Since I’m down to not blogging much, I figured I would at least try and make the post I do make have some quality.
We are getting very close to having our new daughter. While anything can happen and derail the plans, chances are that the child has been picked and all that is left is working through the system. My mind races at times about all that this means. Growing up without a dad, I know the struggles that a person in a broken family has to go through. But even then, I wasn’t abused and neglected. I did without a lot, but I wasn’t beat down by people that should have protected me. What we are doing for this little girl is rescuing her from that reality. The change in her life circumstances will change so drastically that who and what she is today will not at all resemble who and what she can become if she chooses to take the opportunity given to her and run with it.
Then my mind races to all the people in my life over the years. This process toward adopting this little girl started 5 or 6 years ago at our first church. I remember sending out an email asking my closest friends what they thought about my family adopting a child. To be honest, it was not a positive response in many ways. Each made their own set of excuses about why we shouldn’t do it. So we didn’t fully act on it at that point. However God had other plans and he sent to us a little 5 month old boy that later became part of our family. I do dare say that in spite of all the reasons a person could say no when he came to our life, we said yes… and it has been a complete blessing to my family. All of those “no’s” never became an issue. Though this even reminds me of a story nearly 9 years ago when my wife was pregnant with our third, and only planned, child. A sweet old lady that was very close to our family went kind of crazy about how bad this was. How we just couldn’t afford to have a third child and various other reasons why it was a bad idea. Now lets be honest, that third child is our toughest parenting challenge… he is just like his dad! But here we are nearly with a nearly 9 year old son who is doing just fine, and so is our family. The relationship with that sweet old lady.. pretty much over. I never fully understood this until my wife and I were going through our foster care training. I’ll expand on this in a bit.
So let me take a bit of a side rant here first. I don’t understand people. When our friends share their dreams and ideas with us, we immediately go to why it can’t or shouldn’t happen. What good does that do? If it can’t our shouldn’t happen, it won’t. But chances are you need to be a source of encouragement to your friend, not a source of why not. It reminds me of a conversation I had with a good friend several years ago. He spent several years in a job that he didn’t care for, making a pretty humble wage. He had a job opportunity with great potential and a nice salary increase. He asked me what I thought. I had two choices, I could encourage him to do what he thought was right or tell him why I thought it was bad. I chose the negative, he chose the job and several years later… he was right. I was wrong. This situation has stuck with me for many years.
Back on topic. I never understood why the relationship with that sweet old lady broke down as it did until we were in our training. One of the classes we were required to take focused on the topic of public reaction to foster parents. One of the BIG things that stuck out to many of the women in the class was the people that would say things like, “Do you really think this is a good idea?” or “Are you nuts?” and more. The women took this as a personal insult. “What do you think I’d do this without giving it great thought?” So I’m sure, even though this lady had good intentions, by continuously second guessing a decision that my wife and I made after a lot of consideration, we must have felt pretty insulted. Would you remain close to a person you felt was continuously insulting you? There is a point where you really need to let your opinion drop and support your friends if you value the friendship.
I’ve been very thankful for my friends that have spoken encouragement into my family. We certainly know the risk and concerns in what we are doing. We don’t need anybody to rehash those with us. But what I really value is the people in our lives that tell us how what we are doing is special and a great example for how to make a difference in the world. I don’t need to hear them say that to know that its true, but it still feels great to hear it.
Though I will add, my general reply to people that have given negative thoughts is that if there is one thing I am willing to challenge God about, it is taking care of the fatherless. I know the negatives, but I can’t imagine God would not protect my family when we are doing His work.
I’ll close with something I’ve heard several times, even today in an email from a mom of a child on my son’s baseball team. Though the mom said it in an encouraging way:
You can’t save them all.
This has generally been put with a negative spin about how even though we love and care about these orphans, we can’t save them all. And I do agree, however what we can do is save the ones we have saved. We saved a 5 month old from a life of hell. Today he is one of the most loving and affectionate children you could ever meet. We can’t save them all, but what we can do is save this 9 year old precious girl from a life of hell with her chances for a family and a stable future dwindling more and more every day. So yeah, we can’t save them all… but we can save the two we are saving. If we made decisions on the fact that we couldn’t fix it all… why would we ever do anything good? You can’t save all the homeless, but you can save the ones in front of you that day while at the soup kitchen. You can’t save all the children without a dad, but you can save the ones close to your family by ‘adopting’ them as your neighborhood child (more on this in a bit). You can’t do it all by yourself, but that shouldn’t stop you from doing what you can do today.
I guess I’ll close by saying thank you. As a young fatherless child I had many families that adopted me as one of their own. While my mom was working second shift, they were feeding me and letting me hang out at their house allllll the time. The Hubbard’s, the Pennington’s, the Bernau’s, the Richardson’s, and many more. Thank you. Many of you are still role models for me today and I value the time I had at your house greatly.