Against All Odds

Over the past few weeks I have been reading A Compassionate Call to Counter Culture by David Platt.  Normally it doesn’t take me this long to work through a book but with Counter Culture, every chapter is a heavy topic with pages full of thoughts and actions to digest.  Each chapter is a hotly debated cultural topic, and the first ones it tackles are poverty, abortion, and widows & orphans.     You would think, as we are going through the adoption process to bring two abandoned impoverished children into our family and our home that the two chapters that would hit home would be poverty and widows & orphans… and while both of those chapters lowered the boom and hit me right in the gut, the one that blew my mind was on abortion.

The chapter starts off with the stat that 42 Million Babies are aborted every year worldwide.  That is 115,000 babies every day.  (stats taken from abort73.com).  After 18 pages of thought provoking material, Platt concludes with a personal touch that hit home for me.

Here is what it said…

“As I bring this chapter to a close, I think about a mom who lives in one of those countries of the world where baby girls are not favorably looked upon.  Over thirty-five thousand children are ripped from their wombs every day in China, and over half of the women there have had at least one abortion. (allgirlsallowed.org/forced-abortion-statistics) Some of these abortions are voluntary; other are mandatory.  Government officials enforce abortion to ensure population control.  Women in rural villages are routinely checked to make sure they neither are pregnant nor have given birth recently.

I don’t know all the details about this particular mom, but I do know that when she became pregnant, she believed she was not able to take care of her child.  Yet she refused to have an abortion.  Instead, she brought her child to term and gave birth to a precious little girl on her own.

Then she took that newborn baby girl, wrapped her in a light-blue cloth, place her in a brown paper box, and in the middle of the night laid her in front of an orphanage for children with special needs.  The orphanage found this baby girl the next morning and conducted a search for her mother only to come up empty.

Though I don’t know who that mom is, I thank God for her.  Because of her courage to refuse abortion, and because of her compassion for the unborn, a little girl was able to live.  And every day when I come home from work, that little girl comes running up to me with a smile spread across her face, jumps into my arms, yells DADDY and gives me the biggest bear hug you can imagine.”  (Platt, pg 75)

As I read that all I could think was… we are waiting on paperwork and funds to go get two kids… a little girl with special needs and a little boy with special needs who had mothers who helped these kids make it to birth against unbelievable odds.  Then, realizing that they could not care for these kids, they found an orphanage that some day could adopt them out to a family that could give them a chance to live life.

Every day I look at Endale and thank God for him and the way God worked out all the details for that little boy to come to a home that loves him.  To come to a place that could experience his mood-changing smile.  To change the lives of so many people that he has met (AND THAT IS ONLY IN THE FIRST YEAR - what is in his future?)

As I look at him, I think of Lilly and Levi and the impact they are going to make all because God brought them, against all odds, to a family that loves them and excited to see how they will change their world.

It is an amazing process that all of us get to be a part of.  Thank you for supporting us in all of this and we ask for your continued prayers as God’s plan continue to unfold.