Sad, Angry, Painful. And Hope.

This huge giveaway fundraiser for our family and Otto is still going on. 50+ prizes, a vacation, a train set this family's sweet boys helped their grandpa pick out, so many amazing things. But read the posts too. There is a lot of eye-opening truth there about what it is like to have special needs and be in an orphanage or institution. Every time I read another post I find so much I want to say. I can jump off from there in a thousand directions, almost all of them sad and angry and painful. Some of the things that come to my mind after reading these posts are hopeful too. But that hope comes from redeeming lives that were lost to this terrible, unfair, cruel system. Read how the kids are sorted, chosen at a few years old to spend their life in an institution. Our kids were sorted like that too when they were little.

Some of you have met our biological son who likes to pop up in every photo I take. He would have been thrown away if he had been tested in an orphanage there. He is crazy active. It takes something special to have professionals who work with and assess young kids say, "Wow, he sure has a lot of energy, doesn't he?" He has an articulation disorder. We had to work so hard to get his speech to the point where he could be understood. We are still working on it. That never would have happened in an orphanage.

Here's another active boy with a severe speech delay. Barely 6 years old, already in that institution with adults for a while. That is our Orion as a little boy.

My biological son would have ended up there too. Even though he is very smart he would have ended up in the same kind of place. Growing up in an orphanage isn't like growing up in our home where we value education, surrounded by books. He wouldn't have had hours with speech therapists followed by hours of practice at home. He is stubborn and uncooperative for testing. He would have ended up there too. From there he would have sat in the same empty orphanage rooms with children and adults rocking back and forth. Nothing to learn. Where would he have been in 12 years? What diagnoses would he have been labeled with?


It's hard not to focus on the sad and angry and painful things. There are mothers who talk about their children's past with a grace that I will never have. Indignation is a better word for my feelings. It is a righteous indignation though. Children should not be subjected to this kind of life. This is an injustice in the world. This is an evil. Tiny children barely clinging to life in cribs. Preschoolers transferred to adult mental institutions. Biological families told an institution is the best place for their child. These are things that should not exist in this world, and we have a responsibility to end them.


"For Christianity is a fighting religion. It thinks God made the world--that space and time, heat and cold, and all the colours and tastes, and all the animals and vegetables, are things that God 'made up out of His head' as a man makes up a story. But it also thinks that a great many things have gone wrong with the world that God made and that God insists, and insists very loudly, on our putting them right again."
-CS Lewis

I do not think this is merely a problem for Christians, although I do count Christians among the people who should be fighting with righteous outrage against this system. I think the existence of these institutions and the lives these children are leading should be challenged by every moral being. Every human being.

We have a responsibility to fight for the children we know and the children so hidden away that we have only rumors and whispers. There is a face I've returned to often since I first found Reece's Rainbow many years ago. Janie. After years of no updates, we know that these children have been moved to a place whose horror is known by more than whispers and more than rumors. I know firsthand what an institution can look like. I know how tiny and frail children can be in a bedridden building. But this new information has brought me to my knees anew. I thought I was beyond shock, but I am not.

Janie. Nate. Jared. Enoch, whose status I am unsure of. Anna. Anna is in a bedridden room there, even though she is mobile. She is in the same place as children and adults who are so thin they are only skeletons. Children who shy away when light shines into their dark cribs, because it is so unfamiliar. Frail, tiny children are living in the same institution as grown men.

These children and their need have been called out. They are only a few out of an entire system that is designed to fail children and place them in these conditions. But now that these children and their need are known, we have no excuse not to act. We cannot say that we don't know. We know. We know, and we have a responsibility to set this wrong right. These are sad and angry and painful things, but because we know about them these children have hope of escaping. Adoption is hope for the love of a family. Adoption is hope for playing in the sunshine. Adoption is hope for full stomachs and warm beds and safe walls. Please share them and share their desperate need to be adopted. Please think about if you can be the one to adopt them.