Happy Easter

Happy Easter to all of you!
Lily has been singing this morning..."My God is so big so strong and so mighty there's nothing my God cannot do." I guess God knows I need to be reminded of that today. I pray you all experience His Love in a fresh way this weekend.
Last week we got word that our file was being prepped for the Minister of Interior - which is one of the last steps in Silas' adoption. I believe he has our name at this point in Haiti - which makes him ours by Haitian law. Our file will still take a while ??? in this office then a couple weeks for a passport, then all we need is a medical exam and VISA issued. Sounds simple...but in Haiti it is not. We have definitely learned that well. Right now others have been waiting 3-6 months for these last steps to be completed. Our own government is not helping the situation either and has taken much longer than normal to issue VISAs for the children to be able to come home. There has been much controversy in international adoption lately - increased alertness for child trafficking. While I know that we need to safeguard against this, it has made for longer waits for all of us adopting legally. Of course, this wait has been difficult, but the real tragedy is that there are 143 million orphans in the world at this moment. These children have faces like Lily and Silas and Louis, and many never live past their first birthday - like Titus. Will you spend time praying this Easter for God to move in a mighty way in bringing children home that have forever families and mobilizing more families to consider bringing a precious child into their home?
Last week, Noel surprised Lily and I with tickets to a Steven Curtis Chapman concert. He is a Christian artist who has had many great selling albums and his other passion is for adoption. He has 3 sweet girls from China. His first adoption was just a couple years before we got Lily. We have followed his story and actually modeled The Titus Task off of his ministry called Shaohannah's Hope. I am posting a link to his website. It has lots of information about what we can do to care for orphans in the world. Here are some statistics worth considering...

What is the need?

Over 143 million children have lost one or both parents. 1
Every 18 seconds another child becomes an orphan, without a mother or father. 2
At least 16.2 million children worldwide have lost both parents. 3
Every 14 seconds a child loses a parent due to AIDS. 4
Conflict has orphaned or separated 1 million children from their families in the 1990s. 5

Where are they?
43.4 million orphans live in sub-Saharan Africa, 87.6 million orphans live in Asia, and 12.4 million orphans live in Latin America and the Caribbean. 6
1.5 million children live in public care in Central and Eastern Europe alone. 7
At any given point there are over 500,000 children in the U.S. Foster Care system. 8
In some countries, children are abandoned at alarming rates, due to poverty, restrictive population control policies, disabilities or perceived disabilities, and cultural traditions that value boys more than girls. 9

What about AIDS?
More than 14 million children under the age of 15 have lost one or both parents to AIDS, the vast majority of them in sub-Saharan Africa. 10
By 2010, the number of children orphaned by AIDS globally is expected to exceed 25 million. 11
AIDS is more likely than other cause of death to result in children losing both parents. 12
As the infection spreads, the number of children who have lost parents to AIDS is beginning to grow in other regions as well, including Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean and Eastern Europe. 13

What happens to the children?
Children are profoundly affected as their parents fall sick and die, setting them on a long trail of painful experiences often characterized by: economic hardship, lack of love, attention and affection, withdrawal from school, psychological distress, loss of inheritance, increased physical and sexual abuse and risk of HIV infection, malnutrition and illness, stigma, discrimination, exploitation, trafficking, and isolation. 14
Orphaned children are much more likely than non-orphans to be working in commercial agriculture, as street vendors, in domestic service and in the sex trade. 15
Unaccompanied boys are at high risk of forced or 'voluntary' participation in violence and armed conflict. 16
Orphanages, children's villages, or other group residential facilities generally fail to meet young people's emotional and psychological needs. 17

What about foster care?
On average, children stay in foster care for 30 months, or 2.5 years. 18
118,000 children were waiting to be adopted on September 30, 2004. 19
On average, those children waiting for adoption have been in foster care for 43.8 months, almost 4 years. 20
Each year, an estimated 20,000 young people “age out” of the U.S. foster care system. Many are only 18 years old and still need support and services. Of those who aged out of foster care: 21
Outcome 22
Earned a high school diploma: 54%
Obtained a Bachelor's degree or higher: 2%
Were unemployed: 51%
Had no health insurance: 30%
Had been homeless: 25% 23
Were receiving public assistance: 30%

Is there any hope?

Yes. There is One who infinitely loves each orphan and calls His people to join Him in caring for the fatherless. Each one of us can Show Hope to an orphan.
If only 7% of the 2 billion Christians in the world would show hope to a single orphan, looking after the child in their distress, there would effectively be no more orphans. We can each do something.

Thank you for praying for the least of these!
Love to all of you!
Thankful for the cross,
lori

Our God is so BIG so STRONG and so MIGHTY there's nothing our God cannot do!