Can I just be honest?

Like everything else in 2020, it’s been a discouraging year for orphan advocacy. 😢

The NO-TRAVEL orders for families waiting for ready-to-come-home superheroes in foreign countries has been just devastating.

The NOISE surrounding very public disruptions and dissolutions has cast a long and grim shadow with lots of implications for other adopting families.

The NEEDS of 2020 – families overwhelmed with their own children’s educational needs, me being the very first among them, in a time when they’ve been cut off from the normal resources that surround them, means margin is nearly nil for advocates and prospective adoptive families alike. Online physical therapy means parents now ARE the therapists; all-virtual schooling means parents automatically become half-homeschoolers. And keeping tiny humans alive and educated and exercised and fed in a pandemic when they can’t participate in their normal mental and physical health activities has nearly consumed most of the physical, emotional and spiritual energy that many of us less-capable humans have within us. (Supermamas out there rocking out Covid life, I am cheering you on all the way … as I tuck myself into bed at 8:29 each night. 🥱)

But here we are at the end of 2020, and although OUR circumstances may be changing soon, the circumstances of the 600,000 mostly special needs angels still waiting for forever families in China and the more than 17 million double orphaned children around the world WILL NOT.

They remain in “forever quarantine.”

You think staying home for two months or five months or nine months or getting locked down again for a second time is hard?

Try quarantining in an institution where even the most loving and amazing humans in your life are still paid caretakers, and leaving the facility EVER is never an option.

You think watching your children struggle without the option of attending full-time in person school is rough?

Try watching children who would be entitled to full education here in the United States be excluded from it altogether, simply because of their orphan status, their lack of funds or their special needs.

You think it’s hard to miss family sitting around the dinner table at Thanksgiving and Christmas?

Try missing the family who loved you and birthed you YOUR ENTIRE LIFE LONG. 😭

There is no year like 2020 that has given us more insight into the plights and lives of those who LIVE OUT this type of quarantine life every. Single. Day.

For them, a vaccine will not change their situation.

An uplifted lock-down won’t change their status.

Governors, executive orders, Covid counts and hospital metrics won’t change one iota the way these sweet superheroes spend their lives.

When all of this is over, these superheroes, as precious and priceless and valuable and deserving as every child right now living inside OUR quarantine homes, will still remain orphans.

The only thing that can change their circumstances NOW is a FOREVER FAMILY.

Orphan Warriors, not all of us are able to adopt.

But as children of the most perfect Father who swept down and adopted US, ALL OF US can do SOMETHING.

This year, we need advocates who SHARE the stories of those superheroes still waiting for forever homes. We need writers and storytellers and activists and enthusiasts to share and reshare the stories of those precious superheroes whose “special needs” are just superpowers in disguise.

We need financial warriors willing and excited to invest in the families who are able and willing to move forward to make orphans sons and daughters, and just as importantly, to finance the surgeries and education and needs of those children who are at risk of BECOMING orphans in the first place.

Because partnering with organizations that meaningfully serve first families is our privilege and priority in orphan prevention in this life.

We need prayer warriors to pray through families and medical warriors to translate Latin files and all shades of friends and family and neighbors to bring meals and encouragement and resources and rides when families do the hard and holy work of bringing one of these deserving angels HOME.

We need fierce foster families to come and stand in the gap, and we need teachers and tutors and therapists and friends who can offer services to superheroes who have had hard histories in this life.

And as we move into 2021, we need some PARENT warriors, mamas and daddies willing to say, “Here I am, Lord, send me.”

Families willing to raise their hands not so they get to be Saviors – there is one Savior and WE ARE NOT HIM – but so they get SEATS to the most amazing redemption story that God Himself writes when He exchanges beauty for ashes and makes all things new.

Families who get the honor and privilege of being entrusted with some of the most precious treasures here on this earth.

In this season when we can finally see some light at the end of the quarantine tunnel, may we be intentional about remembering the children who won’t get to experience that light unless we, those who are CALLED TO BE LIGHT in this world, choose to move.

To act.

To go.

To actually BE His hands and feet.

Warrior up, sweet friends. There is much work ahead. 💪

“Defend the weak and the fatherless; uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed.” ~ Psalm 82:3

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