Choosing to SEE - Mary Beth Chapman [35]
But we couldn’t find what we were looking for. We began to prayerfully consider starting something ourselves. It wasn’t like we didn’t already have enough to do. Our lives were crazy . . . but this idea stayed with us, so we connected with various people who had the same vision.
In September 2001, Steven and I were chosen by the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute to receive their annual National Angel in Adoption award. At the time, an amazing woman named Kerry Hasenbalg was serving as the executive director. On September 10, the night before the event, we got together with Kerry and her husband Scott, along with other friends, to talk, dream, and pray about how we might do something to help the orphans and vulnerable children in the world.
The next morning, September 11, Steven woke up early to do an interview with CNN. We even had a meeting scheduled with President Bush later in the day to talk about orphan care and adoption.
When Steven returned from his interview at CNN, we sat down at a table in our hotel restaurant to have breakfast. Suddenly there was a news report that a plane had crashed into one of the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York. We watched the television in shock, along with the rest of the world. Then the second airplane slammed into the second tower.
We ran back to our room where Uncle Dave – Steven’s road manager, David Trask – was watching Shaoey. We stared at the television . . . and then we saw smoke rising in the distance beyond our hotel window in Washington. The Pentagon had just been hit.
Needless to say, our event was cancelled that night, as was our meeting with President Bush. But we had forged important friendships during that trip, in particular with Scott Hasenbalg, who would eventually help us create an adoption and orphan care ministry and would become its executive director. We would call it Shaohannah’s Hope.
We officially incorporated Shaohannah’s Hope as a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization in February 2003. God had given us a burden to inspire and educate believers about the plight of orphans and vulnerable children. If Christians could become advocates for orphans who could not help themselves, we would truly be doing the work of the body of Christ and be a witness for the reality of Jesus’ love in a hurting world.
There are about 140 million orphans in the world today. As we became aware of their needs, we read our Bibles with fresh eyes. We saw all the times that the Bible talks about both orphans and adoptions. In Steven’s music and in the platforms God gave us, we started talking more about them as well.
As Shaohannah’s Hope grew, our mission became clear: to care for orphans by engaging the church and helping Christian families reduce the financial barriers to adoption. We provide Christian couples with financial grants so the overwhelming cost of adoption doesn’t discourage them. Our average grants are about three to four thousand dollars. We believe that we shouldn’t fully fund the entire adoption: we want families to raise funds on their own as well as be supported by their local community of faith.
It doesn’t matter which country the child comes from; we’ve given grants to families who have adopted from forty-five different countries.
Beyond that, we felt called to do something about the care and needs of orphans and vulnerable children who might not be adoptable. We believe that even those children who may not survive for very long are still little treasures whom God has put in our world to reveal something unique about Himself.
We committed to help, however we could, those who could be cared for medically and eventually become adoptable, those who would need long-term medical care and not be adopted, and those who would simply need a place to be held and rocked until they peacefully entered heaven.