This month I am partnering with Christian Heritage and My Bridge Radio to encourage families in Nebraska to consider foster care as a way to love families in crisis. If you’re curious about foster parenting, now is the time to get your questions answered! Check out Christian Heritage for more details about informational events happening across Nebraska in September.
When we first began caring for other people’s children through foster care and group home work, we were motivated by a desire to love and serve these children. In our minds, they were the helpless victims of their parents bad choices and deserved our compassion. But the funny thing was, the more we learned about their parents, the more we were able to see that they too had been victims in their own lives. They were often acting out patterns and cycles of abuse and disfunction that were so ingrained that it was difficult for them to know how much they were wounding their children. They genuinely loved their kids, but they lacked the parenting skills to know how to care for them. As we watched them grieve the loss of their children and realized they were not the enemy, our motivation in foster care started to shift.
Our hope is to see redemption for the families we serve. We are now looking at a bigger picture of not just children loved and protected, but families filled with hope and equipped with the skills necessary to safely be reunified. As foster parents we can come alongside these moms and dads and express our support for them. We can be some of the first people in their lives to treat them with dignity and respect. We can become their advocates, champions and cheerleaders as we watch them do the hard work of breaking the deeply ingrained unhealthy patterns and coping skills that have kept them from being able to safely parent their children. As people who know Jesus, we can offer them forgiveness because we have been forgiven. We can offer them grace because we have experienced grace. We can bear all things, hope all things, believe all things, and endure all things because we have been filled with a love we were intended to share.