orphans | Aaron Buer

The Hope For the World

“Nobody cares about orphans in this country. The Christians don’t want to get involved and everyone else pretends they don’t exist” This was the criticism I heard from the director of a Ukrainian para-church organization 3 years ago after spending a heartbreaking and life-changing week with Ukrianian orphans.

I’ve never felt more hopeless than after leaving the orphans I had fallen in love with, knowing that 70% of the girls would end up involved in prostitution and most of the boys would end up in prison or addicted to drugs living on the streets. Who would care for them? Who would lift them out of poverty and hopelessness and teach them how to live. No one.

That was 3 years ago. In my opinion, the game has changed. Along with me in that orphan camp 3 years ago was a Ukrainian pastor named Sasha who, to be honest, seemed to be there against his will. He was the speaker for the camp but he didn’t seem to enjoy it at all. He also seemed rather unwilling to engage the orphan children relationally.

But, when we returned to the camp the following year, he was waiting for us along a bunch of people from his church. There could be no doubt, he was a different person. His entire demeanor was different. He had fallen in love with orphans.

As it turns out, he experienced the same haunting feelings of hopelessness and felt compelled to become more involved in orphan ministry. Here was a man fighting against the cultural tide and leading his church to do the same.

Our second year of ministry with the orphans was amazing because we served as the body of Christ. The Holy Spirit overcame 7 time zones, national borders, and language and cultural barriers to produce amazing camaraderie between Americans and Ukrainians. It was a beautiful experience.

Some of these Ukrainians reordered their entire lives to serve orphans. One young woman began visiting the orphans every weekend. Now she’s teaching cooking classes in the orphan school, developing relationships what will endure as the kids exit the school and enter the real world.

Last month, I returned to Ukraine alongside 23 friends from our church. This time, 25 Ukrainians from 3 different churches met us. The passion of these Ukrainian Christians was deeply evident. They led the way in all aspects of the ministry. In three short years, everything has changed.

A few days after our orphan camp experience, I met a young pastor near Kiev whose passion for orphan ministry blew my mind. I fought back tears as he described how his entire church is training to become mentors for orphan kids. Their church is welcoming the orphans into their community with open arms. They are teaching them vital life skills and connecting them into small groups. The people from this church are setting up ministries at the local technical schools—where the orphans go after their time in the orphanages is complete. The church is even putting on its own summer camp for orphan school graduates. I honestly couldn’t believe what I was hearing. His vision and model for ministry is amazing.

I also met a woman who, because of her orphan camp experience, plans to leave her medical practice and set up a transition home for orphans.

3 years ago I left Ukraine utterly hopeless. I cried for weeks and even experienced terrible nightmares about the bleak futures awaiting these orphan children. This year, I left with a powerful sense of hope.

God is in Ukraine. God is moving in His people and His people are responding. They are loving and equipping orphans. God’s people are doing incredible work. This is the church. The church truly is the hope for the world. When the church does what it was designed to do, it is beautiful, compelling and transformational. I, for one, am very proud to belong to the church of Jesus Christ.

When Injustice Gets Personal Part 4

I believe the Devil is real. Why? Because I have experienced evil.

After winning legal approval to adopt, I contacted the girl we hoped to adopt in order to find out if she in fact wanted to be adopted. As I mentioned previously, I had already developed a relationship with her through 2 mission trips and almost daily communication through Facebook.

After convincing her that we were actually serious, she exploded with joy. She was so excited about being adopted and moving to America. She called us mom and dad and constantly asked about her soon to be brothers and sisters. We put our house up for sale in order to get a bigger house that would accommodate a teenage daughter. We made plans for her schooling. We all got passports and made preliminary travel plans. And then everything blew up.

One day, out of nowhere, our soon to be adopted daughter sent me a long and formal message explaining to me that she was very sorry but she no longer wanted to be adopted. She said that she was Ukrainian and belonged in Ukraine. And that was it. We were shocked. I tried over and over again to convince her that she was making a huge mistake but she would not budge. Her writing style was so different that I was convinced it wasn’t even her.

Desperate for answers I contacted a Ukrainian friend who regularly visited the orphanage in which our prospective daughter lived. Through her, I discovered what had happened. The director of the orphanage had somehow talked her out of being adopted.

In that moment I remember how a girl from the same orphanage had told me that when she was 4 an American couple wanted to adopt her but her orphanage director had told her that the Americans would take her away, kill her and sell her organs. Terrified, the little girl said no to the American couple and 13 years later she still lives in the orphanage.

