I love when blog readers write to me. Seriously. It’s one of my favorite things. In the last week I had two women write to me to ask me about how to prepare their hearts for the eventual pain of saying goodbye to a foster child. It was a question that struck a little too close to home as we deal with the twists and turns in our foster daughter’s case. I talked to these women about reminding yourself of the great gift you are giving this child to share your loving, stable home. I talked about obedience and calling. I talked about trusting a sovereign God. And then I sent those emails along.
But something kept bothering me.
I felt like what I was writing to them was true, but was insufficient. I mean, really— how are those platitudes going to comfort somebody when they’re struggling through the difficulty of packing up a child and sending them away? While we have not yet experienced that with the children who entered our home as foster babies, we went through it may times during our group home days. There were boys that were very precious to me (and still are!) that left our care for various reasons. If you’d asked me a month before they left how I could handle parting with them, I would have told you it would be devastating. While each loss was devastating in its own way, I also had an unexpected peace about it. That Holy Spirit comfort didn’t come a moment before I needed it and I had no way of anticipating how meaningful that would be. In all my worrying about kids leaving us and how we would process it, I could never factor in the actual comfort that would be present in that moment, so the worry about the pain was always greater than the pain actually was.
My thinking about anxiety and my strategy for evaluating it was heavily influenced by the C.S. Lewis book “The Screwtape Letters”. In it Lewis writes letters between two demons about how to keep a Christian from being effectual. In the sixth chapter the mentor demon writes this (remember that because these are letters written between two demons the “Enemy” here would be God):
Your patient will, of course, have picked up the notion that he must submit with patience to the Enemy’s will. What the Enemy means by this is primarily that he should accept with patience the tribulation which has actually been dealt out to him-the present anxiety and suspense. It is about this that he is to say “Thy will be done”, and for the daily task of bearing this that the daily bread will be provided. It is your business to see that the patient never thinks of the present fear as his appointed cross but only of the things he is afraid of.
Let him regard them as his crosses: let him forget that, since they are incompatible, they cannot all happen to him, and let him try to practise fortitude and patience to them all in advance. For real resignation, at the same moment, to a dozen different and hypothetical fates, is almost impossible, and the Enemy does not greatly assist those who are trying to attain it: resignation to present and actual suffering, even where that suffering consists of fear, is far easier and is usually helped by this direct action.
I wouldn’t say I’m a person that struggles with anxiety, but I would say I’m a planner. That planner side of me can start to get worried when I can’t see the end or things start to feel out of control. I lose sleep, think through every possible scenario, fixate on the things I can control, and worry. Foster care seems to bring out that side of me in an especially strong way. But I have found that the worrying never makes the pain better when it eventually comes, but it does manage to steal the joy I could be finding in my life today. The wisdom I gained from reading “The Screwtape Letters” was to ask myself if I am worrying about contradictory outcomes. In the same sleepless night I may worry that a foster child will be taken from our home soon OR that they will stay a long time and then be taken OR that they may stay with us forever, but have serious issues we aren’t anticipating. These possibilities can’t all happen, but I am still spending time worrying through the implications of each. This is wasted worry.
I struggled with worry during my pregnancy. I had been pregnant twice before, with both of them ending in miscarriages. This third pregnancy was not easy on my body and every day I woke up with fear that this would be my last day with this child in my womb. Then I started realizing that if this was my last day with this child, what did I want my baby to know about life? Did I want him to know my fears and hear me crying? Nope. I wanted him to have the chance to experience LIFE. I wanted him to hear me laugh, to go on walks, to hear beautiful music, to have his amniotic fluid be just a little ice-cream flavored. I wanted him to know joy and the only way he would know it would be through me and my challenge to embrace his life for whatever period of time I could. And yet, even with that commitment to find the joy and let go of the worry, I still felt an amazing sense of relief when it was all over and my son was born. I have to trust that if the worst had happened with that pregnancy, God would have been there then too, just as he was during my previous miscarriages.
It seems to be true that I can also waste my worry on other people’s situations. My niece was diagnosed with a pretty terrible kidney disease this past year. The prognosis is grim and she’s a teenager. It has been amazing to me to see the grace and class she has had in dealing with it all. She handles the physical symptoms, the doctors, the tests, and all that on top of the normal ridiculousness of high school. My mom and I were discussing how she’s able to cope so well when we feel such worry for her and we realized she is receiving comfort in this situation that we never will. God is giving her peace because this is her struggle to walk through. He is refining her and changing her and we are relegated to outside observers. We can’t carry that pain for her, nor can we know the peace she’s able to experience because she is trusting a God who is bigger than dysfunctional kidneys.
Of course for all of us in difficult situations, the pain is still there. It doesn’t magically go away because we trust God. But knowing the pain may come needs to help us live in the moment and embrace joy. We can’t pre grieve. And what a loss if we don’t fully give ourselves to loving our foster kids or enjoying our pregnancies or even appreciating our functional kidneys because we’re worried about what comes next.
My head knows this all to be true, but I am preaching this message again to my heart. It is a constant battle to reorient my heart to trust God’s hand in the life of our foster child. In some ways the worry feels like DOING something and trust just feels so passive. My heart longs to not sit by passively, but to fight for this child. I am learning that sometimes “fighting” means more praying and less frantic planning. I hope when the time comes for her to leave our home, she will remember it as a peaceful place where she was loved. It will be hard to create that environment if I’m living in my fears.
“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes? Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
“And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin. Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these. If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.”
-Matthew 6:25-34
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