Orphan Sunday

Just wanted to let everyone know that this Sunday is Orphan Sunday. A few organizations that help orphans throughout the world decided to have a day each year that churches could focus on helping orphans. A lot of orphan organizations, adoption organizations, churches, and others are supporting it. It is a Sunday for churches to focus on orphans and promote helping them. It is a very important duty that we have as Christians (for those of you who are Christians) to take care of the orphans as the Bible tells us to.

There are approximately 143 million orphans in the world. Half a million kids in the U.S. live in foster care and around 125,000 are up for adoption. In Arkansas there are 7,000 kids in foster care and over 500 available for adoption. Arkansas ranks #1 in the U.S. in the number of moves a child will make while in foster care. They will move an average of 30 times while in foster care. 30. An even more shocking statistic is this....In Pulaski County (most populated county in Arkansas) there are 600 churches and in Northwest Arkansas there are over 300. So if just one family out of each of these churches from just these three counties would adopt that would be over 900 adopted kids which is almost twice the number of waiting kids in Arkansas. JUST ONE MORE FAMILY IN EACH CHURCH AND WE WOULD NOT HAVE WAITING KIDS IN ARKANSAS. And that is just 3 counties.

There are lots of ways to help. There is an organization in Arkansas that seeks to help these children in Arkansas. It is the C.A.L.L. which stands for Children of Arkansas Loved for a Lifetime and their vision is to have no waiting children in Arkansas foster care but instead to have families waiting to take them in. On their website you can find all kinds of ways to help. But the best way is to become a foster parent or to adopt one of these kids.

I wanted to also post some videos about Orphan Sunday in case you are more of a visual learner.

This one is from the CALL

And this one will make you cry.

"Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to care for the orphans and widows in their distress..." James 1:27