November is National Adoption Month.

1. We’re not celebrating the loss.

Adoption exists because something happened that wasn’t supposed to.

There was a family before there was another family. A story before another chapter. Loss that love—however extraordinary—cannot simply erase. We should be honest about that.

But somewhere along the way, we’ve started talking as though acknowledging the grief requires us to withhold the joy.

Friends, it doesn’t.

We can grieve what made adoption necessary while celebrating what adoption made possible.

The love doesn’t erase the loss. And the loss doesn’t invalidate the love.

Nobody needs to call the heartbreak beautiful. But goodness, when love shows up in the middle of it? We’re allowed to call that beautiful.

Before adoption was ever part of any earthly story, it was part of God’s eternal plan.

Ephesians 1 tells us He chose to adopt us through Jesus Christ.
Romans 8 says we can call Him Father.
Galatians 4 says we are heirs.

Not temporary guests. Not charity cases. Children. With a name. An inheritance. And a place at the table.

And please hear me: This doesn’t mean adoptive parents are playing God or adopted children need to be rescued. Quite the opposite. Scripture doesn’t cast adoptive parents in the role of God. It casts every believer in the role of the adopted.

Every last one of us: welcomed, wanted, wildly undeservely loved.

And if that doesn’t humble us enough to love others, we’ve missed the point of the whole beautiful thing.

3. We’re celebrating commitment.

Adoption stories often center around a single moment: the courtroom, the signature, the first family photo.

But family doesn’t happen in one day. It happens in the thousand ordinary days afterward. In therapy waiting rooms. At kitchen tables. During hard conversations and harder seasons. In the patient, imperfect work of learning how to love one another well.

Adoption may begin with one yes. But families are built with a thousand more.

Another yes to showing up. Another yes to listening. And another yes to staying when things get complicated.

National Adoption Month isn’t celebrating adoptive parents as heroes. We celebrate because faithfulness deserves encouragement.

4. Children are still waiting.

And this is where National Adoption Month needs to become something more.

Because while we’re sharing the beautiful family photos, there are children who still don’t have one.

Teenagers. Sibling groups. Children with disabilities. Children whose stories are complicated and whose futures are still full of possibility.

Children who deserve to be known for more than what they’ve survived.

Psalm 68:6 tells us God sets the lonely in families.
James 1:27 calls us to care for the vulnerable. Not simply to feel sad about them. To care for them.

We cannot celebrate the families that have been formed while forgetting the children still waiting.

National Adoption Month should do more than make us emotional. It should make us available. To foster, to adopt, to support families, to advocate for children, to help struggling families stay together whenever safely possible.

There is room for all of us in this mission.

We celebrate because broken beginnings can still become beautiful stories.

We serve a God who has never required a beautiful beginning to write a beautiful story.

He brings beauty from ashes. Hope from heartbreak. Life from places where everything seemed lost. And no, that doesn’t make the brokenness good.

We don’t have to call what happened good to celebrate what God can still make beautiful.

So this Novemeber, let’s make room for the whole story. The grief and the gratitude. The complicated beginnings and the beautiful becoming. The families who have found one another and the children still waiting.

Let’s tell the truth about adoption without apologizing for its beauty. Let’s honor the losses without overlooking the love.

Because the hope of adoption isn’t that nothing was ever broken. It’s that God knows how to redeem broken stories.

And friends, if that isn’t worth celebrating, I don’t know what is.

We are reminded of God’s faithfulness through the lives of the mothers and children we serve in the Philippines. Even in the midst of poverty, uncertainty, and difficult circumstances, we continue to see God at work, bringing hope to families.

We believe every mother deserves the opportunity to build a safe and stable future for her family. That’s why we walk alongside mothers like Jane who are facing difficult circumstances and wondering how they can provide for their children.

Jane’s story is a beautiful reminder of how God works through community and compassionate care to bring hope in the midst of uncertainty. We are grateful to share her story.

—The Philippines Team

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At 19, Jane was pregnant, living on the streets.

She was unsure how she could provide a future for her child.

