At the beginning of each new year, we sit down with our team and take some time to dream. We press in and ask God what the new year is going to bring. We ask Him what hat He has for us, for Marked and those we reach. Last year, during this time of dreaming, we heard clearly that the word for the next 3 years for Marked was “sustainability”. Honestly, we didn’t fully know what that word meant, or what the ramifications would be. We just knew it was the direction we were supposed to move in, so we said yes.
Recently, we came across a statistic from UNICEF from 2015, which stated that of the 153 million orphans we hear about, it’s estimated that at least 90% have a living parent somewhere. 90%. It has been made clear that many sincerely want to care for their children, but due to oppressive poverty and other pressures, and/or lack of life skills, they simply cannot. 90%. Many being single mamas.
Last year we just barely scraped the surface of what we felt the Lord was speaking over us and the ministry in regards to sustainability. We started to create jobs trough our “marked keys” and things like Marked coffee and the cookbook. We put our focus on establishing relationships with government officials, local schools and businesses who have a desire to see their city and towns transformed. We started to experience huge success with the Marked store, and began receiving invitations into new communities to coach them and share our strategies of success. We are seeing, now more than ever, the importance and significance of creating small businesses and focusing a lot of our efforts on education and preventative work.
Our mission hasn’t changed, to create an orphan-less world. But to us, this mission just got a little bit easier. With 90% of children having living parents, our focus has to shift from an “orphan industry” based primarily on handouts, to creating jobs and educating people and communities on how to care and provide for themselves and their families. We don’t just need hearts transformed, but we need to see communities strengthened, jobs created, and people that can offer strength to one another. We’ve learned that this is what it looks like when Heaven invades Earth. This is the foundation on which an orphan-less world is created.
If parents had the means to provide for their families, children were being educated and hearts were being made whole, I promise you, we would see these numbers begin to rapidly decrease. The amount of children sold into human trafficking would decline and cycles would begin to break.
So what’s our plan? One community at a time. And how will we do that? That will come over the next couple weeks as we invite you into a plan to see these numbers begin to decrease forever.