“Our God is a good God! He is worthy to be praised! He is a father to the fatherless.
He is a mother to the motherless! He’s a doctor when you need him! God is good! Glory! Hallelujah!”
These are praises sung in the Independence Day film release by Angel Studios, “Sound of Hope: The Story of Possum Trot.” Nino was being welcomed as the first child received into the Bennett Chapel Missionary Baptist Church community. Bishop W.C. Martin’s wife, First Lady Donna, was convicted that God had called her and W.C. to foster and adopt. They invited their rural Black congregation to consider the call themselves. In response, 77 children were adopted out of foster care in the surrounding area by 22 Bennett Chapel families.
“The Lord heard this child,” First Lady Donna says, radiating gratitude. To see the boy smile, dance and settle in is joy. “Sound of Hope” asks us to examine our consciences. Where are we ignorant? How do we choose to be ignorant because we do not want our capacity to love to be stretched by God?
Don’t let foster kids age out
As First Lady Martin sang the Almighty’s praises, I thought of some of Pope Francis’s cautions about our inauthenticity as Christians. How many times do we say “Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit … ” with less conviction and confidence than we might have in a shopping list. Why aren’t we singing? Why aren’t we in awe? I think we want some of that love for him to be expressed with more fervor. Let’s pray that we do so.
Some of the marketing presents “Sound of Hope” as an action-item response to last year’s “Sound of Freedom,” about the horrific sex-trafficking of children. While trafficked children can wind up in the foster system, the Possum Trot movie is about so much more. It’s about not abandoning the orphan. It’s about how God does not abandon us. It’s about how we tend to abandon — or ignore — those who need us most. It’s about how we can do better. It’s about how people notice credible Christian witness when they see it. It’s about life after the overturning of Roe v. Wade.
It has long been a “lazy slander” against pro-lifers that we only care about babies until they are born. There are countless examples of how that is untrue. But if we don’t open our homes to children suffering in foster care, our critics will have a point. Children should not be left to age out of the system because they are not adorable babies, albeit born with a drug addiction. The trauma children experience that has them in foster care should cry out to us, as adopted sons and daughters of God the Father. That’s at the heart of the Possum Trot movie.
Be doers, not just donors
And “Sound of Hope” is most certainly about worshiping God. Not just on Sunday, but in our choices.
Catholics used to be trailblazers in caring for the orphan — religious sisters were in the lead. But now we all too often live our faith as donors to a (sometimes compromised) bureaucracy. We assume that if there is a social problem, there is a department or ministry for that. But kids who have been to hell and back don’t need departments or ministries. They need loving, tender, forever families. They need to be embraced and never given back to a system that is designed to abandon them when childhood time is up, even if they never really got to be a child.
Pope Francis has also said that the identity card of Christians is the Beatitudes. “Jesus was pretty clear in the Sermon on the Mount,” a prominent secular sociologist once said to me, arguing that if our culture was inundated with Christian charity, there wouldn’t be bleeding sores like the epidemic of loneliness. The Possum Trot movie is not denying your pain. But when you let go of yourself, you will be surprised what you learn and how deeply you can love — with the Heart of Jesus.