Itsara

In talking to people, I realized that we had made a fairly significant decision that we neglected to update you on. In truth, it’s not really a change in vision. A better word might be reclarification.

As most of you know, we came out here with the intention of starting our own orphanage. Knowing very little about how to do that, we chose to start working with Im Jai House in order to learn, with the idea that we would eventually leave in order to do what we came here to do. For a time, we had thought we would be house parents at Im Jai instead, but that didn’t happen. With Sandra, we pulled out almost entirely from the kids of Im Jai House. But we have learned a lot during our time at Im Jai – especially with the contrast of parenting Sandra versus what we were doing with the kids at Im Jai.

We have seen the institution style of raising children, and we are experiencing what it means to parent a child. Our hearts are very much with the latter. What we want to do is to take care of the children God gives us as we would our own, including adoption whenever possible.

Obviously there is a limit as to how many children we can take care of in this manner. We couldn’t provide love and parenting to 50 children at once! So the other part of our vision is to teach others with similar hearts to do what we do. We’ll see how much that changes in the future and what God does with it. He’ll have to bring us people to teach, I imagine.

I want to add that I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with the institutional method. It just has different strengths. An institution is capable of giving food, education, and (ultimately) opportunity to a large amount of children who wouldn’t otherwise get it. But personally, I don’t think that institutions are the best way to teach children to love God and love others. Conversely, the parenting method that we want to implement is limited in how many kids it can reach, but those children receive a higher quality of life – not in terms of food or material goods, but in terms of love.

Like I said, this isn’t really a major change, but when we were home a lot of people would ask us when we were going to start our orphanage. So our answer is that we’ve already started it, but it’s not really an orphanage. It’s a family.