Countless times in parenting, I have pulled back from the edge just before I made a choice. Maybe it was because I knew in my heart that the direction I was headed was wrong. Usually, though, it was because the path my feet were pointed to was scary, or unknown, or unpopular, or fraught with some potential peril I couldn’t swallow deep enough to ignore.
Sometimes, I’ve been grateful for those no’s. They’ve no doubt saved me—and my kids— heartache. I like to think those were Holy Spirit moments, times when I was being warned and I was wise enough to listen and obey the discouragement.
Other times, though, the Holy Spirit said something different. At other times, I was urged forward— directly into the crazy, swimming upstream, “why on earth are you doing this?!”places where I got so dizzy looking down that all I had to cling to was Jesus and the thin cord of hope He offered me each morning, new as the dawn.
Fostering was one of those crazy places. It was a nonsensical move that placed us in positions of enmity with several folks who knew and loved us. It was a dangerous, faith-stretching season of holding our hearts out for others to pierce, and then asking them to kick our children in the gut, too. There was loss, and love, and growth, and scarring.
We have two sons who came to us through that season, so I have never regretted it for one instant. Too, I have beautiful memories of seeing God at work, of being able to partner with some amazing people to see good happen in the lives of families, of holding babies and whispering prayers over them.
But honestly, I was never sure what fruit it would bring to bear in the lives of my children, the “along for the ride” passengers on the journey of our perceived folly. The kids who loved on babies they never saw grow up, who heard of sin so devastating it left physical marks on small bodies, who came to know terms like, “service resistant addict,” and, “prostitution” in the same way some kids learn the lines of dialogue from cartoons.
Yes, I’ve seen their sensitivity as they’ve grown. I’ve been blessed by their ability to grant second, and third, and fourth chances to sinners who’ve failed and failed again. I’ve noticed that they don’t have to fight off the urge to judge quite like I do, and that they are more free with their affections and the concept of “family” than most of their peers.
I assumed God had given them a bigger vision, sown the seeds of something in them that made them softer to His love for His children. But I didn’t think it would go much beyond that, to be honest. After all, fostering was mine— mine and their father’s. Not theirs. They, after all, had no choice.
But God’s economy pulls from savings more frequently than we realize, making deposits in the present and investing in the future at the same time. A few weeks back, I overheard my daughter speaking encouragement to a foster mother about the precious boy in her care, and I got chills. This wasn’t an empty “you’ve got this!” session. It was empathetic, it was real, and it was spoken in a way that shared the hurt and the confusion and the bittersweet joy the mother was feeling. That same day, Mathaus called to tell me he was volunteering for a ministry that was pairing him with a 9 year-old boy in foster care for a weekly mentoring session.
“Are you sure you can handle this?” I asked, remembering one particularly tearful parting where I got back into my Suburban after handing over a baby he had grown to love and hearing him sigh, “I hate foster care.”
His answer came from a legacy of risk that his upbringing had written into his very DNA: “Foster care is a known quantity, Momma. It’s not scary. Sometimes you love someone you never see again, and that’s hard. But wouldn’t you rather have been able to love them in the first place?”
I’m still catching my breath at that wisdom, spoken by my eighteen year-old son.
As believers, we don’t often get the opportunity to see what God is thinking when He brings a person, a circumstance, or a season into our lives. We usually move on and never know why we turned left instead of right, or why God insisted that we trudge through something that everyone around us calls crazy. But this time… this time, I see it. This time, the fruit of our blind faith is beginning to blossom right before my eyes.