A Full House {guest post}

By Amanda Tingle Taylor | Twitter

I always thought my home would be full of children. I knew that I wanted children from an early age. I was always the “mom” in my friend groups, making sure that everyone was taken care of. I had my daughter at an early age and I was excited for what the future would hold. Circumstances changed for me and I found myself divorced with a baby. I knew my plan had changed, yet I still held out hope that I would have a large family full of children.

Many years later I fell in love again, got married and started making plans to grow our family. Better late than never seemed to be a fitting plan! Yet, time was no friend to me; as the years flowed past us our family didn’t grow. Abandoning my dream of having many children wasn’t an option. That lead to testing and fertility doctors. There were kits and creams, a surgery, and a tremendous amount of praying. Nothing changed, nothing happened; our family did not grow.

When reality set in that our family would not be growing the way that I thought it would, we started looking at other options. We agreed that we were not willing to spend a small fortune on something that might never happen with doing IVF. We moved next to adoption as an option. My heart wasn’t there. I again looked at the costs; financially, emotionally, and relationally and found that I couldn’t find a way to reconcile my brain and my heart. I started to worry that our family was done.

Secretly I had been looking on websites that provided photos of children waiting in foster care for adoption. Every time I clicked on a photo or opened the website I felt that little pull in my heart. I felt a hand gently pressing into my back urging me to keep moving in that direction. The more I looked the more I realized that there was such a huge need that I had been blind to. It wasn’t adoption that was most needed. It was loving and caring foster homes. The number of foster children in need was staggering.

That was twenty months ago. Since then we have had seven beautiful children in our home. I have been mom to them all. The ones who could talk have called me mommy. Each time a scared little face looks up at me for the first time I remember that I always wanted a home full of children. I have that now. Six of them have gone on to other families or back home to their parents. I still pray for each and every one of them at night. Sitting on my coffee table I have a photo album with photos, birthdates, and notes about each child.

The other child; the one that hasn’t left our home since she came to us twenty months ago – she is my daughter through and through. At this point we have been asked if we would adopt her if that became an option. YES! A thousand times over we said yes. She is graduating from Pre-k soon and planning to celebrate another birthday with us. We’ve been able to share two Christmas’s with her and have established new traditions with her. We are her parents. And as I tuck her in at night I know that will never change. No matter if she is with us for twenty more days or twenty more years. She IS my daughter.

When it’s quiet and I am up all alone, I look around my house and smile contently. I finally have a home full of children. It doesn’t look the way that I always imagined that it would. People often don’t understand why we would put ourselves through the pain of saying goodbye over and over to the little faces that call us mommy and daddy. The need is so great but they only see the hard parts.

They can’t understand that even when a child has to leave my home it doesn’t make them any less my children. I have loved them, sheltered them, cared for them, cleaned them up and fixed their ‘boo boo’s’. I may never be able to explain it fully to others, but as I pick up toys and put away clothes at night, I know why. I still see a home full of children even though they may have moved on. Each child has taken a piece of me with them. More importantly, I have a heart full of children; my children and I will always have them there.

About Amanda:

Amanda is an art teacher by day and by night a writer, foster care advocate and avid DIYer. Her passion for helping others and her desire to reach the lost and hurting come through in her artwork, writing and relationships. She shares her home in Georgia with her husband, daughters, foster children and a menagerie of animals. You can find her sharing real life and real struggles on her website A Joyous Mess. Follow her on Facebook, Twitter, and/or Instagram!

GIVEAWAY OF ADOPTED!

For our last week of posts on foster care, adoption and children, I’m giving away a free copy of Kelley’s book, Adopted. It was one of my favorite reads last year and it was awarded the Christianity Today: 2018 Award of Merit Christian Living/Discipleship. Sign up for my newsletter by midnight (MT) on Thursday, May 31st and be entered to win a free copy! And/or tag up to four friends on my Instagram post about this book and I’ll enter you up to four times per friend you tag! Sorry, no bots and only U.S. residents!

Sign up for the Mid-month Digest and Secret Newsletter Here:

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This month on Scraping Raisins, we’re talking about adoption, foster care and children. If you’re interested in guest posting about this theme, shoot me an email at scrapingraisins (dot) gmail (dot) com. The theme for June is “Create,” so you can also be thinking ahead for that. Be sure to check back or follow me on social media so you don’t miss the fabulous guest posters I have lined up this month!

*This post includes Amazon affiliate links.

May 24, 2018May 24, 2018

There Has to Be More Than This {guest post}

By Lisa Russell

There has to be more than this.

That’s what was ruminating in our hearts and conversations. In the perspective of our Christian culture, we had “arrived.” We were happily married, had started a family, had a dog and a house just shy of a white picket fence. We had a church community, were in Bible studies and serving in ministry. So why the holy discontentment?

