One year ago, we looked around our dining room table and decided that we had room for one more. So with a leap of faith, we returned to Eastern Europe to the same city as our youngest son, to bring home our ‘room for one more’ named Zorey. You can read all about her here. Throughout the process of two international adoptions, my heart was broken for the children I left to die. Simply stated, these Orphans DIE. In Eastern Europe, 50 percent of orphans will not reach their 2oth birthday. A staggering statistic that has crystallized into faces and stories within my mind.
Two years ago, I walked into an orphanage in Eastern Europe to adopt my son, and left hundreds of faces behind. It felt like an unfair roulette of choice, as I scooped up my son and fled from his orphanage. I rushed up those stone steps in a vain attempt to leave behind what I had experienced and saw within those cold and sterile rooms; but what I wanted to leave behind actually came home with me. My son became a constant reminder of the children left to die within the cold stone walls. As my son fought the trauma and the pain he had lived for years, I was forced to face what he had endured. I could not sterilize or sanitize the torture that was inflicted physically and emotionally on a four-year-old boy. I could not let borders, nationalities, or geographical lines blur what I knew in my heart was true. Orphans die and they die alone.
The day I heard the silence of a building filled with children, touched the broken child caged in a crib, and breathed in the misery of loneliness. That was the day that I became responsible to act. That was the moment that God dropped the scales from my eyes and thrust me headlong into the world of the Fatherless and marginalized. That day I realized that my suburban bubble is so far from the real world, that it’s scary. And what is even scarier was to realize that the comfort I was living in; the American dream I was pursuing was hollow. In that moment my whole life sat suspended and I realized that I had bought the lie, I was not living the American dream, I was living for myself. I was drinking from the cup of the privileged life and it tasted bitter. That has led us to jump headlong into following God’s lead in beginning a non-profit called Lost Sparrows. You can visit Lost Sparrows at www.lostsparrows.org.