Having grown up without the security of a family herself, she believed adoption was the only way to give her baby a better life. Jane had been removed from an abusive home as a young child and raised in a government-run institution. After aging out of care at 18, she searched for her biological family, only to find them still living in extreme poverty.

Now facing motherhood herself, Jane reached out to our team in the Philippines. They provided her with medical assistance, counseling, essential supplies, and a safe community of mothers who walked alongside her.

With this support, Jane began to imagine a different future, one where she could raise her son herself but with support.

She found the courage to choose motherhood and take steps toward building a stable life for her family.

Today, Jane is a full time student pursuing a bachelor’s degree in public administration while gaining work experience with our team. She is working toward a future shaped by hope instead of defined by hardships in her past.

A young woman who grew up without the security of a family is now building one of her own.

From January through June 2026, your generosity through our team in the Philippines has helped:

• 20 mothers attend monthly gatherings.
• 17 volunteer mentors support mothers in the program.
• 100% of the children in the reported program group experience rescue from abandonment, neglect, or trafficking.

Their stories remind us that when mothers receive practical resources, encouragement, and a supportive community, families can stay together and thrive.

As Isaiah 43:19 reads, “See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it?”

Through the support of this community, mothers like Jane can find hope in the middle of a crisis and begin building a different future for their children.

Together, we can help vulnerable mothers build stronger families and give the next generation opportunities to thrive.

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Will you help orphaned and vulnerable children in the Philippines experience the hope of the Gospel?

When you give to Lifesong, you show orphaned and vulnerable children they are seen, known, and loved through Gospel-centered holistic care. Thanks to TMG Foundation, 100% of your gift goes directly to helping orphaned and vulnerable children.

Hope is dangerous.

Anyone who has waited on God for something important knows this. Hope means letting yourself want something again. It means leaving the door unlocked for disappointment. It’s easier to stop asking than to keep asking and keep hearing silence.

Ebie Hepworth has a name for this type of tired: hope fatigue.

When I read that phrase, I put the book down. Through her words, Ebie had walked into the room where I keep the things I don’t say out loud, and she turned on the light.

Midnight Hallelujah: Why Hope Is Still Worth the Risk is that kind of book. It doesn’t stand at a safe distance from suffering and dole out advice. It sits down in the dark with you. And then, slowly, it starts to sing.

The question underneath the questions

Ebie asks what so many believers are afraid to ask:

“What do we do when the life we’re living feels painfully out of step with the faith we proclaim?” —Ebie Hepworth

This is the question of every adoptive family waiting on a phone call that doesn’t come, every foster parent watching a child they love walk out the door. Every mother staring at an empty nursery, every couple holding paperwork and hope in the same trembling hands.

It’s the question of anyone who has ever believed God could and then had to live inside the days when He didn’t.

Ebie calls it the devastation of delay. And she refuses to make it smaller than it is.

Hope is not a pep talk.

What makes this book unique is that Ebie doesn’t cheapen hope. She confesses she once thought hope meant “trying to out-talk the what-ifs before they found their footing—to drown out fear with optimism.”

Most of us were discipled into that. We learned to treat positivity like a spiritual discipline and to call our nervous energy “faith.”

But optimism is a coping strategy.
Hope is a conviction.

And Ebie is brave enough to say what disappointment actually feels like from the inside: “Soul disappointment often feels like God’s betrayal. As if He signed off on the very thing only He can prevent.”

Some will flinch at that sentence. I’m grateful for it. Because the people I know who have walked away from God didn’t usually leave over a doctrine. They left over a disappointment they were never allowed to name. Ebie names it. Not to accuse God, but so we can finally bring the whole truth of our hearts to Him.

“Honest prayers are the oxygen of confident hope.”—Ebie Hepworth

And you can’t breathe while you’re holding your breath.

Why hope is still worth the risk

Ebie didn’t write this book from the other side of a painful story. I’m deliberately not telling you what that story is, because I don’t want you to hear it secondhand. I want you to meet it in the way I did: page by page, in her words, with her heart wide open.

So many of the stories we hear come with the ending already attached:

The diagnosis, then the healing.
The prodigal, then the homecoming.
The waiting, then the good news.

