Do you remember lying in the dark, eyes glued to the clock, your 7-year-old arms and legs trembling with anticipation?  Waiting for the moment you were allowed to get up on Christmas morning? For me, the Year of the Atari stands out. But I also remember socks.  The Lipstick Years, my mom named that era.  The time when things were tight, when we chopped wood to heat the house, and she bought herself one lipstick in two years. As I grow older, I understand more and more the sacrifices that both sets of my parents made for me and my […]

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Imagine you are….. abandoned at three days old found in a trash can raised in a Soviet orphanage abused repeatedly by an adoptive father found freezing on the winter streets of St. Petersburg thrown in jail beaten and abused by peers forced to carry the body a young friend to the outskirts of town for burial institutionalized If I had experienced only one or two of these events, I’d break.  Fall apart.  IF I survived it, I’d need years of expensive therapy to recover even slightly. My friend Alex lived through all of this before he reached fifteen. Today, Alex […]

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Designed for anyone who is called to love and care for the orphan, the Together for Adoption Chicago conference is coming up next month. Registration is only $15 for a full-day conference, and includes lunch!  Register now at www.chicagoadoption.org

According to the UN World Food Programme and UNICEF, almost 18,000 children die every day from hunger. For the third year, Pathway Community Church opened its doors to Feed My Starving Children, an organization that harnesses the power of community to, well, feed starving children. Members of LifeBridge, Pathway, and a number of community groups volunteered in 2-hour shifts beginning on Thursday, and together, packed 404,568 meals this weekend. That will feed 1,108 kids for a year. If you do the math, you’ll find that statistic is based on one meal a day.   One meal a day. One. Even though […]

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I hope everyone will indulge me for today……I have to brag on my precious friends in our small group.  This weekend, we put on a fundraiser for Bill and Sara.  Totally done, idea-to-event, in under three weeks. Now, when I say “we,” I mean the collective we of our small group….I can’t take credit for much of anything, because, well, I didn’t really do much. In contrast, Tess O’Day is my new heroine.  Not that she wasn’t before, but over the past couple of weeks, I’ve remembered that impossible is simply not in this girl’s vocabulary.  She rises to a challenge.  She […]

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