I don't know if I can do it

This weekend, I saw an aquaintance from long ago who had just been on a whirlwind trip to several east Asian countries. He shared some pictures with me from the day he went to an orphanage in China. There were 200 children in the orphanage, and 196 of them were girls! One picture was of a room, wall-to-wall with cribs. Each crib had a straw mat in the bottom. Some of the cribs held more than one baby. They were all standing up, looking at the camera with bright, beautiful eyes. All I could do was cry.

I don't know how I am going to manage it when I actually have to go to one of these orphanages. It's too much to think about: I will be taking one home, and leaving behind the other 500,000. It's just too much.

In attempts to make me feel better (which I don't get... Why SHOULD a person "feel better" about that?) But anyway, in attempts to make me feel better, two different people mentioned the starfish story to me. You know the one about the kid on the seashore throwing washed-up starfish back into the sea. Someone says, "you will never be able to save them all." and the kid says "i'll save this one!" as he throws one more back in the ocean.

Yeah, that's a nice story. I feel so much better.

Others want to tell me about how the child we bring home will have an opportunity to hear about Christ blah, blah, blah. Not that that isn't important, but I just don't believe that God needs me to save someone. If they are going to believe, they will... and He doesn't need me to accomplish that. (And this has nothing to do with evangelism, so settle down, folks.)

The fact is that there are half a million babies in China alone who don't have a mom or a dad. That is sad, and I don't want to feel better about it just because we are adopting one. To me, it is like saying that the issue won't matter anymore after we bring her home.