We love those stories, and we should. But if we’re honest, they can be hard to hear when we’re still living in chapter three of our own story and can’t find the page where it gets better.

Ebie isn’t writing from the mountaintop, looking back at the valley with the clarity that distance gives. She’s writing from the valley floor. Her prayer isn’t fully answered. Her story isn’t resolved. The midnight hasn’t lifted. As I write this, she is still living in the very hour that makes the hallelujah necessary.

And that changes everything about how you read her book.

That’s why she can say, without a trace of cliché, “Miracles can be complicated.” She isn’t theorizing. She’s testifying. And still she holds the line:

“Even with the ache, hope is still worth it.”—Ebie Hepworth

Notice she didn’t say after the ache. She said with it.

That’s what gives this beautiful book its credibility. Not that she’s made it through, but that she’s still trusting while she goes through. Her hallelujah isn’t the echo of a victory she’s already won. It’s a song sung at midnight, before the doors swing open, by someone who stubbornly believes they will.

Close to home

We’re especially grateful to share this book because Ebie and her husband Zac are a Lifesong family. Their story is part of the larger story God is writing through so many families who say yes to adoption, often without knowing everything that yes will ask of them.

It’s 11:14 p.m. The house is finally quiet.

Your child is asleep down the hall.

You should be asleep, too. Instead, you’re propped up in bed, phone an inch from your face, thumb doing what thumbs do.

And then the algorithm shows you a video—

A stranger in her thirties, adopted as a baby, looks straight into the camera and says her adoptive parents should have known better. That love was never enough. That they took more than they gave. She calls it a savior complex. A business. She says adoptive parents just want applause.

By 11:52 you’re standing in your child’s doorway in the dark, watching his chest rise and fall, wondering if your yes was actually selfish. Wondering if you ruined him by loving him.

If you have lived this scenario, I want to talk to you.

Two days before Jesus went to the cross,

a woman walked into a dinner in Bethany carrying an alabaster jar filled with perfume. It was worth more than three hundred denarii, close to a year’s wages.

The woman approached Jesus, broke the jar, and poured the expensive perfume over His head, the way prophets once poured oil over the heads of kings.

The room immediately filled with the scent.
Then it filled with commentary.

Why was the ointment wasted like that? It could have been sold. The money could have gone to the poor. Mark said they scolded her (Mark 14:4–5). Notice who was talking. Not Pharisees. Not Rome. People at the table—people who loved Jesus.

Can you see the woman? Standing there, hands still slick with oil. The jar in pieces. Every eye in the room on her, and every one of them sure they knew better.

Then Jesus spoke.

“Leave her alone. Why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to Me” (Mark 14:6)

Jesus doesn’t tell the room the poor don’t matter. He tells them they’ll have plenty of chances to care for the poor later. Then He says something I’d like to put on every adoptive parent’s refrigerator:

“She has done what she could” (14:8).

Here’s what I’m not saying.

I’m not saying the adoptee in the late-night social media video is wrong about her pain.

I’m an adoptee. I was left at a hospital as a newborn, lived with one family, then was adopted by another. I know that story from the inside.

We are continually reminded of God’s faithfulness in the midst of the challenges our country continues to face. While Haiti has experienced seasons of uncertainty and hardship, we continue to see God at work through the lives of the children, students, families, and young adults He has entrusted to us.

We are grateful to walk alongside them as they pursue education, discover their God-given purpose, and grow into people who can serve their families and communities. Every milestone is worth celebrating because behind each one is a story of perseverance, God’s provision, and the support of people like you who choose to invest in the next generation.

— Haiti Team

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In Haiti, where darkness and uncertainty have made daily life difficult for so many,

Rivaldo is choosing to look toward the future.

Five years ago, Rivaldo stood among Lifesong’s first graduating class in Haiti, proudly receiving his high school diploma.

Without parents to care for him, reaching that milestone was already a significant achievement. But Rivaldo’s story didn’t end there.

Today, he is a college graduate with a degree in Computer Science.

