ADOPTION: YOU CAN DO IT! Blog Post #6 – God’s Call to the Church for Orphan Care

(excerpt from) Chapter 1 – God’s Call to His Bride, the Church, for Orphan Care

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world.  James 1:26

…It should be one of the church’s primary duties to look after orphans in their trouble.  This duty is not assigned by God to the state, to the unbelieving gay couple down the block, nor the secular orphanage in a foreign city.  This important job is assigned to the Church, Christ’s Bride.  As the Church is made up of people, then it is the people of the church who are to provide orphan care.  It may be that only one family in a small church is to actually adopt orphans, but it then behooves the rest of that church congregation, even if they have to team with another small church, to look after the orphans that have been adopted into that church body through that one family.

What does this mean?  Well, it means a mountain of things.  When a happily married, healthy, and joyful couple brings forth biological sons and/or daughters, their children are typically just like their parents – happy, healthy, and joyful.  Further, they are no doubt well nurtured, with a reasonably structured life. These children are (most likely) going to be fairly easy to parent. Well, all children are sinful and have issues, but generally, life is good and things go according to plan for the parents raising their birth children to adulthood.  When a couple adopts a baby, there is a multitude of issues that set apart the raising of that adopted child, from a typical birth child.

First, no matter how young the baby was at separation from its birth mother (and father) to come home to its adoptive family, the baby suffered and continues to suffer from the anxiety of losing its biological parents, which is a traumatic loss to that child.  Second, the birth mother was most probably under great stress during her pregnancy (why would she have to give the baby up for adoption if her life was picture-perfect?), which compromises the overall development of the baby in-utero, another trauma to that child.  Third, if after birth, the baby was malnourished or neglected, these also factor into a less than ideal physical development, another trauma to that child.  Finally, if the child suffered from abuse and or neglect, experienced violence toward others through war or domestic incidents, or was raised on the porn channel (very common for children left in motel rooms by drug seeking parents), then there are life-long emotional, physical, social, and spiritual scars that the child will have to deal with, which means more trauma to that child….