I travel often for work. Enough that the whole experience is a fairly routine one for me. Airports, car rentals, hotel rooms, even long security lines and flight delays - I'm fairly numb to it all now. It's just a means to the end of getting where I need to go. However, a recent trip to Chicago was anything but routine. My oldest daughter came along with me and it changed the entire dynamic. In the months leading up to the trip she checked out and read at least a dozen books from the library about Chicago's history. She researched museums, parks and famous sites she hoped to see and visit.
The questions, comments and curiosities about foster care come with the territory when you bring a child into your home. They're an ever-present part of the whole experience. While most encounters are hugely encouraging and civil, some are not so much. Yet even in those, although it may come across as such at times, I'm convinced the majority of people are not intentionally malicious or insulting. I believe people are wondering - wondering what they are seeing, how to make sense of it and if they can go on with their normal lives as if they did not know what they have now seen to be true.
It's virtually impossible to fully prepare someone to become a foster parent. It's too nuanced and complex of an issue to prescribe a certain formula to it. This doesn't mean parents shouldn't be properly trained and prepared; it just means that while certain things are universally true and can be anticipated, most things are not when it comes to the messy and hard and raw of real peoples lives. You simply can't script it; you can only live it - discover it - piece by piece, a little bit at a time.
Foster parents: God is using you to love in some of the hardest places and through some of the most difficult situations. In the midst of all the uncertainties and unknowns that surround what you're doing there are promises and truths in scripture that are constant and sure and worthy to be held onto. Here's just a few...1. It won't be easy. Jesus is not unclear about the implications of what it will mean to follow Him: "Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me." (Luke 9:23) Very little in life that's worth much of anything is easy.
Foster care is just as much about us pulling a child out of a broken story as it is about us being pulled into one. Every story of abuse, neglect and brokenness dismantles a piece of the dividing wall that once separated their normal from ours and extends the opportunity for both normals to be radically redefined forever. Their normal exchanged for ours, and ours for theirs. Now an entirely new normal being written together. In April of 2012 we were pulled into a story that would forever change ours. What would have been just another normal Wednesday ended up not being normal at all...
Ask many church leaders and they’ll tell you, announcements sometimes feel like a necessary evil – most don’t want to do them but know they have to. For many church leaders, announcements are the “Achilles heal” of their worship services. But perhaps they don’t have to be. In the first post of this series we discovered Five Ways to Make Announcements a Powerful Part of Your Worship Service. Now, let's talk about how, with some simple changes, announcements can be strategically used to cast the vision and reinforce the core values of your church in powerful ways.
The stories are often horrific, the statistics are daunting and the problem so massive that it's often hard to know what to do or where to begin. Yet, at the core of who we are as the Church, we believe that even in midst of the hard and the broken and the overwhelming there can be a hope and a truth is that far more compelling. That as the Church we have both the duty and privilege to speak on behalf of and stand for the sake of those who cannot speak and stand for themselves - because that is exactly what God has done for us through Jesus.
I spend a lot of time in a lot of different churches around the country - from small, medium and large ones to rural, suburban and urban core ones. The worship services and styles vary greatly, but there is one consistent aspect of every church I spend time in that more often than not feels like the weak link in the whole experience. The dreaded announcements. Ask many church leaders and they’ll tell you, announcements sometimes feel like a necessary evil – most don’t want to do them but know they have to. Is there really a good place to do them?
It was only a few years ago. We had three young daughters, a new church plant and a conversation one night that will forever change the course of our family. She was ready for us to become foster parents. I was not. It had been an on-going discussion for months. A very cordial one. We were on the same page, just different timelines. While I had been dismissing it in the name of it “not being the right time” she had become prayerfully convinced that in fact it was. The conversation that day was a carbon copy of the many other discussions we had on the subject up to that point. She believed now was the time.
Every day you and I are counting the costs of things. We do it with clothes, food, cars, homes, extra curricular activities, the way we spend our time and energy, how many times we hit snooze on the alarm clock, the friends we hang out with and even the ones we don’t. We do it intentionally; we also also do it subconsciously. In the economy of our daily lives, we are perpetually assessing the value of things, relationships and opportunities by determining whether or not the benefit of having those things in our lives will be worth the costs required of us to get them. This constant evaluation of costs, worth and ultimate value are a part of our normal daily rhythms of life.
To all those foster parents that are daily learning to navigate everything they need to do and everything they have to be for the sake of these kids…here’s three things you don’t have to be for them today, or tomorrow, or ever: 1} Perfect. You don't have to be perfect parents to be perfect foster parents. Kids in foster care don’t need you to be perfect; they need you to be present. They don’t need pretty and polished foster parents; they need growing and repenting ones. Perhaps one of the greatest gifts we can give children from hard places is the hope that broken things don’t always have to be final things.
