We have a 15 year old foster daughter. She has another set of parents who are still in the picture. Every Friday we haul the laptop with us to baseball games, or send her downstairs with it if we are home, so that she can log in to a zoom meeting and see her mom and dad on the screen for a few minutes. The picture is fuzzy because no one has a good webcam, and her dad usually has trouble getting the mic to work or his video is flipped sideways. Mom sometimes logs in ten minutes late or more. The words they speak to each other are carefully guarded by the social worker who also watches in on the call - it's their job to make sure nothing inappropriate is said and to check in on how the kids' week went. For…

I am so quick to call on the Lord when things get rough. Like the disciples when the boat is starting to take on water, I look up and yell, Lord! Help! He is faithful and comes to my rescue every single time. But there are a lot of times when I don't yell for help, when I take my eyes off of Jesus, and I decide I can do it all by myself. Things have been going really well here lately, and just this morning I had to repent for trying to do this life all on my own without Him. I've said this before and I'll say it again, Satan is a sneaky guy. So often I'm looking for him to come at me as a guy with a pitchfork offering me illegal drugs or sex on a platter or something that…

Lord, you are good and your mercy endures forever. Before a word is on my tongue, You Lord, know it completely. You hem me in behind and before,And you lay your hand upon me.Such knowledge is too wonderful for me,Too lofty for me to attain.Psalm 139:4-6 We are a full week into having our foster daughter in our home. One week of learning someone new, changing routines up, picking up someone else from school, and learning to navigate teenage emotions and friend stuff and drama. There have been some heavy moments, where we've learned that there is more going on under the surface here than we thought. There are many players in this drama, and many of them have secrets they are guarding closely. Yesterday I was feeling quite overwhelmed trying to keep up with all of it. So, I asked the Lord for…

When I was growing up, I heard over and over that when I had kids of my own, I would more fully understand what God did for us when He sent Jesus to die for us. And to some extent, that's true. Now, with two kids of my own (and other temporary kids coming through the doors) I can't imagine sending one of my kids- one of those pieces of my beating heart- to die for murderers, robbers, prostitutes, and liars. But. If you want to understand the flip side of this story of grace, the other side of the coin that shows how much the Father loves us, step into foster care or adoption. When Jesus died for our sins, the veil that separated humans from God in the temple was torn, from top to bottom. At that moment, when he purchased our…

Today we become parents [again]! This time, to a 15 year old girl. We had a 17 year old girl stay for respite a few weeks ago, just for one night, but it was definitely different. This time, we know her, or at least my husband does. She's a student at his school. This isn't a kinship placement though, we were called from our agency about a (seemingly) random placement. For quite a while, I felt like the Lord was nudging my heart back toward foster care. I was a little resistant, because our experience the first time wasn't so great. It was the hardest thing we ever did, and we ended with no warm fuzzies and no baby (hello, it's FOSTER CARE, so I'm not sure what I was expecting). But. This time around, I knew it wasn't going to be easy to…

"You do not have because you do not ask God. When you ask, you do not receive, because you ask with wrong motives, that you may spend what you get on your pleasures." - James 4:2-3 "And I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. You may ask me for anything in my name, and I will do it." - John 14:13-14 I have trouble asking for things in my life. I have perfectionist tendencies, and was raised to believe that I can do things on my own, because I am strong and smart and I don't need to ask other people for help. So often this spills over into my relationship with Jesus. Satan knows this, and when I read the verses above, he is quick to point out that those kinds…

One day I hope to get to tell her this as part of her story. The foster child they called about 3 weeks ago? We said no. After a lot of back and forth, a lot of prayers, and a LOT of tears, we decided it wasn't what was best for our family. It was a decision that my husband and I were torn about, we were on different pages about, and one of us wanted to say yes when the other one wanted to say no. But, we are a team. And we agreed going into foster parenting that is we weren't on the same page, we weren't going to say yes. We made a choice before we ever got placement calls that we were going to be both all in, or not at all. Anything less wasn't fair to the child, and…

I was scrolling through the news the other morning, and was surprised, and heartbroken, and a little scared, by story after story of someone shooting someone else. In a massage store. In a grocery store. In an office complex. I go to 2 of these 3 places as part of my normal weekly (sometimes daily) routine. Sometimes I take my kids with me, and in the stories above, kids were casualties too. The thought that I could be getting pasta and fruity pebbles and come face to face with a mass murderer was unnerving. Is nowhere safe anymore? I think I got used to it, before COVID hit, when people were shot at concerts and churches and blown up while running marathons. It was shocking, but it was everywhere. You couldn't go a month without news that someone had killed a bunch of people…

Have you ever had pride sneak up on you? Most of the time when I think of pride, I think of a raging beast - those feelings of being better than someone else, or of being something so special that no one can touch you. I think about pride as being very obvious and easy to spot. They say "pride goes before a fall", right? If it comes before a fall, I would think it would be easy to see it coming. But that's not always how pride works. Pride is sneaky. Like a tree root that just sticks out of the ground enough to catch the tip of your shoe. It may be barely noticeable, but it's enough to trip you up and leave you face down in the dirt. Sure, a lot of times, it looks like very obvious feelings of superiority…