Helping Orphans and Widows
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
Helping orphans and widows is for every Christian. When I finally realized this truth years ago, I tried to find manageable ways to do that. I honestly didn’t know any orphans to help. One of the ways I discovered a few years ago, was a website called Rainbow Kids. Rainbow Kids is an orphan listing that sends email updates on various orphans all over the world who are in need of a loving home and a forever family. Whenever I receive an email, I pray for the child and then delete the email. Easy ministry! Be warned though, both of my adopted children came to us as a result of Rainbow kids! We all can do things like this. Prayer is one of the most powerful and most underused tools of ministry.
We have also had great joy in “adopting” children from Compassion International. I don’t know the percentage of these children that are orphans, but they are in great need, nonetheless. At one point, we supported the amount of children we had. At the time, we had five children, two girls and three boys. So we signed up for two girls and three boys from Compassion. We let the children help us decide the geographical location we wanted to support. We chose Latin American countries because we had been on mission trips in those places. It was a great experience for the children to correspond and pray for their friend in another country.
We have also had great blessing in “helping” widows in our neighborhood, although the truth is they have helped us much more. I confess that I haven’t done enough in this area. But a few simple ideas are:
Double your soup recipe and take a portion to a widow. It doesn’t have to be fancy, but the gesture will be appreciated.
Pick a handful of spring flowers and take them to a widow. They don’t receive as many flowers as they used to.
Show up to help them put up or take down Christmas decorations. Those simple pleasures can be great burdens when one is alone.
Send your older children to help rake leaves in the fall. It will teach your children to serve and work hard, and will be a great blessing to all involved.
I think the main thing is to be willing to serve those who need help. I know that if my kids or I were in that position, I would hope someone would remember and come to our rescue. Not everyone is called to adopt. But if we call ourselves Christians we should keep our faith pure and faultless by helping those in need. Tell the Lord you are willing and He will send simple opportunities your way.
As for the third part of that verse, keeping ourselves unpolluted by the world, that can be another post in itself. This week, ask the Lord how to help widows and orphans. You will be blessed and so will they.