Suppose you asked me to help you lose 15 pounds. The problem is, however, you have a disease. That disease is called "Chick-Fil-A"! You're addicted to the #1 value meal which includes a sandwich, fries and a drink. You're eating it almost daily for lunch. As part of my motivation I inform you the meal deal you always order is a total of 1,020 calories. Sounds like a lot of calories, right? Yes, because it is, but probably not enough to cause you to think twice about ordering that meal again. It tastes too good not to. As a matter of fact, this one value meal constitutes a vast % of annual revenue for Chick-Fil-A.
In a counterintuitive way, the goal of your church is not to make foster care and adoption special; it’s to make it normal. It’s relatively easy to make caring for orphans or kids in foster care a “special” thing because in many ways it is special. It’s a uniquely difficult yet rewarding place to engage a broken world with the heart of God. Yet for as special as it is, we don't want it to be a peripheral side-show in our church - we want it to be a normal, regular, consistent thing our church does – any time and all the time. That's a bit more challenging and requires a more thoughtful, strategic approach.
Christmas is the story of a good Father going to extravagant lengths in order to adopt those who have been separated from Him. It is the celebration of God seeing the plight of His people and responding with the greatest gift of love this world has ever known - Himself. Not merely for us or near us in theory, God now put on flesh and became one of us in humanity - entering the darkness and brokenness of our story to bring us a brighter and better one in Him. In what we now know as the Christmas story, scripture consistently speaks of the incarnation, the act of God wrapping Himself in the flesh of an infant child, in beautifully vivid and forever-altering terms.
Imagine three friends come upon a raging river. They see children in the water rushing down the rapids towards a waterfall. One friend immediately jumps into the river and begins pulling as many children out as he can. Knowing there’s a waterfall downstream, the second friend runs down river and tries to catch as many children as he can before they fall to their deaths. The third friend, however, wonders why these children are in the river in the first place. He runs upstream to find out how these kids are getting thrown in and to stop whoever is doing it. All three friends are running in three different directions, but all of them are right and necessary places...
The goal of your church is not simply to start a peripheral orphan care ministry a few are involved in; it’s to establish a foundation culture of orphan care everyone has a role to play in. An environment where it's understood that while we're not all called to do the same thing, we're all certainly capable of doing something. That's the goal. Everyone. Doing. Something. If we're not careful, we may unintentionally define "orphan care" too narrowly - to simply mean foster care, adoption or some other form of bringing a child into your home long term. While these are of course crucial and essential places for the Church to engage...
It was trial day for the baby girl we had been fostering for nearly a year up to that point – the day the court would rule on who would retain parental rights over her forever. But it was more than just a legal proceeding; it was a spiritual one. What was taking place in the courtroom that day, just like in many other courtrooms everyday all around the country, was more unseen than the negligent actions of birth parents, the hustle of lawyers and case workers and the proceedings of an overrun and under resourced legal system. It was by nature unseen – an attempt of the Enemy to steal, kill and destroy (John 10:10) this innocent child’s life, and to perpetuate the systemic brokenness of past generations into hers.
My brother-in-law and I live in the same town. Attend the same church. Eat at the same restaurants. Play on the same softball team and hang out at the same family functions. But aside from those things, we couldn't be more different. My career has mostly involved standing on stages speaking to audiences or sitting behind computer screens writing at coffee shops. His, on the other hand, has in large part been spent in helicopters, flying top-secret missions into parts of the world most of us have never heard of to train or protect us from dangers most of us were never even aware of.
To all those foster and adoptive parents that find themselves in a difficult season right now, or to those who will at some point but just don't know it yet...this is for you. Jesus’ struggle on our behalf was not the result of His weakness, but the outcome of His faithfulness. It was Him willingly choosing the cost of our joy over the price of His pain. His suffering brings meaning to ours. His struggle brings purpose to ours. They remind us that the gospel is nothing if not the ability of Jesus to bring great beauty out of broken things.
I am excited to share with you that I will be joining the Christian Alliance for Orphans (CAFO) team this fall. I'm humbled to have the opportunity to work with an amazing organization like CAFO who is helping to lead a gospel-driven, church-based and kingdom-minded movement of orphan care around the world. CAFO exists to serve, support, inspire and resource churches and organizations in their work to care for vulnerable children and families. The annual CAFO Summit draws thousands together to be inspired, networked...
