We have three kids. Their ages are 7, 4, & 3. Three years ago I had my tubes tied after a particularly stressful year and a half which included having two babies, moving, enduring a brain tumor diagnosis and surgery for my oldest child, and my husband graduating with his doctorate degree. We were oh so tired and completely at peace with saying that our family was done. It felt right.
So how in the world did we get here? Finishing up the process of getting licensed to foster, moving things around to make an extra bedroom, getting fingerprinted and filling out all sorts of information about ourselves for whoever has to review all of that? I guess we have to go back several years.
Josh and I were married in 2004 and just a few months into our marriage we heard about an organization that was responsible for placing foreign exchange students. It piqued our interest and we requested information, only to find out that we did not qualify because neither of us was 25. A year later, Hurricane Katrina hit the gulf coast and all of a sudden there was a significant need for housing and area churches were asking people to volunteer their homes for refugees that made it this way. Again we put our names out there, but we were not used or needed, mostly because there weren’t a lot of Katrina victims that came this far north. But I guess I could say that from the very early days, we felt a desire or tug to host people in our homes in some way, shape, or form.
From 2010-2014 we were in a community group at church that had one couple that fostered, another couple that had a niece that had been adopted after being fostered, and a young girl that worked for a group home and had multiple siblings that had been fostered. Rubbing elbows with people who had a heart for neglected children just gave us a new perspective and opened our eyes to what some of that looked like.
In 2014 our teaching pastor made a public challenge for the church to support orphans and vulnerable children. We were encouraged to support these kids either through donating items to a closet, volunteering babysitting services to families who were fostering, coming alongside other families as prayer partners, offering discounted services as business owners, or getting licensed to foster. There was going to be an informational meeting for anyone who was interested in finding out more about what it looked like to become licensed foster parents.
I was actually sitting in the service by myself that morning and I told my husband later that I really felt like we needed to attend that meeting. Our house was on the market and we were hoping to move closer to his work so I didn’t really see it being anything in the near future, but I was at least interested in getting more information. But admittedly so, I am often led by emotions and a moving video of a family that had fostered could stir up something in my gut that could be more warm fuzzes than a legitimate work of the Holy Spirit. Josh said that he was okay with getting some information but he didn’t see that being anything we would do until we moved. I agreed that it wasn’t in the near future but felt like it was worth learning more.
A few weeks later on a busy Sunday afternoon, Josh stopped me in the middle of something in a way that was very uncharacteristic of him. He said that we could talk more later but it was really pressing on his heart after that morning that we needed to attend the upcoming informational meeting because he really felt like God had kind of given him a word that we were supposed to start this process.
I would say that at that point was when I first felt fear. Crap. I had decided that the tug I felt actually was just warm fuzzies and I hadn’t processed through the realities of what it meant to do this for real.
So several weeks later we attended a very informal meeting at church where some social workers spoke to us about becoming a foster parent, answered a lot of questions, and then told us what would need to happen if we wanted to proceed with getting licensed. I went into that meeting with a lot questions in mind and still doubting if this was something God was actually directing or if I had just developed some sort of Savior complex. I left that meeting 100% convinced that we were being called to this. I don’t really know how to describe it other than the Holy Spirit stirring something in me. I had anxiety and excitement but also confidence.
After the meeting I shared with a few friends and had some conversations with my cousin and lifelong friend who has been a social worker for many years. For the most part we kept it quiet except for some close friends and the people we asked to serve as references for us. We filled out an application and waited a month or more to hear anything.
We got a call from a case worker from the South Carolina Youth Advocate Program who asked us if she could stop by to give us some information. I had somewhere to be the evening that she stopped by so she quickly ran through a MOUND of paperwork, explaining things to us, and then left us with the stack and instructions on getting fingerprinted and registered for pre-licensing training. Because I had somewhere else to be, there wasn’t a lot of time to process that meeting but I think when she left we were both kind of bug-eyed. The folder of paperwork sat on a dresser for about two months after that.
Because our house was on the market, we just let the papers sit while we waited for it to sell. A series of events led to us taking our house off of the market and a lot of that had to do with the fact that we felt more confident that we needed to be fostering than we did that we needed to move. So at that point we really got things rolling with the process.
With each new thing - making a trip to get fingerprinted, filling out all of the paperwork, putting lots of time and money into rearranging the upstairs of our house so that it frees up space for another child - we feel more excited and more anxious. And yet through all of this there is an underlying peace and a continual conviction that God is calling our family to be a part of the solution to the problem of there being children out there that are not being cared for.
I was a part of an intensive Bible study this year on the book of Matthew and God spoke directly to my heart when we studied Matthew 18. Children matter to Jesus. God has blessed my family and he has given us the means to take care of those who can’t take care of themselves, and so this is the mission that has been laid out for us. This is no longer one of those things that we are talking about being a “later” thing. We are quickly approaching our license and this is going to be a reality for my family. Here goes nothing.