One sweltering summer afternoon in the Reynosa Salvation Army orphanage I sat in a swing for about half an hour with an orphan on my lap. He was not like those rough urban kids who've been burned so many times that they push you away when you try to befriend them - rejecting you before you can do what everyone else has done and reject them.

His need for affection was so great, it overwhelmed whatever reticence he felt about sitting in the lap of a total stranger. Like the vast majority of orphans, he suffered from a severe love deficit.

Because God is love, he has a keen interest in the plight of the love-deprived. We think religion is about what happens on Sunday; God says true religion is loving orphans in their distress. But how do you do that practically when we in America are so far away from them?

There are so many things we can't do because of the great distance between us and most of the world's orphans. But here's some good news about an old technology - email - that can help.

While email has been around for a while, it is only now becoming accessible to many of the poorer countries of the world where so many orphans live. Because email is old hat for us, we don't recognize it's huge potential for expressing love to orphans as the internet makes the final jump from your living room to an orphanage office or nearby internet cafe. Now, thanks to email, it is possible to do something that used to be impossible. We can now express our care for a specific orphan in words over a span of years.

Distance may make hugging an orphan impossible, but the internet now makes it possible to be present in his life and to demonstrate the kind of parental concern that he desperately craves. Orphanages located near internet cafes will transform the way ministries like Children's Hope Chest or Compassion or g42 ensure that orphans in places like Africa or India receive care. Then it's up to us to maintain those relationships for the multiple years that they need.

This is the ministry of presence, despite the distance, and sometimes, language barrier. For an orphan to have someone communicate care by sending a periodic email message when others have forgotten is to say, "You matter. All evidence to the contrary, you are special."