For four years, Rivaldo worked toward his degree while his country faced increasing violence and instability.

As gangs overtook communities across Haiti, the challenges surrounded his education only grew. But Rivaldo continued to trust that God would give him the strength to keep going.

He shares,

“It was a journey that was not so easy, given the difficulties we encountered. But after four years, I can say I am a computer engineer thanks to your support. I pray more young people can reach their goals and realize their dreams.”

Rivaldo didn’t succeed alone.

Rivaldo’s journey is a reminder of what can happen when orphaned and vulnerable young adults in Haiti are given the opportunity and support to pursue their education.

Through scholarships, young adults like Rivaldo can attend college and pursue the careers God has placed on their hearts.

Your generosity helped Rivaldo continue his education even when the circumstances around him made it difficult to imaging a bright future.

Now, Rivaldo wants to use what he has learned to serve others.

Currently, he is an IT teacher at our school in Haiti. His education is becoming more than a personal achievement, it is a way for him to use his God-given skills to serve others.

From wondering if he would ever attend school again to becoming a college graduate, Rivaldo’s story is a beautiful reminder that God can use education, opportunity, and faithful support to transform a young person’s future.

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Will you help orphaned and vulnerable children in Haiti experience the hope of the Gospel?

When you give to Lifesong, you show orphaned and vulnerable children they are seen, known, and loved through Gospel-centered holistic care. Thanks to TMG Foundation, 100% of your gift goes directly to helping orphaned and vulnerable children.

In Bolivia, we are grateful to see the growth God is bringing about in the lives of the children and young people we serve. Through strong and consistent relationships, children are encouraged to discover their strengths. With opportunities to grow, they can move forward with confidence into the future God has for them.

One of those children is Josephine*. Her story is a beautiful reminder of how God can use people around a child to encourage her and strengthen her confidence. Through that support, she can continue growing.

—Bolivia Team

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Sometimes, growth happens one small step at a time,

and for Josephine, each step is helping her discover just how much she can do.

Josephine is a cheerful and outgoing fourth grader who loves spending time with the people she cares about. Whether she is sharing moments with her “heart sisters” or celebrating accomplishments with her older brother, Josephine is growing through the relationships around her.

She is also growing in confidence at school.

She continues to make meaningful progress in her education and personal development, learning to thrive with ADHD.

One of Josephine’s teachers shares,

“Among her greatest strengths are her reasoning ability, strong memory, and eagerness to learn.”

Josephine especially enjoys music. Alongside her classmates, she has had the opportunity to learn and play the zampoña, an Andean pan flute, a new skill that gives her another way to learn, participate, and grow.

This term, Josephine earned high scores on her tests, reflecting her continued growth in both academic and classroom participation.

Behind that progress is consistent encouragement, care, support of Lifesong Bolivia and the people walking alongside her.

Josephine’s story is a reminder that growth takes time.

When people hear, support, and value a child, they help her discover her strengths, face new challenges, and build a future filled with hope and opportunity.

Thank you for helping children like Josephine grow, one step at a time.

*names changed to protect the identities of the children we serve

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Will you help orphaned and vulnerable children in Bolivia experience the hope of the Gospel?

When you give to Lifesong, you show orphaned and vulnerable children they are seen, known, and loved through Gospel-centered holistic care. Thanks to TMG Foundation, 100% of your gift goes directly to helping orphaned and vulnerable children.

Not everyone is called to adopt.

But every Christian is called to care.

Some of us will open our homes. Others will open wallets, calendars, churches, dinner tables, or spare weeknights.

The question isn’t “Will you adopt?”
It’s “What do you have to give?”

Because caring for orphans and vulnerable children has never been a one-solution calling.

Here are a few ways to begin—

1. Sponsor a child.

For children living in vulnerable situations around the world, sponsorship can help provide things most of us wish every child could simply take for granted: food, education, medical care, Gospel discipleship, safe community, and people who know their name.

Here at Lifesong, child sponsorship helps provide holistic, Christ-centered care while working toward something bigger than meeting today’s immediate need: helping children and families flourish for the long haul.

