This post isn’t about me. It’s about changing the conversation around foster care & adoption. It’s about understanding that foster parenting & adoptive parenting are very different things.

God is a God who brings dead people to life.
He is a God who heals and restores and redeems.
He is a God who intervenes and makes whole.
He is a God who is sovereign and wise and good.

Excerpt from Filled: 60 Devotions for the Foster Parent’s Heart • Read Colossians 3:13 & Matthew 18:21-35 for more

Recently, there have been so many times that I wish I could just wrap up my babies—from my 2 year old baby to my 16 year old baby—and protect them & rescue them & make everything ok for them.

I’ve been fighting (and failing) to hold onto hope for a little while now. But my heart has finally found it—in remembering grace, as it actually is.

All of your love, all of your work, all of the giving and serving and doing is always about more than the ones you’re doing it for. It’s always ultimately about Him. And for all that you do for them, He will say to you, “You did it for me.”

The call to love a child with a broken past sometimes comes as a call from a principal. It’s a holy call. To die to self and to live in love and to remember always: That above and before being those who love broken people, we’re those who were loved AS broken people.

You are called to foster care.

Maybe not foster parenting, but foster care.

It’s more than semantics. It’s intention.

How is it possible to be whole-heartedly fighting for & praying for & supporting the healing of a family, if you’re actually really hoping for the family to fail so that the child can be yours forever??

Our guy looked down for a minute and replied, “I think I need to say it as a secret.” He walked over and whispered into my ear: “Love.”

No matter if our kids are fostered, adopted, ours for a short time or forever…

No matter what their parents have done or not done…

There is something that can & should always be true of us as foster & adoptive parents.

Most of what I share speaks directly to foster and adoptive parents. This one’s for the rest of you. You read what I write, but I want to make sure you’re not reading into what I don’t write, so I’m going to spell it out, clear as can be.

As important as it is for my kids to experience consistent love from their mom, I know it’s even more important that they watch how mom repents & repairs when she fails at loving them the way she should.

Are you overwhelmed by the brokenness that surrounds you?
Have you wept in sorrow over what you’re walking through?
Are you brokenhearted by what your children are experiencing?

These tears, they have an expiration. This sadness is coming to an end

Being a foster parent doesn’t have to be seen as a forever life calling. It can simply be an opportunity to serve, a way to help. You don’t need faith for the whole journey, you only need it for the first step.

Foster care means living in the both/and.

Foster care is two families unified through separation,
a child experiencing the loss & gain of a family,
the brokenness & blessing of “all one family together.”

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Our kids’ parents have so much to overcome. May our judgment of them not be added to the list.

It’s all of these and no one of these things alone. We grieve what he lost. We celebrate what he—and what we—have gained. And we hold the nuance. For our kids, for their families, for our own hearts, we hold—in broken & beautiful tension—all of it at once.
We keep space for the sorrow. We hold onto the joy. And we cling, with our whole hearts, to the love.