I Would Still Say Yes To Foster Care- Part 1

As we round the corner to our one year anniversary of becoming foster parents I have been reflecting on how it feels when your vision of something collides with reality.  I have watched friends suffer sleepless nights, behavior issues that were more than they could handle, difficult relationships with bio parents, emotional burnout, and having to say goodbye to kids that they cared about.  A friend we went through training with recently told me, with one of her foster kids by her side, "I'M DONE."  I felt overwhelmed with sadness for her and those precious kids who have been through too much already.  Burned out, emotionally drained, physically exhausted foster parents are everywhere.  It is hard to see someone drowning and feel like you have no life boat to send them.  I want to dedicate some of my posts to help encourage those who are knee deep in this muddy water.  I also want to paint an honest picture for those of you who might be seriously thinking about joining us.  There is always struggle in things that matter.  It always feels like more than we can bear at some point in life.  Whether that comes through foster care or a million other ways, life is just hard sometimes. But some things are worth it, and we're better for it in the end.

Hear the good and the bad, but don't weigh them on a scale.  Please just go to your knees and ask God with eyes wide open if this is what He is asking you to do.  

Over the next couple of days I want to introduce you to some very dear friends of mine, Laurel Becker and Danielle Kuntz.  God crossed our paths over a decade ago when we were all in college or fresh out. Those were the days of doing inner city and international missions over summer break and dreaming big dreams of what the rest of our lives would look like.  We all got married within a year of each other.  We were spring chickens just trying to figure out how to be adults.  There is too much to tell, but believe me, it hasn't been all rainbows and unicorns along the way.  We had no children when our friendships began.  Now there are 12 kids (7 and under) between our three families.  We have not yet attempted a reunion with this wild bunch.  We're all waiting for someone else to be brave enough to risk their house being set on fire.  And although all of us hoped adoption would be a part of our stories at some point in life, I do not recall any of us dreaming about doing foster care.  For me, it was at the bottom of the list of possible routes toward adoption.  BUT GOD.  He has a way of changing our hearts over the course of time.  Sometimes it happens in an instant and sometimes it is a very slow process.  However it happened for each of us living hours apart from each other, we all ended up sitting through our nine weeks of foster care training and getting licensed to become foster parents within a year of each other.  We didn't plan it that way, but God clearly did.

These friends have been some of my few out of town confidants over the last year.  They have been faithful prayer warriors and it has been a comfort to have friends in the trenches with us.  Our stories and placements have looked very different.  I have learned a lot from them as they have been a step ahead of us.  I want to introduce them to you because I know and trust their love for God, and their surrender to Him.  I know they are leaning into the pain and choosing to love anyway.  They are obeying the call God placed on their lives to love children not born to them, and to love their broken families.  It's been hard, it's been messy, and it's been exactly what God needed to do to deepen their faith, and ours.

Today, I am honored to have Laurel here on the blog.  This is their story.  Please stick around.  I promise you'll be glad you did.

Even before Dave and I were married, we knew we wanted to adopt.  For a million reasons, adoption was on our hearts, particularly because we love the picture of the Gospel in it, and because my husband doesn’t know his own biological mother.  Seven years into our marriage, we had two biological children and were swimming in the “what next” question of growing our family.  We had explored several adoption services both domestic and international, but none of them ever seemed to be right.  Initially, when Dave suggested foster care I shut down the idea entirely. In many ways fostering seemed like the ugly stepsister of adoption-so painful-so uncertain-so much stigma surrounding it.  Honestly, I was terrified.  Obviously,the Lord had other plans for our family, and my heart softened.  We began our journey through training and received our license almost two years ago now.

Going into the process, I had so many ideas about what fostering would be like, all of them underscored by my desperate attempt not to have any preconceived ideas.  Nine weeks of (often heavy and heartbreaking) training left me feeling like I had at least an inkling of how to encounter and journey through the brokenness of our foster children and their families.

A couple of months after our license officially opened, we met Z.  She was a beautiful blonde-haired, blue eyed two-year old with a huge smile and a half body cast.  We loved her from the beginning.  Over the months she lived with us, we watched Z grow leaps and bounds in communication and development.  However, the more she grew, the more apparent it became that she had been far more broken by her experience than anyone had imagined.

“Atypical.” That’s the word everyone within the system used to describe our situation. “Z is atypical.  Usually when they’re this young they don’t absorb this much trauma.” “Your case is very atypical-most of them aren’t this complicated.” Honestly, for a season, we were drowning. What initially had appeared to be a very straight forward case and child soon became insanely complicated. Z had doctors’ appointments, therapists, visits with her mom, dad, and siblings, weekly phone calls with each of them, and we had FSTs and court appointments to make. Moreover, Z herself became defiant, and was prone to rage fits and even putting herself in danger. We didn’t know what to do because she was too young for therapy to truly benefit her, and we struggled to reach her at home. Moreover, I was pregnant which seemed to be serving as a trigger for Z’s anger and behavior and to be wedging apart my relationship with her.

