143 MILLION

That's the number of orphans in the world. (estimated, of course) It's a big number. Children whose parents have died or who have been abandoned. It's a staggering number. Too big to comprehend, really. Let me put it into perspective for you.....

• This number is half the population of the United States.
• If you lined up all the orphans shoulder to shoulder, (1700 per mile), there would be enough children to go around the equator of the world 3 times
• If you drove at 60 miles per hour past this line of children, 24 hours a day, you would still be passing children after 60 days
• Every 18 seconds a child becomes an orphan
  
• In sub-saharan Africa, there are 13 million orphans because of AIDS alone. (predicted to grow to 40 to 50 million AIDS orphans in Africa by 2010)
  
• Every 13 seconds another child is orphaned due to AIDS in Africa.

It's hard to take in. Hard to imagine. Harder yet to imagine that we can even begin to make a difference. None of us alone can make a difference to 143 million children. Why even bother?

Because we can make a difference to one. (or two, or three....) Because God tells us to. Because if we all do it together, we CAN make a difference.
Do you know that approximately 1/3 of Christians contemplate adoption, but only 2% ever do adopt? Do you know how many more children could be helped if more would act on their contemplation? If only 7 percent of the 2 billion Christians in the world would care for a single orphan in distress, there would effectively be no more orphans. All children would have a family.....think about that.
The thing that might be going through your mind right now is something like, "We aren't all supposed to adopt children.".......well, we are all supposed to have some part in taking care of the orphans of this world. Maybe it is to adopt, maybe it isn't. That is between you and God, but I think you will agree that the statistics are mind boggling and something needs to be done.
What will your part be?