|
History
"Will you help us adopt a child from China?" That short, simple question
uttered back in 1993 ended up capturing me. It ended up capturing me
because on the other end of it, as I was soon to discover, was a beautiful,
sometimes expression-less, needy child – the kind of child that your heart
yearns to help as soon as you see her, and who unfortunately lives all over the
world. At the time, I was living near Washington, D.C. – a great place to
get information – and after several months of gathering it and processing
paper work we had her, and I had a new passion and calling.
Soon thereafter, I moved back to my home state to practice law with another
Christian attorney, Dale S. Ditto, who also had a passion for children and
for adoption work. In fact, he had completed dozens of domestic adoptions,
although he had never worked internationally. With the help of several
other Christians interested in children and adoption, a neonatal intensive
care nurse, a retired state social worker, a computer specialist and
adoptive father, and others, A Helping Hand was born. This led to the
eventual ending of my time "in the law" as my time working with foreign-born
orphans consumed all my time (and more!), whether in adoption or Christian
humanitarian work.
In the intervening years, we are thankful to God for giving us the privilege
of working to change the lives of children one home at a time. Now that
number of children placed in loving homes is nearing the thousands!
Perhaps thousands more have been touched by the love of God through His
people in our outreach work, whether by Friendship Teams, the provision of foster care, or the digging of wells.
Our greatest asset, of course, is our adoptive parents who, I am convinced, are unsurpassed in character and in quality. Each of those adoptive parents are doing the "life-changing." It is our privilege and our simple role to act as the bridge to link the foreign-born child to their doorsteps. It is a function that we pray we are able to perform for hundreds more families and hundreds more children in the coming years.
|