Looking at our week, we were with our Christian friends in our Christian community doing Christian things nearly every night, yet we couldn’t shake the feeling that we were full … too full.

I call it Spiritual Gluttony.

We were filling up so much without an outlet for overflow, which left us lethargic, stagnant and, well … bloated.

There has to be more than this.

We started praying and the Lord quickly responded with a question: “If you had the perspective of being a missionary in your own town, how would your life look different?”

At the time, I was an event planner doing an event for a local non-profit raising funds for abused and neglected children in our community. When they put statistics up about children in our very own community, I broke. Our community? Our city in beautiful Colorado that has been on the top places in the country to live? We have the resources, and yet there are children who don’t have a safe haven.

I was shocked to see that there are children even suffering from malnourishment. These kids are in our own backyard–would we be willing to invite them in and care for them for a while? We were already the neighborhood hub for kids–most of whom didn’t have involved parents, who were starving for attention and a fruit snack from our pantry. What if we took it to another level and became foster parents?

Every step of the journey to become certified foster parents involved excitement, hope, fear, anxiousness and self-doubt. And yet every step felt like removing a brick from a dam, unleashing the flowing water built up over time.

The foster care training felt like church–learning how perfect love casts out all fear, actually being the hands and feet of Jesus, loving on the orphan, the “great commission.” Then, one day walking out of a grocery store, I got a call from our case worker. I thought she was calling to let us know our certification went through as we just finished our home study, but she called to ask if we would be willing to take a newborn baby boy just 16 days old. Two hours later, our first foster son entered into our home and immediately into our hearts.

You would have thought he came from my very own womb. I fell in love with this little bundle like he was my own. What I didn’t expect was to fall in love with his family.

There was even more than this.

Even more than taking in a foster child, was taking in a larger family: his aunt, who was emergency care after he was removed from the home, the grandma who was desperate to see her newborn grandson, the extended family that was concerned, and even the biological mom who was entangled with addiction.

Our eyes were opening to see the need in our community that was hidden by masks of prosperity. Driving into our city from the interstate, there was a new strip of trendy restaurants and shops systematically placed in front of a trailer park. We can’t have people seeing a trailer park when they enter into the #1 city to live.

Our eyes were also being opened to the unseen– the evil that claws its way through families by speaking lies of despair and hopelessness. Our hearts were being broken for these families that have had a name spoken over them that they believe to be true.

Unwanted.

Unloved.

Our foster son’s grandma told me she is a pariah–an outcast in this society with little hope a door would be cracked open enough to get back in.

We tend to dehumanize these families. By no means am I giving a free pass or condoning their actions as perpetrators, but we gain no ground to healing and restoration if we don’t start seeing them and hearing their own stories. More often, these bio-parents are suffering from their own trauma, abuse, neglect, mental illness, poverty and injustice. I had a bio-mom tell me once that her mom was the one who taught her to shoot heroin. When that is your model and your norm, it’s more than difficult to cut the generational root of sin and addiction.

It’s a broken system because we are broken people living out generations of brokenness.

The longer we got into fostering, the more I heard and felt that the system is broken. I don’t know how we can have a healthy system with broken people on this side of heaven. The truth is, there are a lot of people who are just doing the best they can- from the caseworkers, to the bio families, to the foster parents and the children that suffer the consequences the most. I do know a good place to start is having eyes to see the humans in front of you, being willing to listen to their stories and have hope for them when they aren’t able to access it themselves.

I do know a good place to start is having eyes to see the humans in front of you, being willing to listen to their stories and have hope for them when they aren’t able to access it themselves.–Lisa Russell

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There is more than this.

There is more than this life–this futile effort to piece together the broken parts of people and our larger communities. It results in a painful glory, through the painful process of diving into the messy, stagnant waters, removing the bricks of the dam, the water will flow once again and produce life and fruit to the land. We have to hold tight to the “more than this” hope.

There is more than this.

About Lisa:

Lisa Russell and her family fostered for 5 years for Larimer County Child Protective Services. She is now focusing on Lisa Russell Ministries as a Counselor, Spiritual Mentor and Speaker.

GIVEAWAY OF FINDING HOME!

We’re doing a giveaway of the e-version of this book of essays by various writers about what it’s like to raise or be a Third Culture Kid (TCK). To enter, simply sign up for my newsletter AND Rachel’s newsletter before this Friday, May 26th, midnight (MT) and we’ll draw a name after that and email the winner!

