Book-A-Million! Well, minus a few

I've heard that life changes when you have kids. Everything that once would have seemed abnormal becomes standard. I think this starts to happen even before you have your child, because I'm noticing some changes already. For example, this weekend I had my first incident of "parent rage." It wasn't totally unfamiliar. I mean, I'm familiar with "road rage", "IU game referee rage", and "annoying people at Wal-Mart rage", but this is one of the first times I've ever been angry about something that directly relates to our child.

We went to Books-A-Million in Clarksville to look for an adoption book that we have to read for our agency. We were pretty sure they didn't have it and that we'd need to order it, but we wanted to check. We also figured that, since we had some time, we'd look around at what other adoption books they had both for children and for adoptive parents. After we found the section with parenting books, I started looking through the titles while Ashley went to the next section to look through the children's books. After looking through all the selections we made a discovery, they had nothing. Not one book on adoption for parents. None for adopted children either. It's not that there was a lack of reading material for parents though. There were books on enough diseases, social problems, discipline issues, and parenting philosophies to both educate and scare me to death at the same time.

Here's where the rage hit me. Why not just a few adoption books? Now it's not like I'm expecting every bookstore to have an adoption section, but there were a few titles on the shelves that could have easily be bumped for an adoption book or two. I mean, seriously, do we need 7 different books of baby names? Can't any of these books be replaced with google? And while I certainly am in the target market for "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Fatherhood," I'm not sure anyone would miss it if we replaced it with just one book on adoption.

I didn't go so far as to make a scene in the store (Ashley wouldn't have let me), but I can't help but feel like our society is failing. There are 147 million orphans in the world right now who simply need a loving home. Not a wonder drug to cure some rare disease, just a place to go. If there were an epidemic of 147 million children with broken arms, we'd have this fixed by tomorrow. Governments and citizens across the world would convene and decide that this is a fixable problem and dedicate all their efforts to making sure we solved it. Why can we not do the same for children who need loving homes?

Maybe someday we'll do better. Maybe eventually we'll get to the point that stores don't have adoption books because they sell them out quicker than they can stock them. Maybe we'll take this problem seriously enough that when you type "adopt" into google, the first 4 suggestions aren't about adopting a dog. But that only comes when our society begins to address this issue head on. Our hearts should break for the plight of these orphans. It's my prayer that someday we begin to take this problem seriously and get these children into the loving homes they deserve. And maybe we'll even get them to print a "Complete Idiot's Guide to Adoption" along the way.

ONE MORE THING: Don't forget that we'll be having a soup supper this Saturday, the 23rd, at Westview Christian Church. We'll start eating at 5:30 and enjoy music from members of the Calvary Christian Church praise team, followed by our speaker, Brian Walton, who will begin around 6:30. We're really looking forward to this and can't wait to see all of you there!