I felt like a failure.  We were miserable, and I didn’t know what to do.  We didn’t want to disrupt Z’s placement with us, but we were terrified that she would end up hurting herself in one of her fits.  Eventually after much prayer, we met with some friends of ours who also happened to be licensing workers and foster parents for eight years.  Over some wonderful Peruvian food, we poured out our struggle, our heartbreak, and our fears.  After we finished, they lovingly suggested that we contact her caseworker about finding a different home for Z. I’ll never forget what they told us that night, “I know we tell you all the time in training, ‘Never disrupt a child,’ but this is an exception.  No one could have known this, but your home is not a good fit for her.  It’s not your fault; it’s not hers, but she needs to be somewhere else.” It was incredibly freeing and incredibly heartbreaking.

We called her caseworker a few days later and shared our hearts again.  Less than it was about removing Z from our home, it was about getting her into the right one-one where they had behavioral training, access to better therapies than we did, where she was the youngest child. Little did we know that the same week we began praying about disrupting, the family that had her brother began praying about pursuing the possibility of having Z in their home as well.  God is so good.  Z was able to live with her brother, in a home where they had weekly visits from a child therapist in their own living room and where the parents were behaviorally trained. It was such a sweet affirmation of one of the hardest decisions we’ve ever made. Even more exciting, Z was able to reunify with some of her family a few months later. 

When we called our licensing worker to let her know our decision, she assumed that we would want to close our license. Although we were exhausted, we still knew that we were not done in foster care. We left our license open, but took an eight-month break.

Seven weeks ago we took our second placement. Our son was born last July, and in February, we brought baby O into our home. He’s four months younger than Ike, and we’re learning about what it’s like to have functional twins. His case brings its own set of difficulties, and although they are totally different, they are still incredibly complicated and new water for us to navigate

Fostering has been an incredibly eye and heart-opening experience for our family. It has been probably the most difficult journey we’ve ever traveled together, but also one of the most blessed. It is painful, one of our friends calls it the ministry of a broken heart, and that is so true. To love a child or children, to make them your own, without knowing for how long, and also while hoping for healing in their own families often feels like more than I can even process let alone live out.

But it is a calling. To love the orphans (even the situational orphans) is so dear to God’s heart, and we have grown so much in following His call.  We have been able to watch our biological children love on the children who have come into our home-to see them struggle through what they want or what is convenient and to defer to each other and to our foster kiddos; it is so incredibly challenging.  The struggle in my own heart has been as well.  So often, I find myself torn between how much I love our foster littles and long to adopt them and my deep desire for healing in their own families.  My flesh wants to keep little O; I love him, and he feels like my own. But I long for his parents to want him, to be able to make the decisions they need to bring him home. He is the youngest of four in our home and his own, and frequently I find myself thinking about all of the moments and smiles and stages that his own family is missing.

I also find myself wrestling the selfish part of my flesh as well.  It was so much easier to only have three children, to not have two infants. This is hard, inconvenient, and noisy. Oh, my flesh is ugly and prone to extremes, and foster care has made that so obviously apparent. It is often a war between my pride in how well O is doing and in my feelings of being so unskilled at parenting four children.  But God. How he is faithful in using my feeble offering to love on these littles and to grow me in Him.  I depend so desperately on Him, and I cannot imagine fostering without knowing Him. It would feel so hopeless.

So why do I still do it? Believe me, it has nothing to do with my own goodness and everything to do with the Lord. When we said yes to bringing O into our home, I was absolutely terrified. I wanted to say no, to close our license, to believe that we aren’t cut out for this, and to give up. Most days I feel so absolutely ill-equipped and under-qualified.  But God. It is His calling, and He is faithful to carry it out in us.  So we journey on in this crazy adventure.  It is a moment by moment obedience, and it is often difficult and gut-wrenching.  But he makes us brave, and we have been so incredibly blessed to get to live out the Gospel day-in and day-out in a very obvious way in our home and with our children.

Foster care is absolutely a calling.  It is not for everyone, but I think it is for many people.  It is scary and many times risky, but isn’t that true of so much of the call of Christ?  It is teaching me about selflessness and about what it means to be a servant to “the least of these.” I have been blessed so much by this journey, and that is not of me, but of watching the Lord work through these moments in kiddos’ lives.  We foster, not for ourselves, but for the kiddos, in hope, that they might see and know that they have always been wanted and loved by us, and much more importantly, by their Creator.