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.

You don’t need to see the whole path. You won’t ever know the destination. You just need the faith to start. You just need a very first “yes.”

Don’t wait to arrive at “ready.” You never will. The question is: Are you ready to take the first step?

There’s no easy way to lose a child. And as a foster parent, you don’t even get to acknowledge your loss. Celebrate reunification. Accept the next placement. Remind yourself that this is the gig. Put on a brave face. All while having lost a child, a child who feels like and who was—in every sense except, you know, actually—yours.

Building relationships with our kids’ parents isn’t (just) about being kind and compassionate and humble toward them. It’s about doing all that we can to work towards creating the outcomes that we are praying for our kids.

Foster care is about family. It’s about welcoming a child into your family. It’s about—in one way or another—welcoming another family into your family.

Foster care is about protection. But it’s about more than that. Foster care is about restoration.

Maybe you leave out some of the specific details, maybe you talk to your child about what and how you’ll share. But I encourage you to share. Share with your child’s teacher, so they have all they need to know to love and serve and teach your child well.

We don’t have to know where the road will end. We know Who’s called us. We know Who’s determined the path. We know Who’s walking with us.

But my hope as a foster parent isn’t that I will be missed & yearned for & remembered. My hope is that my impact will remain, but the memory of me will fade. That the love of a mother through her earliest years will be forever imprinted on her brain & body & heart, but that the loss of me as that mother won’t be felt.

I could resent that my simple picture of what family "should" be has been wrecked. But I choose to see that the blurry edges create a more beautiful picture. That the open ends and the added faces only add to the unique design. Our experience of the fullness of family has expanded right along with the definition of it.

You are called to foster care. Yeah, you. Maybe not foster parenting, but foster care.

Mostly, that all that we have is from Him, any love we show comes through Him, the best we can do is lead to Him, and it’s all really for Him.

I can teach, get to their heart, give (hopefully natural) consequences, offer redos, encourage them to ask forgiveness and repair, pray, share Scripture.

To the One who walks with me through the shadows, the One who is Light and drives away every shadow. To the One who has been faithful and proven His trustworthiness, the One whose character is all perfection and never changing, the One whose promises are glorious and always kept.

It may look to the rest of the world like the child in your arms replaced that child in your heart, that one you hold now fills the gap of the one you held before.

When we understand the pervasive effects of trauma on the brain, we’re also let it on the inverse—the equally pervasive effects of nurturing relationship & therapeutic intervention & restorative love.

And all of the mess leads me to the same conclusion as the perfect picture: I am in awe of the blessing of this life of mine.

I’m learning to embrace rather than bristle and see that He has gifts for me in weakness that are available only there. The recipe is simple: acknowledge it, glory in it, then wait for the strength that He will provide because of it.

With each cuddle and whisper, clean diaper and full belly, a parent speaks to the body and brain and soul of a child: you are safe, you can trust, you are precious.