Battling Poverty - Saving Kids

Today is Blog Action Day, a day meant to bring about awareness of poverty throughout the world. So often I think that we focus on the poverty existing in underdeveloped countries across oceans and time lines. The first thing that comes to mind when I hear the word poverty is the deteriorating family structure in America. So many of the children who enter foster care and never leave are from homes that sit way below the poverty line. Poverty in America means drugs, crime and promiscuity, just as it means those things in other nations. Drugs, crime and promiscuity result in children who are not wanted, are abused and don't have anyone to turn to. Daily, children in the United States enter a system they will not soon depart from. The lives they knew, although tumultuous and frightening, are now gone. Their parents are gone. Their schools are gone. Their friends are gone. And often, if a foster home is not available to take multiple children, brothers and sisters are torn apart. Innocent children, who have already been done the disservice of being born into a family that cannot care for them, have now lost everything they know and everything that gives them any comfort. The poverty that underlies the many reasons that children are neglected and abused is ignored while blame is passed back and forth and no one seems to notice that there are lives at stake. I now have two sons, both of whom are victims of poverty and the consequences that poverty had for their biological parents. None of this is to say that adults are not responsible for their actions and their choices. I will never be an advocate of making parents look like victims. It is the system that faces the biggest shortcomings in putting an end to the extensive trauma these children face. In order to address the needs of children in foster care, we must all work together to bring about change. We need to recruit more families who are genuinely interested in the success of these children, who are not afraid of parenting challenged kids and who are willing to go the distance. We do not need more parents who are quitters, who give up as soon as life becomes uncomfortable or traumatized children act out. Children in care do not need another set of adults to give up on them or to abuse them. We, as concerned parents and as faithful Christians, must do the work to bring about change for the orphans of America. We cannot look away from our own neighborhoods and towns toward children in far away places because that is more comfortable for us. We must look poverty and the children it is destroying right in the face. We must stand up to the devils in our own backyards and make the difference right here. It may seem like an insurmountable task, like one person cannot make a difference. The truth is, the life of one child is changed by the life of one adult. If we each make a decision to change the life of one forgotten, thrown away child, then the course of poverty and its affects on US children will be altered drastically. Nathan and I made the decision to parent one child and his life is forever changed. He is learning to be a Godly man who has respect for himself and others. He is growing in his great compassion for others, especially children who are where he has been. Our prayer for him is that he will not forget where he came from and that he will, as an adult, choose to bless the life of children who have been forgotten as he once was. Deciding to adopt T will not only change the course of his life, but it has changed the course of our lives. We did not set out to do this but God has blessed us with a deep passion for these children and we have been given a mission to change things. Adopting T has inspired in us a desire to fill our home with as many children as we can. I believe that God can inspire a love for these children in any heart that is willing and open to the great possibilities. If you are interested in standing up to the injustice and evil in your own backyard, stare down the devil and don't let him stop you from saving the life of an American child.