Why Love Orphans? from Christian Alliance for Orphans on Vimeo.
Learn to do good. Seek justice. Help the oppressed. Defend the cause of orphans. Fight for the rights of widows.Isaiah 1:17 (New Living Translation)
This past year has been the darkest of my days and perhaps even the darkest of my life. Sometimes we carry hidden burdens that secretly we individually keep to ourselves, or we tell very few people. The enemy carries us through the ditches of depression, and some of us are more skilled at hiding those thoughts and feelings more so than others. In the middle of the tornadoes that almost tore my personal psychology and state apart, I got an email from a new friend who proposed a “marketing internship” with the Christian Alliance for Orphans (CAFO). I did not realize this was God’s answer for me to crawl out of the bat cave I had dove into with my own feelings of insecurity. Before I left for the conference in Louisville, Kentucky this past weekend, I had a long talk with my father about what “we were going to do” with these continual downturns of repressed frustration and disappointment without the feeling of Christian joy in my heart. As I often say and have said in past times, “I lost my Tinker Bell.” I was going to survive three more days to complete a conference I had done my very best to contribute to in the little ways I did. Sometimes the little things we must overcome day to day seem like colossal Goliath giants. When we are down in the darkest of times, feelings of being wanted and feelings of being needed in the expressions of love with others carries us through to stay the course, to never give up!
A leader in this organization kept emailing me with sincere encouragement and with emails constantly saying, “We’ll make it work.” While I would often tear up as I fell asleep at night as the Devil whispered lies of nothingness into my ears, I would say to my God and Father, “We are going to make this work. We are going to make this work.”
Two newfound friends: one Christian Brother and one Christian Sister never judged my efforts, my penmanship, and my design work. They appreciatively and gratefully said “Thank you” for my simple efforts to survive, hold on, and do what I do.
As I attended breakout session after breakout session at the CAFO Summit, I realized on a small scale maybe what orphans with international backgrounds and barriers feel with my own invisible disability where most people just don’t know what it is like to be “in our shoes.” At certain points in my own life, I have been the rejected, distressed orphan fighting for the right to breathe. The fatherless are often stripped from their own homes to move to a new destination in a country that might as well resemble another planet in space. The process of adoption is not a simple check written for a bill where the stork delivers a freshly born baby on the footsteps of your white picket fence front yard. The transition to adopt from China, Vietnam, Russia, the Ukraine, and to the far reaches of the world is not a normal day routine trip to the grocery store. It is a calling. It is a vision to change lives and carry through with the miracle of life when life may be threatened to the point of extinction.
So in my own metaphorical point to extinction, I was taken into CAFO as an orphaned intern where my service was little but I was birthed again with the hope that lives in the cause for the fatherless. Two people poured into me to believe once again. And so my dark days came to a close with the newfound hope I found in a subculture I may join in the fight for humanity to “defend the cause of the orphans.”
I am exhilarated to see what the future beholds because I have seen the fight for those who truly live for Him in a cause I was completely unaware of but am now passionate to spend more time serving. Churches continue to standstill, but some answer the call. I am now choosing to answer that call through my writing, my photography, and my service to humanity. I am coming out in a newness of Spirit, thanks to two new friends and an Alliance that at least for now has changed and saved my search for hope that truly is everlasting.
For more information concerning CAFO or the yearly Summit conference, please visit the website. The experience of the orphan may change your life as it did mine in what were some of my darkest days where light now shines because I have found fairy dust in the Tinker Bell that now settles once again in the joy of my smile and the chimes within my heart….my sincere thanks to the Alliance and all those involved to bring joy where it seems most bleak!
