Guest post by Shelly Roberts.
During our years as church-planting missionaries in rural America, God took us on two adoption journeys. The first was domestic, the second int’l. It was during our second adoption that Stamp a Child Home was birthed.
Since we didn’t have a dollar to our name to put towards our second adoption, we prayed for God to show us what He wanted us to do to help raise the funds. We weren’t afraid of hard work. That had been proven in our first adoption. Our three young sons were well-known around our small town as they did all sorts of odd jobs to help raise the needed money. But our second adoption would take us to a whole new level. It would become an intensive test of endurance and faith {and plain ole stinkin’ hard work!}.
I made cards. During our first adoption I had set up a booth at the local harvest fair to sell them for our adoption. I remember making a total of 50 bucks. From that, an idea blossomed of taking that vision and launching it on a much greater scale. Each month gals would come to my home for classes on hand-made cards and paper crafting. I began using the money from those classes to purchase supplies and launching “Stamp a Child Home” {SaCH for short}. For about a year … many of the days being 10-12 hours of production in one way or other, we labored. It was a family affair. A couple of our sons were good at assembly. Another was great at counting and packaging. Each card would be hand made, packaged and shipped all over the country. Each package would have a label of our family blog where they could learn about our journey. Whoever wasn’t creating or assembling was helping keeping us all fed and laundered. It required extreme teamwork.
During a few times over those long and rigorous months, I remember breaking down … feeling like I couldn’t possibly go on. You see we were considered a “low income family”. There would be no tax refund at the end of the long journey like there are for so many these days. Since we were self-employed and didn’t even make enough money for taxable income we were completely ON OUR OWN. Not completely though. We knew that the God who called us would be FAITHFUL. I remember weeping one afternoon, as my hands were feeble and weary …. “Lord, I can’t go on!”. “You must”, He whispered to my spirit …. your daughter is laying in an orphanage across the world somewhere COUNTING on you to go on! I’d never before been so humbled. How could “I” possibly COMPLAIN of how hard this journey was? All that Jesus had already done for ME. And so we pressed on. I would often go back to the words of Eugene Allison, founder of the ABBA Fund, “These children have WORTH and they are WORTH working HARD for!”. Amen and Amen.
Friends took packets to every place they could think of. I took on many special orders of personalized design work. This was all BEFORE the amazing network we have today through Facebook. Oh what a dream that would have been! Back then we couldn’t even mention “fund raising” on our adoption blog! Even so, we ended up raising a little over $10,000 with the SaCH project. Glory be to HIM who is able to exceedingly and abundantly more than we could ever imagine.
Shelly is a dedicated wife and mother of five blessings from around the globe. She is known for being an encourager, prayer warrior and advocate for the Fatherless. She is the author of “31 Days of Hope” – a devotional for adoptive parents. While serving with the ABBA Fund, Shelly strives not only to see children be placed in families, but for those families to thrive. She blogs at reachingheartsblog.com and is also a women’s speaker and enjoys traveling all over the US, bringing inspiring insight to impact and encourage all who hear.