Defining Moments

In a one week period this month, Mama Carmen welcomed 15 children into the Casa Hogar Sion family. Five of the most recent children to come to live at this orphanage in Tijuana, Mexico are Felipe (11 years old), Mario (10 years old), Jon Carlos (6 years old), Lupe (5 years old), and Rubi (age unknown 1-2 years old). Some of these children will live their lives with no memories of what life was like before coming to live at the orphanage. However, some of these children are old enough that they will remember the day they first came to the orphanage. The first day at Casa Hogar Sion will mark a defining moment in their lives.

Each of us can recall defining moments from our past. Moments after which your life changed and would never be the same. Some of these moments were filled with pain and sorrow. Some of these moments were filled with joy and celebration.

I remember the defining moment when the Lord placed a burden on my heart for a group of children I had never seen. This burden led to a vision of the ministry of Seeds for the Fatherless. The responsibility that came with this vision placed a demand on my life, my time, and my priorities. I have been blessed and encouraged by the number of people who have decided to embrace this vision to honor Jesus Christ by sharing His love by caring for the physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of the orphaned, abandoned, and fatherless children close to home and far away.

Little Rubi's life will be forever changed because she has been taken in by Mama Carmen and Jorge to live at Casa Hogar Sion. Not all of us will be able to go visit her and the many other children like her living in the thousands of orphanages around the world. We are not all called to go to foreign countries, but Seeds believes we are all called to help these children. "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world" (James 1:27, NIV). We may not all be called to go, but we are all called to help.

The Pruning Shears of Truth

When we have the opportunity to speak into the lives of children, we must avoid the danger of being overly critical, which can lead to hopelessness and self-deprecation. But we also must avoid the danger of lavishing false praise, which can lead to arrogance and an unrealistic sense of self-importance and self-efficacy. Perhaps more than anyone else, children need to hear the truth in love. But if they don't see, hear, and know your love for them, then the truth they hear may not be true at all.

How many father-son and father-daughter relationships have been destroyed, not by what was said, but by what was heard? What if these fathers had planted the seed of love and cultivated it before planting the seed of truth?

Truth spoken into a heart filled with pain, shame, doubt, fear, and insecurity is ripe for rejection unless the child hears the love in the truth being spoken. Truth spoken in love and received by children who know they are loved is ripe to yield the fruit of godly change.

If you grow the tree with love, when the time comes to separate the bad fruit from the good fruit, the pruning shears of truth are less likely to destroy the tree.