Stories of Rescue

Our church has been going through “Stories of Rescue” as a way to connect the congregation with the work our church is doing in various areas of our community and more globally. I was blessed to be able to speak this last Sunday on the response of our congregation to the needs of foster children and I wanted to share with you what I shared with them.

Pastor Michael asked me to speak about our foster care experience as part of the “Stories of Rescue” we’re going through. Because word choice is really important to me, I want to clarify what exactly has been the “rescue” part of our foster care journey. I would not say that we “rescued” our foster children. That would imply that they need to be grateful to us and if any of us expect our kids to be grateful that they are our kids, we would probably be disappointed. There was a moment of rescue for our children where someone literally picked them up out of a bad situation, but that person wasn’t a foster parent. That was a police officer or social worker or hospital employee. We aren’t the rescuers or our kids anymore than we were the rescuers of Joel by giving birth to him. We are just the people blessed by getting to raise them and have a hand in their story.

But there was a rescue involved. Foster care is how God rescued Brian and me from thinking we were in control of our lives. It’s how we’ve been rescued from some of our selfishness, our idolatry of comfort, and our lack of compassion for the poor and oppressed in our community. Foster care has not only changed the trajectory of our kids’ lives, but also our lives as we’ve come to understand God’s heart for children in need and families who are struggling in our city.

I know there are some of you who might have a tendency to tune me out because you don’t want to feel guilty about the fact that foster parenting isn’t for you. I want you to not feel guilty, but to feel encouraged about what the Body of Christ is doing  here and how you are playing a part in that. Brian and I had a friend who came to our church a couple times and who worked for a foster care agency. He told us that if they could get the same percentage of a local mega church’s families to decide to foster as the percentage of our church families who are fostering, every foster child in Lincoln could be sleeping in a Christian home tonight. For being a small church, our response to the needs of foster children has been huge. The very first week Brian and I attended here 4 years ago I remember the warm welcome we received and how a nice lady said, “What a sweet baby. Can I hold him?” and I passed off our Danny (who at the time was named Marcus) to Jen and Marcus. We probably talked for a total of ten minutes before I asked her if they’d ever thought about foster parenting. About two years later they got their license and now a precious little girl knows the beauty of family because of their selfless service. It has been incredibly beautiful to me to drop my kids off at the nursery and see that a large percentage of the little ones in there are foster or adopted kids. We have families who have taken the foster parent classes and will be licensed when they feel ready, families who have foster kids, families who have adopted their foster kids, families who are licensed to provide respite for foster kids, and we’ve even been blessed with having people who work for foster agencies here.

So I want to encourage all of you that this church is doing something special in Lincoln right now when it comes to meeting the needs of foster kids. And I see that as a corporate story of rescue. At a time when our church was going through a tough situation, instead of getting angry or just hunkering down for survival, God moved families to reach out and look for how they could serve in a very difficult area.

There are some of you who have felt like foster care might be an option for you, but there’s something holding you back. Please feel free to talk to me or any of our other foster parents about it, or to attend the Christian Heritage informational meeting at New Covenant this Thursday night. I’m not going to tell you that foster parenting is just easy and fun and fulfilling although there are moments when it is all of those things. It is hard work, but if Christians aren’t the ones to step up and care for these kids, who will? For a long time there has been a negative connotation with foster parenting and I am very passionate about changing that by having quality families step up who know their strengths and have healthy boundaries. I can answer a lot of your questions about how it all works, but I can’t alleviate all your fears. Sometimes you have to do the right thing even when you feel a little fear about it. There have been moments of anxiety for me with each phone call we get about taking a child, but in the end I remember that this is a child in need of a family and saying “yes” to them is saying “yes” to Jesus.

There’s a lot about the history of our children that is very private to us, but I want to share a piece of our daughter’s story with you. When we got the call about her need for a family, I thought maybe we should say “yes”. Brian thought I was crazy. We had a three year-old and a 14 month-old with some special needs and we were being asked to take on a 5 month-old. I told Brian if he wanted to say “no” I understood, but he’d have to be the one to call Christian Heritage and tell them. Five minutes later Brian called me back and said, “She’ll be at the house in fifteen minutes.” I asked him what changed his mind and he said that he had told Doug we didn’t want to be baby hogs and surely there were other people lined up for a healthy little girl. Doug told him, “Brian, I don’t know what we’re going to do with her if you say no. You’d think people would want her, but it’s hard to find a family that is willing to do the diaper changes and late night feedings, and deal with all the helplessness when there’s no promise of adoption on the other side.” Brian said to me, “I couldn’t say no to that. If this isn’t the least of these, I don’t know who is.” And 17 months later that baby we were supposed to keep for six weeks became our daughter.

I have no doubt that if Doug had called a wrong number and had dialed your house by mistake, there are a bunch of you in this room right now that would have heard there was a baby who desperately needed a family and you would have said yes. You would have run to Target and bought diapers and formula and loved that baby because it was the right thing to do. But it’s really easy to think there aren’t any children in need in our area because you don’t have a foster license and so nobody is going to be giving you that call tonight. If you want to be in a position to be the hands and feet of Jesus to the children in need in our neighborhood, you have to go to some classes and fill out some paperwork.

I firmly believe not everybody is called to be a foster parent. I have actually talked people out of it. BUT I do take the Bible seriously when we read in James that “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” If you aren’t going to care for orphans by bringing them into your home, how are you going to do it? You do it by being the support structure for our church families that ARE doing it. You bring meals when foster kids enter their home. You work in the nursery. You provide respite care. You pray for foster parents and foster kids. You volunteer as a CASA (court appointed special advocate). You donate clothes to the Foster Care Closet or to individual families as they take in children. You drop off diapers or matchbox cars or school supplies when a child enters a our corporate family. You welcome them with open arms to our church every Sunday.

So I want you to talk to your spouse or your friends or your Life Group about what exactly you’re doing to support the kids in need in our community so you can experience the same rescue we’ve been blessed to know.