You may never travel across an ocean. You may never meet the child whose life you are helping change. But month after month, your ordinary Christian faithfulness can become part of their story.

Sometimes changing a life looks like an automatic monthly donation, given faithfully over time.

We are so grateful to see how God is opening doors for the children and young adults we serve in Uganda. Through education and discipleship, children who once faced overwhelming barriers are being given the opportunity to dream about what God might have in store for their futures.

Makula’s story is one of those stories. We have watched her grow in confidence, faith, and purpose, and today, she is dreaming not only of a career in health care, but of returning to her community to serve others. We invite you to read her story and celebrate with us the difference one opportunity can make.

— Uganda Team

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Imagine working for three straight days,

breaking and collecting stones in a quarry, only to earn the equivalent of one U.S. dollar.

For Makula and her family, this wasn’t an abstract poverty statistic; it was their everyday reality. Before she started school, her parents struggled endlessly just to cover basic living costs, making the prospect of paying for an education feel nearly impossible.

Then, came a turning point.

Through a scholarship at a nearby Christian School, supported by Lifesong, Makula’s life took a completely new direction. She shares,

“I am very thankful to Lifesong for having chosen me, to support me and to nurture me into the right person that God intends me to be.”

The scholarship lifted the heavy financial burden off her parents’ shoulders and gave Makula a safe, supportive place to learn and grow.

At school, holistic, Gospel-centered care and education is the center of everything they do. For Makula, the spiritual encouragement has been just as vital as her studies.

The daily Bible lessons have grounded her in faith, a key part of her growth that she feels she wouldn’t have found anywhere else.

Makula is determined to uplift the people around her.

Growing up, she watched her family and neighbors suffer from unaddressed eye conditions, completely unaware that treatment was possible. Inspired by their struggle, Makula has set a clear goal for her career: she wants to become an ophthalmologist.

By specializing in eye care, Makula hopes to return to her community and provide the medical support her family and neighbors have gone without for so long.

Her journey is a powerful reminder of what happens when a child is given a chance.

With the right support, hardship doesn’t have to define a child’s future, it can become the foundation for a life dedicated to serving others.

*names changed to protect the identities of the children we serve

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Will you help orphaned and vulnerable children in Uganda experience the hope of the Gospel?

When you give to Lifesong, you show orphaned and vulnerable children they are seen, known, and loved through Gospel-centered holistic care. Thanks to TMG Foundation, 100% of your gift goes directly to helping orphaned and vulnerable children.

Bekah did not say yes. She said fine.

By then, she and her husband, Brian, had already walked through one miraculous adoption and one deeply painful disruption. They had prayed, sacrificed, loved a child they believed might become their son—and then watched the adoption fall apart.

Bekah was heartbroken.

Done sounded reasonable.

But when their attorney asked whether they wanted to remain available for another adoption, Brian hesitated to close the door completely.

“If we say no, we don’t leave room for God to work.”

Bekah couldn’t argue with that.

So she said fine.

And sometimes, apparently, God can do quite a lot with fine.

Adoption had been part of Brian and Bekah’s conversations since the beginning of their marriage.

Bekah’s mother had been adopted, and Brian had grown up with adopted friends. So after welcoming two biological sons, Brian and Bekah began seriously exploring adoption in 2020.

And then the world shut down.

They eventually scheduled a phone consultation with a local adoption attorney. They were told they could wait a year or longer.

Three days later, the attorney’s office called with a potential match.

There was only one problem: Brian and Bekah hadn’t even hired the attorney yet. They had no completed home study. No fundraising plan. No carefully prepared adoption fund.

Yet one month later to the day after that first phone call, they left a Louisiana hospital with their daughter.

Her name means favor and grace.

Because the adoption happened so quickly, Brian and Bekah said yes without knowing how they would pay for it.

Through Lifesong, they received a matching grant and fundraising support. Friends and family stepped in. Bekah’s boss learned how much they needed to meet the match and wrote a check.

The resources followed the yes.

But their next yes would end differently.

