The Hardest Thing I've Ever Done...

The last few days have been very hard. My wife and I said goodbye to our second foster child, baby Z, and returned to our previous state as a family of three (and an evil cat). Because of the physical state of the little guy when he entered our care, we were stretched to physical exhaustion faster and harder than anything we had ever experienced before (and trust me, our biological son was a terrible sleeper for the first year of his life).

The "feed him every 3 hours" schedule wasn't friendly to sleeping -- especially because his intense reflux made it look more like the "feed him, burp him, watch him spit-up all over his clothing/burp cloth/the floor, change his clothes, get a new burp cloth, and spray and scrub the floor" schedule. This meant we often were sleeping in spurts of 1-2 hours.

But the physical exhaustion is definitely NOT the reason that foster care is the hardest thing I've ever done. There are so many other reasons...

You are forced to love without caution and expect to have your heart broken. The ultimate goal of foster care is to provide care for children with great needs, while their parents/guardians go through some sort of rehabilitation or assessment. The ideal result of a foster care placement is the reunification of the biological family. We are not in the business of permanently destroying these families. But we can't take children and treat them as if they are temporary -- instead we must love them with a "they have always been our children" love. These children don't deserve cautious love, but deserve all of the love we can offer. This inevitably leads to heartache. We pour all of our physical and emotional energy into a child, only to see them leave our care and reunite with their family. It is very, very hard...

Life keeps moving around you and few people seem to notice. One day we are a family of three and the next we are a family of four. We don't get 9 months to mentally prepare for the arrival of a child. We don't pursue maternity/paternity leave to make the transition smooth. A few people reached out to us and offered/brought meals, but nothing like the flood of affection we received from friends and family when we had our biological son. And we understand. Many of these placements are temporary and it would exhaust our network of relationships to keep supporting us in tangible ways (read: free food) every time we received a child. And this is not to minimize the prayers, the questions, the conversations, and the kind words we have received throughout this foster care journey. Our little world changes dramatically in an instant when we get a foster child, not unlike having a biological one, but the rest of the world keeps spinning essentially as it had before. It is very, very hard...

You have a front-row seat to the ugliness of sin. Every single child that comes into care is the result of a painful situation. These can be precipitated by drug use, neglect, abuse, violence, or any one of a number of other sad factors. And it's common to blame this on "external" influences. For example, my wife was just told in a foster care class that "almost all placements are the result of either mental illness or drug use". See what we've done there? Now we can blame the pain, suffering, and losses of children in the system on illness or drug use -- we don't blame it on the natural human propensity towards sin. The reality is that human sinfulness has created a separation between man and Maker, and this leads to untold horror, pain, death and destruction in our world. Every child we take into our home brings a story that is stained with the effects of sin. It is very, very hard...

And our hope for each of those stories is to write a new chapter that is filled with hope and redemption -- the kind of healing that can be found in the only solution to the sin problem. That solution came in the the form of Jesus Christ, who lived a perfect life and was nailed to a tree to pay the penalty of sin. That penalty was a death I deserved and the death he took on my behalf.

For each child that comes into our home...

We want to love them with a reckless love that leaves everything on the table and breaks our hearts every time they leave.

We want to notice them and value them as the image-bearers of God that they are.

We want to shower them with prayer and take up the cause against the sin problem that is wrecking their world. We want to share with them (and any family members who will listen) the hope, healing, and reconciliation with God and others that can only be found in the saving work of Jesus Christ.