I suppose having a tender heart is part of the job description for the director of Orphan's Tear. But sometimes I feel that my heart exceeds the tenderness requirements! That possibility entered my mind as my eyes teared up reading a letter I recently received from a little boy in Mexico called Beto (translated by our dear friend and ministry partner Nicole Fitzpatrick). I hope Beto's words touch your heart as well...

"You know...we have to move here," Daryl said to his wife Wanda after witnessing the horrific conditions inside a handicapped ward of a Guatemalan hospital. With deep conviction, she replied with just 2 words: "I know."

"I really don't know how they survive," Pastor Geordany, the director of Mt. Carmel Orphanage, replied when I asked him how Haitians could pay the high food prices in Haiti. The average cost of a gallon of milk is over $9, and a pound of oranges costs about $5!

"I was sad that I had to bring him here, but I knew he would have a better life." With those words Thessoit Belony, translated through Pastor Wildelson, the director of Mount Zion Orphanage in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, told me her story. Mount Zion is a small orphanage crammed into a crowded sea of colorless, half-crumbling cement-block-and-rusty-tin homes on the southwest side of the city. You can see poverty everywhere. You can smell it.

I wish orphan care ministry was always smiles, giggles and success, but it isn't. Unfortunately, we sometimes find a "bad apple" orphanage director who isn't honest with us, or due to some other ongoing, unbiblical behavior we must end their support. It grieves me deeply because I know it's the children who suffer most from a director's poor choices. Though we may discontinue our financial support of a particular orphanage, however, that doesn't mean our prayer support for their kids should stop.

Straightening lives that have been twisted by abuse and neglect has become a special calling of God on the life of Nicole Fitzpatrick, a Heaven's Family missionary in Mexico. She has learned that Jesus' love, poured out liberally and consistently over time, makes even the most broken and bent souls straight.

This little boy is enjoying a luxury he’s never experienced before. It’s been hard for the children to sleep each night…very hard. That’s because many […]

Providing new clothes at Christmas for the children who live in orphanages—what are for most the only new clothes they receive all year—has been a great tradition at Orphan's Tear for many years now, and Christmas 2014 was no different. Except, perhaps, that this time sponsors didn't receive an appeal beforehand as we've done in the past.