To those of you who say, "My body just can't have another baby," o r, "We can't afford it," or, "I am too busy already,"  I say, seek the Lord and He will provide!   You must trust Him to bless you in your faithfulness.  It is not too hard.  It is not too expensive.  If not by birth, then by adoption.  I speak from first-hand experience.  I had one by marriage, five by birth, and have added five through adoption. Our family does not have medical insurance.  We live modestly, yet abundantly.  You can, too.  You should, too.

Jesus said that pure religion is providing for orphans in their distress (James 1:27).   If not you, then who?  It is easy to write checks to the church or para-church ministries for others to do the work.  I say this is something that we should do with our own hands.

Do you remember the scene in the classic movie, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, when the father, children, and Truly Scrumptious enter the dream land and there are no children?  The locals have hidden all the kids to protect them from the child-catcher, who works for the royal couple. It is the royal wife, obviously a high maintenance queen, who doesn't like children, so the kingdom doesn't have any around.

Well, I drove through my old urban neighborhood the other day (we moved from it five years and five kids ago to our farm), and there weren't any children.  It was a beautiful Saturday in Denver, 70 degrees with a slight breeze, and I didn't see a child in sight for miles. I even drove down a few side roads and alleys and didn't see any.  My old neighborhood, once a bastion of stay-at-home moms with 3+ kids in most homes, had been renovated into huge homes on small lots with working adults and no kids.  Chitty was a prophetic movie.

So, where are all the kids?  Well, I know for a fact that there are fewer siblings wherever you go. I rarely see more than two or three children in a family group at Wal-Mart.  My kids used to be the only siblings watching at their brother or sister's soccer games.  Americans have stopped producing.  We are right behind Europe, where a declining birth rate has begun to alarm government officials worried about a growing elderly population. There are a few devout Catholics out there who have four or five children; I know a family with eight.  They are a rarity in a Christian denomination that once promoted large families.

If you are a conservative, 10-Commandments Christian (you believe both the Old and New Testaments are the unerring word of God), then you should, no matter what, be pro-big family. That is what the Bible promoted then, so it must still promote the concept now if God is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.  Are you mad at me yet?  The seniors all seem to like us!  Most of them say quietly in my ear or between the pews that they were from a family of 10, or 13, or something close to a dozen.

So, if your career is more important than your kids; if your new car is more important than a used van that could transport more kids; if you can't imagine relying on hand-me-downs or cooking from scratch, then get over it!  If you don't want to have more children as a sign of a blessed marriage, then take in kids that your state can't find anyone to take. There are usually at least a couple of hundred waiting.   And, they are virtually free--not the thousands of dollars that overseas adoptions or "private" adoptions cost. There are orphans out there dying because Christians won't consider adoption as life is too full of can'ts or won'ts to have a larger family.   Trust me, adopted kids, especially older ones, will test you to the end of your greatest abilities--and then the Lord will make your weakness perfect in His strength and you will receive the blessings He has for you.

I beseech and admonish you to be on your knees in prayer, and in gentle conversation with your husband about what your family--even if no other family you know is doing it--can do about the mess we have created. How can we ask the Lord to bless our nation if we don't do the right thing about our children--who are our future--nd the Lord's blessing for marriage? Maybe if you start, and can convince another family, and they can show another family, and then a whole church, and then a whole community, and then a whole nation…well you get the idea.   Just go, girls…