Castaway Kid: one man's search for hope and home

By R. B. Mitchell

Besides owning a bookstore and carrying meaningful books, we want to know what our family ministry should be. Where does God want to use us as a family? We have a heart for the fatherless for sure. It probably stems from the fact that God has built our family through adoption. We have had each of our children from the newborn stage, but a compassion and burden has been growing in our hearts for those older kids who may never have a family of their own. We don't know where He is leading us specifically. Is there an American orphanage where we can touch these lives somehow as a family and/or is He calling us to adopt once again. We don't know, but He always has a way of directing our steps if we allow Him.

All this detail to introduce an autobiography that I just read called Castaway Kid. This is a true story of a boy who had to grow up in a children's home, always wishing for a family to call his own. You will need some tissue as you read this book, but He does find the Lord through his heart wrenching young life. I am recommending this book for you if you want to gain a greater understanding for those children who have hurts and wounds from such tremendous rejection of living without a mother or father to call their own. Maybe God has put these children on your heart to serve them in some way or maybe He is leading you to adopt.

We hope to gain more wonderful books on adoption. If you know of any to recommend, please let us know so we can preview them. This issue is obviously close to our hearts. We hope to write a book someday sharing our stories of adoption with our 3 brown-eyed girls. If ever we doubt that there is a God all we have to do is remember and look at our children and stand in awe at God's handiwork in bringing them to us to be their mom and dad.

(Here is the Reading Guide for Castaway Kid if you want further discussion with each chapter.)

Another review of Castaway Kid..


"Mitchell's life story is written in a way that draws you in and makes you want to go ahead and read the next chapter each time you finish one. Yet
it does not feel as if it is embroidered one bit. He simply tells you the
plain truth of what happened in his life in a very direct way. We are allowed time to linger with the feelings he experienced, the good and the bad, but mostly the mixed and confused. We feel the bewilderment that he
felt as he tried to understand things that just did not make sense. The story is unbelievable at times, although we don't doubt for a second that it indeed happened just as written. Many who have felt pain in their formative years will relate very well to this story, even if it was not the same kind of pain. Mitchell then takes us through his spiritual evolution, once again, in a very straightforward way. There is nothing sappy about it. He finds the only kind of faith that will help a troubled
adolescent. The real kind. In a few very short and simple episodes he asks the biggest questions that can be asked, and finds the kind of answers that an angry kid, (or angry adult), can sink his teeth into.
Ultimately the author finds reconciliation and peace, and the reader will too." -by Alan M.