“Give us this day our daily bread…” It’s the prayer we say without even thinking about what it really means.

We have enough daily bread in our homes to feed a small army, usually. If not, we can run to the store and pick some up. How many people around the world pray these words in earnest, gut wrenching hunger: “Lord, please give us this day, today, the bread we need to survive another day”?

Why did we adopt from Ethiopia? Because God has given us our daily bread and asked us to share it with others. Because 1 in 10 children in Ethiopia is an orphan. Because this summer, in the Horn of Africa, 29,000 children under the age of 6 died of starvation, and that’s not the first time.

Why adopt at all? God calls us to love and to give and to share our lives with others. The question really should be, “Why not adopt?”

There are 147,000,000 orphans in the world. That’s 147 million children without a family to love them, tuck them in at night, sing songs, read them stories, take them to church, make them laugh, kiss their injuries, celebrate birthdays or feed them their daily bread.

There are 147 million children ready and willing to love a family, to make them laugh, make them cry with complete joy, celebrate Mothers Day and Fathers Day, fight with siblings, play with the family pet, bring home great grades, help set the table, sing songs they learned in Sunday School and eat their daily bread.

The love goes both ways. People always tell us our daughter is so blessed, so lucky. We see it the other way as well. She has blessed us and brought us more joy and love then we ever imagined. She is our daughter and while her skin may be a darker shade of brown than her mom or dad, her heart and her insides are just like ours. Family doesn’t mean you all look just alike, just that you love each other as God loves.  Who is missing from your family? 

Sharon Kirkpatrick Felton and her husband, Keith, live in Hamilton, Texas. They adopted their 3-year-old daughter from Ethiopia in 2009 through Buckner. They have two biological sons who are 10 and 7 years old.