I learned that over the last decade the director of the orphanage had not permitted a single adoption—not even to Ukrainian couples. Why? Money. He receives money from the Ukrainian government based on how many children are in his school and how many of those children graduate.

Fury can’t adequately describe what I felt. We tried every method possible to change her mind but she would not budge. She would not even discuss it. Then our adoption appointment with the Ukrainian government came and went. Somehow, in spite of all that God had done to open the way for us we had failed. We did not get our precious girl. Now she is too old to adopt and she’ll soon be released from the orphan school to the streets.

What do you do with that? I don’t have many clear answers. The best I can offer is that now I have glimpsed the pain God feels when His children reject Him. Evil clouded our orphan’s judgment and she rejected a family that would have provided her with love, protection and opportunity. In the same way, evil clouds my judgment on a daily basis and I reject God’s best. Out of one of the most painful experiences in my life, perhaps that is the lesson. I’m not sure.

I take comfort in the reality that as much as my heart breaks for this orphan girl, the love I feel doesn’t even compare to God’s love for her. I know that His heart breaks for her too. I trust that He is present in her story and that He will never stop pursuing her.

Somehow in the failure and the pain God is present and He’s not finished.

When Injustice Gets Personal Part 3

I don’t believe in closed doors. I believe in smashing through them. Let me explain:

Growing up in church I repeatedly heard phrases like these:

“I was going to become a [insert occupation] but God closed that door.”

“I am unsure what direction to go but God keeps opening up doors so I keep walking through them.”

“We wanted to get involved with [insert opportunity] but God closed that door.

I was taught that when an opportunity seemed to close it was a sign from God that I needed to move in a different direction. If this is true, what we are saying is, “If it’s hard then it must not be God’s will.” This doesn’t jive with the practices of the early church at all. At the risk of offending people, I think the open/closed door concept is bad theology and a terrible way to make decisions. If we had taken this approach in our pursuit of adoption we would have given up after a few hours.

Because we knew jack-nothing about adoption, one of the first things we did was call a large and reputable American adoption agency. An agent explicitly told me that the girl we wanted to adopt was too old and it would be impossible to adopt her. Disappointed, I called the branch of the US government that processes international adoptions and was told that the adoption was impossible because by law the adoption needed to be complete before the girl’s 16^th birthday which was only 2 ½ months away. There just wasn’t enough time.

The door had closed. I was distraught. I went for a run to process the news. Was God telling us that adoption wasn’t His will for us? I don’t think that’s how God works. We already knew God’s feelings on injustice and orphans in particular. We weren’t out of bounds in pursuing adoption. I believe that sometimes God allows us to run into a closed door so that we can experience His power when He smashes through it. And so we decided to do some smashing.

As my feet pounded out the last leg of my run, I decided that we would not take no for an answer. If it meant flying to Ukraine and bribing government officials we would do it. Be warned, this is the sort of crazy behavior that happens when injustice moves from abstract ideas to real relationships.

And so, I kept pushing and calling and eventually found the loophole we needed. Because of the audacious determination of a pastor and his wife in Colorado, there was an addendum to American adoption law that would permit us to adopt an older orphan. I guess that couple doesn’t believe in closed doors either.

So here’s my challenge: pay no attention to closed doors. If you’re pursuing something that you already know God cares about and if your community is behind your pursuit don’t give up! Smash through that door! If you’ve recently smashed through a closed door I would love to hear about it.

Tomorrow I’ll finish this series by sharing how everything fell apart.

Photo by percivalsmithers

When Injustice Gets Personal Part 2

Crazy is uncomfortable. We in suburban America like safe and normal. There are social penalties to doing things that rock the boat. You get talked about and people say things like, “Bless your heart,” which when translated from Christianese means, “You’re an idiot!”

I’ve discovered that when you tell someone that you’re going to adopt an orphan teenager they usually try to talk you out of it. Go ahead, try it for yourself and see how people respond. People will tell you that you’re putting your family in danger. They’ll tell you horror stories of adoptions that were so bad that the parents tried to send the kids back. They’ll tell you that you don’t have enough money. They’ll tell you that older orphans are irreversibly damaged.

I understand that one of the key functions of good community is to help us process decisions and uncover blind spots in our thinking. Our community and family helped us immensely in these ways during our adoption process. In fact, every family member and close friend immediately or eventually supported our adoption which helped confirm our decision. And yet, outside of our inner circle, I could sense immense skepticism and discomfort.