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There Has to Be More Than This: On Foster Care {guest post}: "Our eyes were opening to see the need in our community that was hidden by masks of prosperity." #fostercare #nationalfostercaremonth #fostercareawareness #fosterparenting #fostermom #fostermother #fostersystem

May 14, 2018

A Lament to God for Christ the Foster Child {guest post}

By Gena Thomas | Twitter: @genaLthomas

A few months ago, lament was heavy on my mind as I was hearing the news about DACA recipients. I didn’t know how to express my lament, so I opened up an amazing book by Soong-Chan Rah about lament and found the tool I didn’t know I needed: the acrostic. Then, stretching in a way I didn’t realize I needed to, I began to pen A Lament to God for Christ the Immigrant, with help and direction from the brilliant Juliet Liu.

Today marks a culmination of decisions that have me, once again, feeling the heaviness of lament. So once again, I have turned to the acrostic. And once again, I must thank Prof. Rah for this tool in the midst of weighted pain.

I lament:

for the Adulting you had to do at such a young age.
for the Bonds that must get prematurely cut.
for the Control you should have over your life but you don’t.
for the Decisions made without your input.
for the Environment you had to grow up in.
for the ‘Foster’ put before your name, and the prejudice that will come from it.
for the Grotesque scenes you’ve witnessed.
for the Heaviness you carry with you.
for the Isolation you constantly feel.
for the Juxtaposing you do daily between your life and everyone else’s.
for the Knowledge that has come to you out of its proper order.
for the Lying you’ve learned to mimic.
for the Mountains others will call mole hills.
for the Notes home from teachers that wouldn’t be there if …
for the Opportunities that never were.
for the Pains of growing up that will be deeper than most kids your age.
for the Questions that may never be answered.
for the Rights that may terminate or may not terminate.
for the Songs of childhood you never learned to sing.
for the Tension you may always hold between your past and your future.
for the Unwillingness for most people to understand you.
for the Visions of horror and the visions of home you hold in your minds eye.
for the Ways the people of God have not been intentional about loving you.
for the X-rays that show & don’t show the abuse.
for the Youth that was stolen and will never fully return.
for the Zeniths of times with blood family that may all be in the past.

For this I pray. For this I lament.

For the ways in which I have been selfish in my love for you, I lament, I repent.

Christ have mercy.

About Gena:

Gena Thomas served as a missionary in northern Mexico for over four years with her husband, Andrew. While there, the couple founded and managed El Buho, a coffee shop ministry that still serves the town of Hidalgo. Gena holds a masters in International Development. Purchase her book, A Smoldering Wick here and/or visit her at her blog or on Twitter.

This post originally appeared at www.genathomas.com and is used with permission by the author.

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*This post includes Amazon affiliate links.

May 7, 2018May 9, 2018

What I Wish a Friend Would Have Told Me Over Coffee about Foster Care {guest post}

By Katie Finklea | Instagram

Foster Care is the hardest thing my husband and I ever walked into. Foster Care is also the most honoring thing that my husband and I ever walked into.

In honor of National Foster Care awareness month, I wanted to share some ideas and thoughts I wish would had resonated with me before taking our first of 11 foster care placements.

These are some top principles I would share with you over coffee. I hope you find them transparent, startling, eye-opening and encouraging.

1. It is not nearly as scary as I thought.

When we got our first phone call for a placement, my heart was pounding, and I started scrubbing things in my house that I had never had a desire to scrub in my life. I was searching for control and I was scared. Scared that we would fail and scared that this kid would be terrible and make us not want to foster again. I was scared for my 2 ½ year old and 11 month old and what they would experience. I was just plain scared.

Then he came to the door with the transportation worker. That blond hair and those big brown eyes instantly melted the fear away. He was simply a kid. A kid who liked mac n cheese, and soccer balls, and bubble baths, and hated bed time.

Did he have trauma? Yes. Were there some odd things we came across that we didn’t anticipate? Yes. But it wasn’t scary. HE wasn’t scary.

2. The church as a whole has no clue how to support foster parents.

Two years ago, before I became a foster parent, I ran into a friend who I hadn’t seen in weeks. “How are you?” I asked. She had just started fostering a sibling group of three kids about two months earlier. Tears formed in her eyes and she began to weep.

“You are the first person in weeks to ask how I have been,” she said. I was stunned–partially because this woman was clearly struggling and isolated, but even more so because this woman was an active member of her church and led Bible studies. She was plugged into her church community and it was no secret to anyone she was fostering.

Has anyone brought you a meal or asked to watch the kids to give you a break?”

“No,” she said. “But plenty of people tell me they are praying for me.”

Are you surprised to hear that this family no longer fosters? Fifty percent of families stop fostering after the first year due to lack of support and burn out. Many times the burn out has nothing to do with the children they are bringing in their home, but simply to do with dealing with the broken foster care system, and little support from their community and church.

