Good News for Russian Orphans

Russell Moore:

Last night I sat at a table in Louisville and watched two ten year-old boys eat ice cream. As my sons devoured the cones I couldn’t help but remember the first time either of them had tasted the stuff. We were in Moscow, only days after my wife and I had adopted the boys, then one year-old. They hated the ice cream, gagging at the taste of it. Things have changed.

As I thought about the Americanization of my sons’ ice cream habits, I thought for a minute about everything else that has changed. These boys, once malnourished and alone in an orphanage, are now members of a family. They hear every day the gospel of Jesus Christ and go to bed every night knowing they are loved. But, right now as I type this, there are 250,000 children, just like Ben and Timothy were, institutionalized in Russian orphanages and group homes. This week brought a glimmer of good news for them.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov signed an accord permitting American citizens to continue to adopt from the former Soviet state. The adoption process there has been threatened for some time due to, most prominently, the shocking abuse of a Tennessee mother who sent her son, adopted from Russia, back alone on a plane because he had “psychological problems.”

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