Davion Henry made national headlines two weeks ago when he pleaded with members of a local church he attends to be adopted into a loving family. From the story about his request for someone to adopt him.
In church, Davion scanned the crowd. More than 300 people packed the pews. Men in bright suits, grandmoms in sequined hats, moms hugging toddlers on their laps. Everyone seemed to have a family except him. Davion sat beside Going, his caseworker from Eckerd, and struggled to follow the sermon: something about a letter Paul wrote. “He was in prison,” said the Rev. Brian Brown. “Awaiting an uncertain future … ”
The preacher spoke about orphans, how Jesus lifted them up. He described an epidemic, “alarming numbers of African-American children who need us.” Then he introduced Davion, who shuffled to the pulpit. Without looking up, Davion wiped his palms on his pants, cleared his throat, and said: ”My name is Davion and I’ve been in foster care since I was born … I know God hasn’t given up on me. So I’m not giving up either.”
Davion said he’d take anyone. “Old or young, dad or mom, black, white, purple. I don’t care. And I would be really appreciative. The best I could be.”
Now, Fox News says the church has been flooded with calls.
“It has been just an awesome outpour,” Cynthia Coney, a secretary at St. Mark Missionary Baptist Church, said. “We’ve been getting calls from as far as Utah and forwarding them to his adoption agency.”
Coney said she was moved by the boy’s appeal and asked her husband, who was sitting next to her if they could adopt Only.
“He said we don’t have the room,” she said. “But he agreed that he would have loved to.”
The Rev. Brian Brown introduced Only after giving a sermon touching on a letter from the disciple Paul, who wrote about being in prison “awaiting an uncertain future.”
“You may be in a dark place,” Brown said, according to The Times. “But look for joyful moments when you can praise God.”
Only is no stranger to that dark place. He was born while his mother was in jail and has never had a permanent home, the report said.
Last summer, Only tried to find his biological mother, but instead found her obituary, the report said. She had died a few weeks earlier.
“He’s starting to put himself out there, which is hard after you’ve been rejected so many times,” Floyd Watkins, the program director at Eckerd’s Carlton Manor, told the paper.
