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This coming Sunday is Father's Day. Fathers all over the country will be receiving ties, mugs and cards. Unfortunately, there are millions of children throughout this same country who have no one to give a card to. Either their father's have simply walked out of their lives completely or those children have no idea who their father is. How sad!
It still amazes me that the senior pastor of my church allowed me to beginning working with teen mothers in his church when I had no idea what I was doing. I might not have known how to serve teen mothers, I DID know that God wanted me ... and the rest of His church ... to serve this neglected population.
Yesterday I had the opportunity to meet with two pastors who believe in reaching out to teen mothers. They committed their congregations and their churches' financial support to assisting Teen Mother Choices in serving teen mothers in the Gurnee, Illinois area. I left that meeting totally energized and ready to get back to work. Their responses were so totally different from the one I received from another pastor a while back.
This past week, the Gurnee and Arlington Heights offices of Teen Mother Choices and the week before the Antioch office, held their annual Volunteer Appreciation evenings. These events gave the teen mothers working with Teen Mother Choices the opportunity to say "thank you" to the many volunteers that make this ministry possible. This year, as last year and the years before that, a volunteer approaches me and says,
I've been blessed to have some Godly men in my life. Men like my father, my husband and several other men have brought me, as a woman, closer to God himself. It makes me sad, that so many teen mothers in this country don't have
It happens every Spring. Just as the trees start budding and the flowers start blooming, several teen moms working with TMC offices get ready to "graduate" out of the program. This year, two teen moms are getting ready to leave the Gurnee TMC office.
There are so many parts in the Bible that talk about "taking care of the fatherless and the widows." For those of us who claim that the Bible is our "Basic Instruction Before Leaving Earth" manual, why aren't more of us actually "taking care of the fatherless and the widows?"
It seems hard to believe that yesterday, March 1st, was the 20 year anniversary of Teen Mother Choices. A lot has changed in twenty years. Here in America, we've had 4 different presidents, Pluto ceased to be a planet and personal cell phones are now necessities. Unfortunately, not much has changed for teenage mothers in this country.