Christians in the West—specifically, suburban mega-church American Christians like me–have replaced normal with abnormal. In the early church, crazy was normal. The first generations of Jesus followers were known for extraordinary acts of compassion and love.

Throughout the ancient Roman world, human life was not valued. Unwanted babies were left to die in “baby dumps” outside the city gates. The early Christians opposed this practice and were known to rescue these babies and raise them as their own.

When plague struck Caesarea in the early 4^th century everyone who could fled the city. However, the Christian community stayed behind and put themselves at risk to care for the sick and dying. The sacrificial love of the early Christians is well documented. We could tell stories for days.

Throughout history, when Christianity has been at its best, it has been characterized by radical compassion and sacrificial love. It has never been by any other influence that Christianity has spread and become stronger. However, when Christians get comfortable we lose our influence (Andy Stanley has spoken powerfully about this phenomenon).

My point is this: attempting to adopt a child who is at risk of sex trafficking should be considered normal behavior for Christians. But instead, normal has become comfort and luxury. We love to talk about sacrificial love but we rarely act in sacrificial love. And please understand I’m talking about myself as much as anyone else. It took 17 years of following Jesus before I ever acted on radical compassion and sacrificial love. I’m not exactly the poster boy for my argument.

The thing is, stepping out in faith and actually doing something crazy in the name of Jesus has been exhilarating. My faith has exploded and God has met me and my family in so many ways. Maybe it’s because that kind of love can only come from the heart of God.

So if your faith is stuck, find a place to serve. Give something away. Get more involved in a ministry at your church or a local mission. Support a child through Worldview or Compassion International or start looking into adoption. By loving sacrificially your faith will grow and so will the influence of the church of Jesus Christ

photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ihhinsaniyardimvakfi/

When Injustice Gets Personal

A few years ago injustice was transformed from an abstract word to a gut wrenching reality complete with faces, names and heartbreaking stories. I’ve seen a lot of pain but nothing prepared me for how children neglected by parents and an entire society would change the trajectory of my life.

Two summers ago I found myself in a camp full of teenage orphans in rural Ukraine. These orphans had been dumped in this camp by their orphan schools for the summer. They were provided with beds, some of the worst food I’ve ever tasted and a handful of university students as their camp counselors. There was no program, no activities, and no school. You can imagine the outcome.

In this camp I found children desperate for attention and love because of years of neglect and rejection. I found beautiful young women, the vast majority of which, either because of desperation or trafficking would someday find themselves enslaved in prostitution. I found rambunctious teenage boys who would most likely end up as addicts or incarcerated.

And yet, in the midst of such hopelessness, despite my best intentions I fell desperately in love with the kids I met. In the midst of overpowering darkness, love took root in my heart. Somehow, in the span of a week I bonded with the kids. And as I opened up my heart to them, I began to glimpse the incredible compassion that God feels for me.

Upon returning to the USA I fell into a deep depression. I cried constantly. I lost my motivation for my job. I had nightmares about orphan children and I could not get them out of my head.

I struggled for a year. And then I went back to Ukraine and did it all over again—the same hopelessness, the same heartbreaking emotions and the same disorienting reentry.

And so, as followers of Jesus, my wife and I decided to do something. How, after experiencing something like that could I pretend it didn’t happen? How could I pretend those kids didn’t exist? How could I go back to normal? That is the power of experiencing injustice.

While wrestling through these ideas, I heard Reggie Joiner say something like this, “Do for one what you wish you could do for many.” Obviously, we couldn’t fix the orphan problem. Nor could we change the fact that 70% of orphan girls are pulled into the sex trade. But, we could offer hope to one. What if we adopted one orphan?

And so we began praying and asking people for advice. I repeatedly asked myself this question, “Is this God’s Will?” But, in light of Bible verses like James 1:27, I already knew what God’s will is. He’s already stated it clearly throughout the Bible. “Care for orphans.” God is for adoption. He adopts people every day.

We didn’t need a sign or some sort of mystical confirmation. It’s already there in God’s Word. And so we acted. We poured our hearts and souls into adoption. We gave an astronomical amount of time, resources and determination into offering hope to one orphan girl.

Over the next few days, I’d like to tell the story of what happened—how God showed up, what we learned and how our hearts were broken.