A family of color

I have been super busy lately. Last weekend I went to Oahu to celebrate my friends' birthdays. Both Rachel Snyder and Maria Daughtry have the same birthday so we had to do something fun to celebrate. I have also been working really hard on my Buddhism project that was due on Monday. I am actually doing my presentation on it tonight. So with my trip and all my studying, I have slacked off on my blog. I want to write about some things that stuck out to me in our lectures last week.

Our speaker was a guy named Ray, who used to be a college professor and who's traveled all over. He had a lot of wisdom to share as he taught us about Cross-Cultural Communications. One point he made was that Christians are so quick to tell people not to get abortions, but what are they doing to help those babies? He told stories of working in inner-city Chicago and how people would have given up their babies for adoption to good Christian people, if there had been some willing to adopt them. He said often Christians want to adopt from other countries but not our country. This is especially true of minority children. Christians need to stand up and give these kids good homes.

Ray definitely has an authority in this area since he has 7 adopted kids of his own. He has also placed about 24 kids into homes without going through an agency. One really cool thing about Ray's family is that it's multi-ethnic. He calls it a "family of color." I may not get them all right but he has a daughter from Eastern Europe, a son from the Philippines, a child from Ecuador, 3 African American kids and one native American kid. It's really inspiring. One really cool thing is that his two oldest kids now have adopted families of their own. They too, chose not to have biological children and instead adopted kids of varying nationalities as well. This shows that they believed in what their parents did in raising them and wanted to give that to other kids in need. So cool!

It's also pretty cool that Ray never had to go through an expensive adoption agency. Adoptions, especially overseas, can cost tens of thousands of dollars. People would often just give him kids. I would like to adopt someday and would definitely prefer that someone give me a kid instead of paying thousands for one. I am so inspired by Ray's story.