When an opportunity arose to adopt another child—a biological sibling of their daugher—Brian and Bekah jumped in. They prayed. Their boys prayed. And they sacrificed financially to begin bringing another child into their family.

Then the adoption disrupted.

“It wasn’t about just having a child,” they explained. “It was about welcoming that child.”

This time, the answer hurt. They had to learn—and teach their children—that a painful ending does not necessarily mean God was absent from the story.

“It didn’t work out the way we wanted,” Bekah says. “But that doesn’t mean God wasn’t there.”

They still believe their yes was worth it. Bekah shares—

“If we wait until everything’s just right and perfect and always going to work out, we’ll never do anything.”

Yet it was painful.

So when their attorney reached out again and asked whether they wanted to stay on the list, Bekah was ready to be finished. Brian said, Let’s leave the door open.

Bekah said fine.

Today, Brian and Bekah have five children.

Their home is filled with everything you would expect: school schedules, sibling arguments, laughter, adoption-day traditions, Cajun food and Detroit-style pizza.

They are a family. A loud, complicated, ordinary, extraordinary family.

Three adopted children joined their home, but across those adoptions and the disrupted adoptions, Lifesong came alongside Brian and Bekah four separate times. Bekah shares—

“We definitely had the heart to do it, but we didn’t have the resources.”

And maybe that’s part of what makes their story so powerful.

Their story story is not an argument that everyone should adopt. It’s a story of what can happen when we leave room for God to work.

Sometimes that looks like a brave, wholehearted yes. And sometimes, after disappointment and heartbreak, it looks a little more like Bekah’s fine.

And today, three children are growing up in the ordinary rhythms of family—siblings around the table, parents in the bleachers, birthdays celebrated, traditions repeated, and a home where they and their brothers belong.

Maybe that’s the beautiful thing about fine. It isn’t always certainty. It isn’t even always enthusiasm. Sometimes it’s simply enough willingness to leave the door cracked open for whatever God might do next.

And God can do an awful lot with fine.

As we look at the lives of children in Cambodia, we are reminded of God’s grace and the hope He brings into difficult circumstances. Each day, we have the privilege of watching children find safety, grow in their faith, and discover gifts and dreams they may not have had the opportunity to pursue before.

We are especially grateful for the ways God is working through Lifesong to provide more than a safe place to live. Through education, discipleship, and loving care, children are learning that their past does not define their future and that they have a purpose in God’s story.

Thank you for standing with us and helping create a place where children can grow, learn, and discover the hope found in Christ.

— Cambodia Team

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For Narin, home was not always a place of safety.

Growing up, he watched his parents fight often. Drugs and alcohol made the conflict worse, and his basic needs were frequently neglected.

But God was writing a different story for Narin.

When Narin was 13, our team in Cambodia came to his village and shared the Gospel. Through Lifesong, Narin was given a safe place to live at our ministry in Cambodia where he found the care and stability he needed to grow.

“I am thankful to God for giving me an opportunity to live here. I have plenty of food, a safe place to live, and it is close by school.”

At our ministry in Cambodia, Narin has found more than safety.

He is growing in his understanding of God’s Word and has discovered the hope found in His grace.

Narin’s favorite thing to read about is God’s grace because it truly touches his heart. He loves that God’s grace can save us from sin and give us eternal life.

With stability came an opportunity to discover his gifts.

Now 15 and in 8th grade, Narin earned the eighth-highest test scores in his class of 45 students. Physics is his favorite subject, and his teacher says he is the best student in her class. He even enjoys helping other students learn.

Now, Narin dreams of becoming a physics teacher one day.

His past does not have the final word. Because of God’s grace, Narin can look toward the future with hope.

As he prepares for high school, we are excited to see how God continues to grow Narin’s faith, develop his gifts, and lead him toward the future He has planned.

*names changed to protect the identities of the children we serve

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Will you help orphaned and vulnerable children in Cambodia experience the hope of the Gospel?

When you give to Lifesong, you show orphaned and vulnerable children they are seen, known, and loved through Gospel-centered holistic care. Thanks to TMG Foundation, 100% of your gift goes directly to helping orphaned and vulnerable children.