan prevention.
We applaud them! We cheer for them! We partner with them! We support them! And we ABSOLUTELY NEED THEM if the orphan story is ever going to change!
We just do it from this place where God has for some reason kept us — at the front door of the orphanage, at the brink of aging out, at the place of fighting for the ones who still wait and, while our fellow brothers and sisters work to stop abandoned children from walking in front doors, dream about walking OUT those doors not as orphans but as desired, loved, chosen DAUGHTERS and SONS.
Who absolutely deserve the option of adoption.
Want to join the battle for the 600,000 mostly “special needs” superheroes who deserve in this life to know that they are LOVED?
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Check back on this blog page throughout November.
And then SHARE the orphan story.
Sharing the orphan story can change it, one sweet superhero at a time.