Chronicling the joys and challenges of fostering and adopting.


Friday, June 9, 2017

Love Your Neighbor As Yourself


This week has been rough. Very rough. A situation happened to make me want to crawl in a hole and cry for a week. It was a defining moment for our family in how we foster. We are choosing to let brokenness into our home, and that brokenness affects every single area of our lives. Our innocent children become aware of things far too early. We are tested and tried if these children are worth the pain and strife they bring in.

Christ tells us the two greatest things in life are to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind, and love your neighbor as yourself” (Luke 10:27). With what happened in our home, I knew that we were at a point of loving this little girl like we would love ourselves. And when I think of “ourselves,” I think of “our kids.” Many foster families will say, “I have to keep my kids safe, so the foster kid needs to go for such and such a reason.” I understand where they are coming from, but when are these foster children ever going to be loved like they are someone’s “own” kids? When one of “your own” children does something horrible, will you kick them out? Or will you do everything in your power to make them be able to survive and eventually thrive in your home?

Our girlie is teaching us that she needs to be loved. She needs to be wanted. She needs to be safe and secure and free to make mistakes and not get kicked out, or beaten, or abandoned for her sin. She is silently asking us to love her as we love our other children. I have such a hard time depicting any of my children different from the other. God has given us 7 children. How He gave us each child is as unique as the child. And I love that. But with each of those gifts has come much heartbreak as well. 



Colossians 3:1-3, 12-15, 17 “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, no on things that are on earth. For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God . . . Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other, as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in one body . . . And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through Him.”



P.S. Because of God's sovereignty, children are moved from homes not outside of His will. We have known families who have needed to move children from their home, and those choices are never taken lightly and really are necessary. Each family is unique. This is a post specifically about our family's foster journey.  

4 comments:

  1. God bless you for your faithful and obedient hearts, and may He continue to bring healing through your family's commitment to these children.

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  2. These are the dark dark things that try to take hold of these innocent babies. Who will stand in their way, who is willing to pay the crazy emotional and spiritual cost to rescue them. Not many that is for sure, it's too painful and risky. I thank God the Father that He and His Son Jesus did the same for us. His word is not just pleasant words meant to make us feel good about ourselves. His children struggled, fought, believed, spoke faith and hoped when nothing they saw, nothing anyone of the world said anything good about the circumstances. We are His children, you and me, we have to believe for the ones that have been violated and damaged beyond any hope the world has to offer. God has so much life for them, and He will do more for you and Sean then you could possibly imagine.

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