Viewing entries tagged
gospel centered orphan care
You don't have to be perfect parents to be perfect foster parents. Inherent in the role is the pressure to be amazing because you are doing something amazing - an expectation no human can live up to, nor should ever have to. Foster parents are not saints or heroes or spiritual rock stars. We are humans. Real moms and dads that struggle, stumble and mess up. We get annoyed, frustrated and exhausted. We don't have all the answers and don't even know the right questions to ask most of the time.
Foster care can be cold and sterile. Like courtrooms. Medicaid office. Hospital waiting rooms. This is not to say foster care is boring and monotonous - it's anything but that. It is to say, however, that the places foster care takes you and the demands it requires of you can sometimes feel more legal than relational and more painstaking than life changing. The humanity of foster care is often lost in the beuaracrcy of foster care. In the midst of training hours, paperwork, court hearings and medicare appointments the fact that we are dealing with...
I'm often asked questions like these: What is the best way to motivate people to get involved with orphan care? How do we recruit more foster families? Are there things we can do to get our church more involved? All good questions that are hard to answer - or maybe not. At the expense of sounding overly simplistic or theologically unrealistic, I can't help but believe the answer to these questions, and the many others like them, is not necessarily what we often assume it to be.
It was never God's intent for children to be without a family. Among the unending evidences that we live in a fatally sin-scarred world, this particular consequence uniquely pains the heart of God. This is why Scripture says He “executes justice for the fatherless” (Deuteronomy 10:18) and He assumes the role of "the father of the fatherless" (Psalm 68:5). This is the heart of God, a good, loving and gracious Father.
