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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Tom Evans

The Pursuit of One

I want to just share with you a little background about my family.

When my wife and I were dating, she told me she wanted to have 10 children.

So anyway, this is a photo, a recent photo of some of our children, but this is our son Andre.

This was a photo taken about 2 years ago.

But Andre is now a sophomore at Southern studying education.

He's a junior business major at Southern.

So we adopted both Daniel and Andres from an orphanage in Latvia.

We met them when they were 5 and 7 years old.

We hosted them for summer, for Christmas in our homes a number of times, and then they became available for adoption, and so we began that process.

And As I shared last night, as we got close to that process happening, we discovered that Andres, the youngest boy there, was battling leukemia.

We were told by the time he came home with us that he was in remission, but that was by Latvian standards, not US standards.

And so that leukemia came back with a vengeance.

We were able to have a bone marrow transplant done, very painful process, very long process.

Initially it looked like it was successful, then that too failed and he had another relapse.

And on April 13 of last year, our youngest son passed away.

1 of the things that I shared last night is that something so beautiful, 1 of the most beautiful hearts I've ever seen, this boy.

And there in the hospital, it didn't matter the pain he was going through, he was always trying to cheer someone else up.

And he would tell them that he would pray for them.

And I remember there in the hospitals, he has all of these cords and IVs and all these things hooked up to him.

He still kept on his wristband for Operation Child Rescue and Child Impact.

And he said when he grew up, he wanted to adopt.

So you see him here making a half of a heart with his hand.

When a nurse would come into the room, she knew her job was the first thing before anything else was to complete the heart.

And then he would take her hand and kiss her hand.

And so as he was passing away, the room filled up with the medical staff, the nurses, the doctors, and tears on their faces as this boy had touched their heart in a very special way.

What Andres did not know and will not know until heaven is that our family continued that dream, that vision that he had for his life to someday grow up and adopt.

And we began the adoption process again for 2 beautiful girls, 2 orphan girls who lost their mother.

Father had abandoned them about 6 years ago and they've been growing up in a safe home, a group home in Bulgaria, but had a dream of having a family, hoping someday that someone would adopt them.

Now I wanna just share with you that when it comes to adoption, many times most people want to have a baby.

Because perhaps they can't have children or they want to have the experience of raising a child from the very beginning.

What that means is that older children and particularly sibling groups have a hard time finding families.

In fact, they often come to the point where they are almost without hope, where it's too late, where no 1 will adopt them.

And so, these are the kids we want to adopt.

Because for our family, it's not about us.

We're not adopting for our emotional needs or because of some dream that we have for our lives to raise a baby up.

And so that is a completely different mindset that we go into this with.

So we want to find the kids that have the greatest needs.

And that is, those are siblings that are older.

And so we have a 10-year-old girl and a 16-year-old girl that we're adopting from Bulgaria.

We've been able to travel over and meet them.

We can hardly wait to bring them home, which we think will be no later than January.

In fact, yesterday I mailed the final piece of paperwork.

I mailed the final piece of paperwork off to our adoption agency yesterday from Los Angeles.

We just wait on Bulgaria to do their final paperwork and we'll be able to bring them home.

But amazing girls and as we've begun the process and we've gotten closer, they've allowed us to have a monthly video call with a translator and so on.

And a couple months ago, Angelina, the 10-year-old, was very excited because she had learned a few English words that she wanted to practice with us.

Do you have any guess what word she chose to learn first?

In order, I want to share with you how she shared with us her mastery of the English language, okay?

This is her choice, this is what she wanted to say, what she wanted to learn.

Second word was actually sister and brother and then I got number 4 at Father.

So, should have put it in the right order.

But those were the words she wanted to learn.

And it reminded me of this beautiful passage from scripture, a father to the fatherless.

And a defender of widows is God in His holy habitation.

For those that are lonely, for those that are isolated, for those that are orphaned?

God wants you to become a family for those that are orphaned, for those that are lonely, for those that are solitary.

That is his dream for you, for his people to step into that gap and make a difference for these precious children.

And so I'm so excited that God has opened the doors for this.

My wife is now telling me that God is impressing her that the next children we need to adopt would be a sibling group of 4.

But if God opens those doors and indicates that that's what He wants us to do.

We're not in this world to have a comfortable life.

We're here to invest in things that will last.

And I believe, as I've looked at all the best investments that we can make here on this earth, I believe investing in a child is 1 of the very best investments we can make because they have their whole life ahead of them.

And my wife and I consider this to be a tremendous blessing.

And it's exhausting sometimes, but it is a blessing.

All right, so I want to tackle our message for this morning entitled, The Pursuit of 1.

I want to begin by asking you to finish a phrase for me that I shared last night with the group.

That is the challenge when it comes to the issue of human trafficking globally.

Because we don't see it, we don't often experience visually seeing somebody who is being trafficked.

Because it's out of sight for us, it's out of our mind.

And unfortunately, the Seventh-day Adventist Church has done very little to address this problem of human slavery globally.

In fact, there's more slavery today than at any time in Earth's history.

It is, the numbers are at 50 million, and just to put that in context, the population of California's around 40 million.

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The Pursuit of One

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