Busting Up Boulders

Just like there’s more than one way to skin a cat, there’s more than one way to break up a boulder (like the one pictured above).  A jackhammer of some sort is ideal, but what if one is not available?  In Jamaica and Haiti, where heavy equipment and power tools are most often not available or affordable, workers use an interesting method that involves the following steps: 

• digging a trench around the rock
• covering it with charcoal and allowing it to burn until the rock is fiery hot
• dousing it with cold water to hopefully break the large rock into smaller, moveable pieces.  

When I learned of this technique, I couldn’t help but think how much starting an orphan care ministry is like that.  The boulder is the enormity of the need -- at least 140 million orphans in the world by the most conservative estimates.  There is no jackhammer big enough to do the job of providing each of them a loving home with parents to care for them.  So what do we do, just concede that the boulder is too big and can’t be moved?  God’s Word simply does not allow for that.  He commands His church to minister to orphans, so we look for other ways to break up the boulder.

I am very grateful for men and women and organizations who have done the work of breaking up the biggest rock.  They have done much of the preliminary hard work of creating opportunities for others to get involved., but there is still much to do.  Many of the rocks are still very big and need exploding further.  The question for us, especially as churches, is this: How big a part can we play in the movement (and I hate to call it that, like just another social cause) to care for the world's fatherless children?  How big a rock can we chip away at? 

The people who helped get the ministry of 4theVoiceless off the ground believed we could take a good-sized piece of the bigger boulder and learn how to most effectively chip away at it.  We have chipped away some fragments, and we have seen some significant pieces fall away.  For instance, we have spent considerable time and space in this corner of the blogosphere talking about our Hope for Haiti campaign, an effort to raise $35,000 to build a permanent building for the House of Abraham orphanage in Jacmel, Haiti.

However, the smaller pieces are no less significant.  There’s the call I got yesterday from one of the widows in our church, getting clarification on the purpose of the forthcoming 4theVoiceless cookbook to benefit our adoption fund.  She is aggressively gathering recipes for us from the senior adult Sunday school classes.  There’s another conversation I had with a lady in our community who wants to adopt but doesn’t even know where to begin, so someone put her in touch with me.

If you are not currently involved in caring for orphans in some practical way, explore how you can get involved.  If you are a part of a church that is not moving toward the command of James 1:27 to minister to orphans, we need you to take your rock and chip away at it (under the authority of your church leadership).  It doesn’t take a large budget; 4theVoiceless started with zero dollars.  It doesn’t take a multitude of connections; most of the people who have been a great help to us we met after we began to move toward God’s command.  It doesn’t take a huge team; we have operated with a handful of dedicated people.  You don’t have to have a dynamic leader for your ministry; I am not being falsely humble when I say that my personality is not exactly magnetic.  But know this: none of those things determine the success of an orphan care ministry.  The great God of the universe, the Father to the fatherless, and the owner of all the resources on Earth (not to mention Earth itself) will guide you to break up more of the boulder that is the needs of the world’s orphans than you could possibly imagine.  Just move and see.

Thanks for reading,
Al