Unfortunately this is the norm. The body of Christ has a responsibility to be the village to foster families. Not everyone is called to be on the front line, but everyone can do something and rally around a family for the long term.

Not everyone is called to be on the front line, but everyone can do something and rally around a family for the long term.

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Mentor the child, offer babysitting, bring a meal, get background-checked according to your state requirements and offer that family respite for a weekend. [Visit Katie’s post about more ideas on how the church can support families who are fostering children.]

3. The goal of foster care is reunification, not adoption.

The ultimate goal of fostering is reunification. When a new foster family enters into foster care with the initial thought of adoption, they need to adjust their thoughts and reconsider foster care all together.

This is hard, and I struggle with this as well, but adoption is not the goal. Family preservation is the goal. Not family preservation at all costs, but we need to hope that the biological family can get the help they need to stand up and parent their child. We as foster parents give their child a safe and loving home while the family gets the help they need. That shows Christ’s redemption all over. That is the goal of foster care.

Of course family preservation is not always feasible and when it is not, there is a beauty in that adoption. But beauty never comes without a deep place of darkness for the biological family and the child.

So many times the biological family loves the child more than society can understand, but they simply don’t have the skill set to raise the child. The skill set isn’t there because that biological parent was a former foster child and never experienced normalcy. Then cycle continues and they lose full custody of their child. It is heartbreaking for them and also for the child to digest later in life.

So there is beauty in adoption, but there is a need for homes to truly be foster parents, and pray and cheer these bio parents on in hopes that reunification can happen.

4. The impact is immense.

This may seem obvious, but the ripple effects of offering a stable home to a child can be even more impactful than ever believed. Did you know that up to 80% of those who are sex trafficked come from children who are in the foster system?

According to Case.Org, studies show that 60% to 80% of child sex trafficking victims recovered by the FBI are from foster care or group homes. “Victims are trained to call sex traffickers “daddies” and themselves “wifey” – a perverted reflection of the family unit that these children are seeking. These children long for a family … even if it means being subjected to extreme violence and abuse.”

Gaining awareness and helping sex trafficking victims is vital, but instead of focusing on pulling them out of the river, we must focus on never letting them step foot in the river in the first place. Stable foster homes are one of the major antidotes for curing human trafficking.

Is foster care for everyone? No. But if you have been on the fence about opening your door to a vulnerable child, I encourage you to grab onto that thought and take the first step in going to an info session. The forever impact of loving bravely could be larger than you ever could imagine.

Check out a recent podcast, Mommin’ Ain’t Easy, interviewing Katie!

About Katie:

Katie is the founder of Loving Well Living Well, an adoption/foster care advocacy platform geared toward educating believers in their role in orphan care. She is also a foster mom, adoptive mom, biological mom and passionate for orphan care and promoting the Church’s role in meeting the needs of vulnerable children. Katie has also worked with birth mothers pre and post placement. Follow Katie on Instagram and Facebook.

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I have three books to giveaway this month, so keep an eye out for them! This week, I’m giving away a copy of Long Days of Small Things: Motherhood as Spiritual Discipline. You can read my review here, but it’s a fabulous book to buy for moms of young children who need a breath of fresh air. Sign up for my newsletter by this Friday at midnight (MT) and I’ll send you a copy! Already signed up? Then like the Instagram post I put up on 5/8 and tag up to four friends in the comments section (I’ll enter your name once per friend you tag)! Sorry, only U.S. residents and no bots allowed. 😉

It would make a fabulous mother’s day gift for a mom in the trenches!

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This month on Scraping Raisins, we’re talking about adoption, foster care and children. If you’re interested in guest posting about this theme, shoot me an email at scrapingraisins (dot) gmail (dot) com. The theme for June is “Create,” so you can also be thinking ahead for that, too. Be sure to check back or follow me on social media so you don’t miss the fabulous guest posters I have lined up this month!

Sign up for the Mid-month Digest and Secret Newsletter Here:

**This post includes Amazon Affiliate links

What I Wish a Friend Would Have Told Me Over Coffee about Foster Care {guest post}

Category: foster care

A Full House {guest post}

GIVEAWAY OF ADOPTED!

Sign up for the Mid-month Digest and Secret Newsletter Here:

There Has to Be More Than This {guest post}

GIVEAWAY OF FINDING HOME!

Sign up for the Mid-month Digest and Secret Newsletter Here:

What I Wish a Friend Would Have Told Me Over Coffee about Foster Care {guest post}

1. It is not nearly as scary as I thought.

2. The church as a whole has no clue how to support foster parents.

3. The goal of foster care is reunification, not adoption.

4. The impact is immense.

Sign up for the Mid-month Digest and Secret Newsletter Here:

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