Love Orphans on Giving Tuesday
Today is Giving Tuesday! Not many of you know this, but one of our FAVORITE days all month is the day we decide where our “leftover tithe” is going to go. See, we have a certain percentage of our income we give to the church and “regular” giving to specific organizations, but there is a little money left over each month that gets earmarked for just our special date, where we’ll go to a coffee shop together and talk about how we want to give the “extra” that month.
One of the biggest conversations we had at the beginning of our adoption process was whether or not we would continue to give regularly to all the people and organizations we love so dearly. After all, we could pay off our adoption loan really fast if we just saved the money we usually give away instead! But we realized we love it too much.
And we realized as passionate as we are about adoption, we’re even more passionate about the larger picture of orphan care. We’re passionate about supporting families, about supporting organizations who provide jobs and life skills to keep families together and prevent kiddos becoming orphaned in the first place. We’re passionate about the “in-between” work, about organizations who provide surgeries, foster care, and food to kiddos waiting for their forever families, just so that no child has to go even a single day feeling unloved or unwanted.
So today, on this Giving Tuesday, we’d like to share with you some of our very favorite people and organizations caring for orphans! We feel so strongly about these guys we give regularly to the work they are doing. So we hope you’ll pray and give today too, friends.
LOVE WITHOUT BOUNDARIES
https://www.lovewithoutboundaries.com
We can’t speak highly enough about Love Without Boundaries! LWB is a non-profit organization providing food, education, loving “families,” and medical services to kiddos in China, Cambodia, India, and Uganda. Gideon was our first sponsored child through LWB back in 2014, and we haven’t stopped loving them since! We currently sponsor a kiddo in the foster program and one in the medical program. We get monthly updates about “our” babies, and we celebrate every time we get news that another little one has graduated out of medical care or been adopted! Our current kiddos are Laurie (medical) and Catey (foster care), but so far we’ve been able to celebrate with Gideon (graduated to heaven), Lillian, Landon, Sterling, Hadley, and Christine.
The thing we love most about LWB though? The Unity Initiative Fund! This super important program provides medical care to kiddos of impoverished families so that one less child becomes orphaned due to lack of medical care. To see these families grow and thrive has been one of the biggest blessings of our lives.
We may be a little biased because sponsoring Gid directly led to our adoption process and the journey to our Gideon. But we love these guys SO much!
BETHEL CHINA
Gosh, we love these guys too! Bethel China is an organization loving on kiddos who are blind or mostly blind. They offer foster care and early interventions for kiddos who otherwise wouldn’t have therapy or advocacy to find a forever family in routine institutional care. We currently sponsor Shirley, who is one of the most precious human beings on the planet (AND paper-ready for adoption, you people 30+ years old)! We absolutely adore the work Bethel China is doing and hope to adopt through them one day!
ONE MISSION SOCIETY – JOSH AND JESSICA WILLIAMSON
https://onemissionsociety.org/give/TheWilliamsons4
Josh and Jessica Williamson (and their daughter Hosanna) are three of our favorite people as well! They are currently caring for orphans, particularly those who are uniquely-abled, in Taiwan, and they plan to stay for the long haul (Josh’s family is there with OMS as well). Day in and day out, Josh and Jessica work with orphanages, with the government to help advocate for better policies, and with Taiwanese families to help build up a foster care network! They are also passionate about starting an orphan movement within the Church in Taiwan, changing the culture so that orphan care becomes “normal” within Christian circles. You can support their work directly below.
SHOW HOPE
Show Hope is kinda the gold standard in the adoption world! They are seriously incredible, and they cover the whole scope of orphan care! They help families stay together. They provide medical and foster care to orphaned kiddos around the world. They provide AMAZING grants to adoptive families (y’all, they gave us $5000 for our adoption and $1500 for Brian's TBRI training!). They support adoptive and foster families both pre-and-post adoption (check out the Empowered to Connect conference if you want to change your life). And they are just stellar people all around. Check ‘em out.
WORLD VISION
Last but not least is World Vision. I know, I know, they had some controversy a few years back, but the work they do to help communities become self-sufficient and families stay together is awesome. We sponsor two little boys we love dearly, and we write letters back and forth a few times a year. Abishek is excelling in school, and Akshay is blind but one of the best artists you’ve ever seen. We’ve covered their faces because they are in a protected area of the world, but their faces are so beautiful! Their hearts are too. :)
GIDEON'S ADOPTION
Honestly – we mean this with all our heart – if you are going to support just one organization or family today, we’d love for you to pick one of the five we’ve chosen above! But if you’d rather help Gideon come home, the links to our Bonfire campaign (t-shirts) and our Stars for Gideon project are below too. Love you all!
Bonfire: https://www.bonfire.com/gideons-tribe/
Stars for Gideon: https://forgideon.com/200-stars-for-gideon/
