Karen Myers is a board member for Romanian Christian Enterprises.
I got a marketing email in my inbox the other day from a kids’ clothing company. The tagline was “British orphan chic.”
Squeaky clean kids wearing expensive, earth-toned clothes.
If this is the image that “orphan” conjures in our culture, our society has successfully barricaded itself from the reality of what it means to be an abandoned, abused or neglected child.
I think of Robi and Cici, aged five and three, abused by their father, living as runaways in the woods surviving by foraging and communicating between each other using a language they created for themselves.
I think of Ghita, bigger and stronger than the other kids at the orphanage, forced by abusive orphanage staff to exact punishment on his fellow orphans. A gentle soul, Ghita has never fully recovered from that trauma.
I think of Roli, bright and intelligent, with all that potential locked inside with pent-up rage at abuses he can’t fully remember.
The stories of these children who Romanian Christian Enterprises has rescued are numerous and overwhelming and far away from “orphan chic.”
How do we inoculate ourselves from the temptation to romanticize the plight of the weakest members of a society? By listening to their stories and obeying the commands of Christ to act on their behalf.
Throughout Scripture we see the heart of a compassionate God who calls His people to care for the widow and the orphan. Jesus compares their physical and temporal circumstances to our spiritual circumstance.
God incarnate came to put the spiritually broken and lonely in His family. For two and a half decades, Romanian Christian Enterprises has been putting broken lonely orphans in loving Christian families for life. They have plucked one hundred and one precious and amazing children from abusive and neglectful situations out of the darkness into the light in the name of Jesus.
Come to our fall event this year and help us celebrate 25 years of making mercy happen for the ‘least of these’ in Arad, Romania. You will meet and hear the story of YoYo and Bob, two boys who became friends after being rescued into the Darius Houses, and then were adopted as brothers into the Balog family.