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Why do I minister to orphans? (A.Zhdankina)
Hello there, my name is Angelina, I'm 30 years old, and I have three wonderful children. I thank and praise Almighty God for giving me the opportunity to not only love my own children and see how beautiful and wonderful they are, but to love other children, as well.
Specifically, He has given me the chance to shower love upon children living in orphanages, children’s shelters, and other such places. For me, this is truly an honor. I can see just how much these children need our love, our hugs, our attention and our support. I don’t know if I could have ever seen this so clearly if I didn’t have my own children… I might have never understood just how much children really need us.
Most of my work in the orphanage is with the older age group ( 7th-9th grade). However, God has blessed me with a younger class to work with as well. The children are 8-9 years old.
Recently, I was in that class, teaching through a lesson called “Do we have anything to thank God for?” When I asked them that question, they looked back at me with such unhappiness on their faces, surprised that I would even ask them such a thing that for a moment, their obvious answer flashed through my mind as well, and I too thought ‘of course they have nothing to thank God for.’ Their homeroom teacher happened to be sitting in on that lesson, and I could just see the silent question in her eyes: “Who are you and what do you think you know about us, anyway?”
I decided that they simply needed a little assistance in broadening their perspective and the way they were looking at their own lives. So…I began asking a few questions to prompt them to see things a bit differently. I asked them if they had anything to eat, if they had clothes to wear, did their dormitory roof leak on them when it rained in the night… and the light began to dawn. I could write pages and pages about that lesson and our time of sharing together. By the end of the lesson, we had come to see how much these children actually had. Their eyes began to twinkle as their mood lightened; they kept remembering one thing after another that they were grateful for, yelling out the answers, interrupting one another as they kept seeing how much that God had really given them.
They had not even suspected how rich they truly were. They had had no idea how much they had for which they could be grateful to their Creator. At the end of the lesson, we all joined hands and spent quite a while thanking God for what He has given us. This time, even the children who don’t usually pray joined in… I think that it must have made God so happy to hear their simple prayers of thanks. Their homeroom teacher just sat there with her eyes full of tears, it seemed that she was ashamed to have not seen how rich she really was, how God has blessed her every bit as much as each of her students.
You know, if even these unfortunate children have so much to thank God for, then we have no reason to complain at all. If anything, we should find ourselves thanking God, with hearts overflowing with gratitude much, much more often than we do.