Recently, I heard an interview with the director of a new movie called American Honey. The movie is about those kids who knock on your door and try to get you to buy magazines. These “mag crews,” as they are called, are mostly made up of kids who’ve been orphaned or who’ve run away. The “vulnerable” as the movie’s director calls them.

The interviewer played a short but haunting clip from the movie. In the scene, the crew’s manager is talking to a homeless teenage girl she’s just found.

She asks, “Got anybody who is gonna miss you?”

“Not really.”

“Okay good, you’re hired.”

Turns out, the “mag crew” industry is rife with abuse, drug addiction, endangerment, and ultimately indentured servitude. In an article in The Atlantic, one official said that selling magazines door to door “is ranked number one in the worst children’s jobs in the United States…. But right now we just don’t know how to stop it.” [1]

So, how do you stop it? How do you beat those people and systems that prey on vulnerable kids? How do you beat evil? How do you win?

Our default answer to those questions is simple: offense. Offense wins. We think that if we just leveraged enough offensive, top-down power, we could legislate these mag crews into oblivion and (ta-da!) save vulnerable kids.

Only … we’ve tried that. It hasn’t worked.

Psalm 10 is really eye opening here. Evil works “like a lion” (10:9 TNIV). “The wicked hunt down the weak, catching them in the schemes they devise” (10:2). “Their mouths are full of lies and threats” (10:7). “They lie in wait to catch the helpless … and drag them off” (10:9).

If you are picturing something you’ve seen on the National Geographic channel, you’ve got the right idea. Evil is like a pack of lions, watching a herd of grazing animals from the cover of the tall grass. They patiently watch, until that moment when a yearling is separated from the herd for just a minute, and then they pounce. They spot vulnerability, and they unleash an offensive attack that is overwhelming.

(“Got anybody who is gonna miss you? Good, you are hired.”)

In other words, evil is better at offense than we are.

So what is God’s game plan?

Defense. 

Psalm 10:12-18 lays out God’s plan for defeating evil, and it’s pretty simple: “defending the fatherless [orphan] and the oppressed” (10:18).

Tell me if you think I’m reading this psalm correctly. Based on what I can tell, this is the argument:

1. Evil feeds its hungerby preying on those who can’t defend themselves. Like the movie director, we’ll call these “the vulnerable.”

2. The most vulnerable, according to this psalm (and that movie), are kids—particularly orphaned kids.

3. If someone could defend these orphaned kids, then evil would …

Starve?

Yea, that’s what I am wondering too.

And that’s what we are wondering at our church. To use a corny sports metaphor, we are wondering if defense really does win championships. To use non-corny, non-sports language, we are wondering if defending orphans might actually do something for the Kingdom of God.

When we wonder about these kinds of things, we typically invest in them.

So here’s our promise: If you go to Highland and decide to adopt or foster a child, we will help you pay for it.

We have official names for this ministry (Highland’s Heart Adoption Fund and Packed in Love), and people who oversee it. But basically it boils down to this: We are so intrigued by the possibility of a good defense that we will pay for it.

We want to defend kids well for the sake of the Kingdom of God.

If you want to see some videos about adoption grant recipients, watch this video: https://vimeo.com/144139102

For more information about how your church can start an adoption or foster care fund, please contact me at eric.gentry@highlandcc.org

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[1] Darlena Cunha, "Trapped into Selling Magazines Door-to-Door,” The Atlantic. 20 April 2015. http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/04/trapped-into-selling-magazines-door-to-door/388601/