A Glimpse of Our Hearts

From a glance around our dinner table to a glimpse of our hearts--quite a jump, wouldn't you say?

Honestly, it's quite an undertaking to try to communicate our hearts to you in a blog post, but it's an undertaking that we feel is worth...well...worth undertaking, so here is my feeble attempt.

Many, if not all of you know, that for the past year God has had our family on a crazy journey involving foster care.

Most of you know that we were changed greatly by the almost six months that we had to love on Little Man.

Some of you know that we also had a chance to love on another little boy; here we'll call him Baby L.

Please don't be hurt or offended if you haven't heard that we had a second placement. Our goal is not to exclude anyone, rather it is to protect the privacy of our family and to protect the confidentiality of the child in our care. In so doing, it's taken us a few weeks to process all that happened in the brief time Baby L was with us. It's a long story. But it's an amazing story--one that we feel is worth sharing.

Before I share, I want you to glimpse our hearts.

When people find out that our family is a foster family, we get one of two responses:

"Wow! I could never do that!"

or

"Oh, we've always thought about doing that."

Our advice to both types of responses is usually,

"Don't do it! Unless God's called you to it--if He hasn't it's not worth it!"

Not exactly the billboard for foster care that we probably should be, but, we've learned that it's hard--it's the hardest thing we've ever done as a couple and maybe ever done in our lifetimes--and if it wasn't for the God of the Bible teaching us more about who He really is, then it wouldn't be worth it to us.

So, as I share in the next few post the long story about our short time with Baby L, please see that our hearts are not that it's about us. It's about Him. There is not one moment in the time we had with Baby L that either of us would say was "us."

God's presence was with us in a way that we've, frankly, never felt before but that we long to feel again for always.