Sometimes as a foster parent, you get calls that on paper you know don’t look good. Caseworkers push for you to just try it, to just have the kid over for dinner, or just sign up for one night of respite care, or just for a week of temporary placement. They do this because they know, that a lot of times, you will find a kid that just seems to fit with your family, even if all of the stuff on paper seems scary.

In my (limited) experience as a foster parent, the long-term placements that we’ve said yes to were all seemingly scary. Each kid was well outside of the tidy list of things that we said we were ok with and comfortable taking in. Our first placement was a newborn, 10 years ago now. We picked her up in a borrowed baby carrier from the DCS office, where she had come straight from the hospital. Back then, newborns were NOT on the list of placements we were comfortable with. We were only supposed to have school aged kids.

But, God.

He opened so many doors that we just knew we were supposed to walk through them. It was one of the hardest things we ever did. When she left, we were devastated. We were told we would be able to adopt her, and it didn’t happen like that. But it was worth it. She was a precious gift, and the Lord used her to help heal my heart after a miscarriage from the year before.

Our second placement (this year, round 2 of being foster parents, now with 2 biological kids) was a boy, younger than the age we were requesting – this time we were requesting teenagers. When the caseworker called about him, we knew we were supposed to say yes. Then we got more information, and it seemed like each phone call over the next week brought more alarming things to our attention. We started to seriously question if this was the right thing for our family, and if this was where the Lord was leading us.

But, God.

I heard the Lord speak very clearly to me then: “this is not the end for him, I’m re-writing his story.” And He did. He moved through a series of events that only the Creator of the Universe could orchestrate, to conduct a jailbreak operation for my boy’s soul and his future. He redeems the years the locusts have eaten, He breaks generational sin, and He makes beauty from ashes. Again, it was the hardest thing we had ever done. This time it was even harder than the first placement, and the heartache when he left made the first loss seem like child’s play. It sent ripples of grief through our entire family, including our kids.

He’s moving again.

He’s orchestrating a story that only He could weave together. The doubts are there, and Satan is firing his arrows of confusion and sadness and fear over all of us today as we stand and think – is this something we should do? Is this wise? Are we putting our family at risk? The answer is, yes, we would be risking everything for this child. We would be risking our comfort and our routines and our financial stability and our sleep at night and our freedom. The Lord is speaking again, but this time I’m feeling that we will be stepping into a situation like Hosea did, when God told him to marry Gomer. He knew going in that she had a past filled with trauma. She wouldn’t be able to attach to him emotionally or return his love. She would run any chance she got, and make choices that put her life in danger. He was talked about, and looked at unfavorably because of it. I’m sure he lost friends over her, lost sleep over her, and probably heard about it from his relatives over and over. But it didn’t matter. God asked him to do it.

Over and over he asked Hosea to pursue her. To chase her down and bring her back. To treat her as a wife with full rights and standing in his home, even though she had done nothing to earn this love from him.

God asked Hosea to put on love like a robe, even when it was hard, even when it wasn’t deserved or requited.

He does that for me.

I’d like to think that we will say yes to this child and she will be so grateful that she will change all of the behaviors that are going on now. Truth is, she may not ever be grateful. She may not ever change the behaviors.

It doesn’t matter. He is asking us to love her like He loves us.