Daring to be Restless

As long as I can remember, both my sister and I have wanted to adopt. Throughout our childhood, our favorite movies and books have always centered around adoption – adopted characters, misfit families of people who weren’t related but became “family” when they needed it most.   It’s no surprise that our favorite Bible verses have been adoption verses as well, verses like Psalm 68:5-6, where God says that He is the Father of the fatherless, who places the lonely in families. Perhaps that’s why Russia has always been on our hearts, a place of interest to us both.   I even studied Russian for a year in college, soaking up the language and dreaming of the people there.   According to some reports, there are over 700,000 orphans in Russia alone, living in more than 2,176 orphanages or on the streets – and the numbers are rising each year.   The outcomes for these children are particularly grim, most of them “aging out” of the orphanages around the age of 16 or 17 and facing life with