That being said, I cannot begin to describe how out of this world this experience has been so far. Scott & I have always been incredibly blessed with amazing family and friends but the amount of people willing to give of their time, talents and resources to support our family and help bring Samuel home has been overwhelming to say the least. There is no possible way we could thank everyone enough or express what their help and love has meant to our family. This process has reminded me that we live in a community and a place where people surround you, love you and walk you through every journey of your life. So thank you to EVERYONE! Whether you have given 10 minutes, 10 days or 10 months of your time, we love you and could not have done this without you.
And while this night proves to be one of fun and laughter and beautiful music there is something way more important to our family that we want to share. Our hope and prayer is that people will walk away knowing more about the orphan. That people will realize, that while the numbers associated with the orphan crisis can be daunting and overwhelming, that every person can do something to help, to be a voice and to possibly change the life of a child. I've been doing some research and putting together some information to share...I'm going to post some of it below just to give you an idea of why God has called us to adopt. Like I said...these numbers are overwhelming and while some days adopting only one child seem like a small effort on our part, if we all came together and all of us did something how could we change the current orphan crisis? How could we impact the world for the better? Both across the ocean and in our own backyard.
Once again, love y'all! Talk with you soon!
• There are 153,000,000 orphans in the world
• There are an additional 20,000,000 “displaced
children” in the world
• The combined count of these categories makes
the orphan population the 7th
largest nation on the
planet – slightly larger than the population of Russia
• In Africa, homeless children are armed and used for
war
• In Africa, there is a concerted effort to extend
children’s lives beyond 5 years of age
• In the US, 25,000 children will leave the foster
care system without families
• 25% of these foster children become homeless,
• 56% of these emancipated foster care children enter
the
unemployment ranks
• 27% of the emancipated male children in foster care
end up in jail
• 30% of the emancipated females in foster care
experience early parenthood
