May is National Foster Care Awareness Month. Among the countless things to be aware of and opportunities to get involved, here’s ten things to consider as you work to bring your awareness to bear through action….
The data: 400,000+ children in foster care. 100,000+ children waiting for their forever families. And this pandemic isn't helping anything.
We’re not merely talking about numbers and data and stats - but instead real kids, real moms and dads, real humans just like you and me.
The fact that data rarely changes hearts and that we are predisposed to find reasons why the data is not our problem.
The truths we celebrate in the gospel - that God saw our plight and went to extravagant lengths to move towards it, walk with us in it and give us hope out of it.
That we live in a world which says pursue comfort and convenience at all costs - even at the expense of the most vulnerable around you...and the gospel says something literally quite the opposite.
We cannot rightly raise our hands in worship of a God that steps towards us in our hard and broken and then use those same hands to push the hard and broken of others away.
The reality that while we may celebrate the same gospel we all don't demonstrate that gospel in the same ways - we're not all called to do the same thing, but we are all capable of doing something.
Our tendencies to minimize our capacity to make a difference in someone else's life - and to, out of fear, sometimes use that self-deprecation as a smokescreen to avoid what we know we are actually capable of (and perhaps called) to do.
God's capacity to do what only God can do, and the freedom we have to not expect ourselves to be anything for these kids or families that only Jesus intended Himself to be - so we don't let the fear of not having what it takes deter us; we let the hope that He does drive us.
All the things we are not aware of - the myriad of unseen things God will do through you that you might not ever see in full on this side of eternity.
May is Foster Care Awareness Month, and perhaps for you the thing you need to be most aware of is the capacity of God to use you in ways you never thought possible - if you would simply be willing to say "yes".
