It all started at the end of 2008. I was sitting in church on a Sunday morning
and had a sudden thought pop into my head.
It said…”you should be a foster parent”.
Totally not related to the service and not something that I thought
about doing at all! I quickly pushed
that thought right out of my head! You
see, we had temporary custody of my nephews a few years before that and it was
an awful experience. Without going into
details, just know that it put a tremendous strain on my family, especially our
marriage. So much so that I wasn’t sure we would pull out of it. However,
God is good and we got through it with HIS help and I really thought I would
never go through that again! Little did
I know we needed to go through that so we would be prepared for the future that
God had in store for us.
For about a month after that day in church, the thought just
kept coming back. It didn’t help that it
was the month that a local radio station advertises an auction that they do for
Foster kids in our county. I decided I
would tell someone and realize how crazy it was and block it out for good. I started talking to a friend and during the
conversation I said I don’t know any foster parents to even talk to about all
my questions. THAT DAY I met a foster
parent. It was someone I already knew,
I just didn’t know that she was a foster parent and had adopted her daughter
through foster care. The amazing thing
is that I only found this out because I overheard a conversation she was having
with someone else. Now I start thinking
that this is more than just a coincidence.
I decided to mention it to Darrell, thinking he would say absolutely not,
and knowing that God would never put us in a situation that would hurt our
marriage I could finally get rid of this now overwhelming feeling.
I get home from work that day and had to run right back out
for something. Before I lost my nerve, I
told Darrell to remind me when I get home to tell him something. He kept asking what it was so quickly I said
I really feel like we should look into foster parenting. He looked at me and said, “if it’s something
you feel strongly about, we’ll talk about and look into it”. WHAT??
This is not at all what I expected to come out of his mouth! At that moment I thought, OK God, I get
it. I’ll look into it.
January of 2009 we signed up and started pre-service classes
to become foster parents. We were the
only couple out of about 11 that were not signed up to adopt. We were in it strictly to do foster care. The classes were awesome. At times I found myself wishing we would have
taken them before we had our bio kids.
After the classes, the home study process started. So much paper work was involved. I started to doubt our decision and drug my
feet on a few things. The final item we
needed was our life insurance information.
I needed to call our finance guy to see what the details of our policies
were. I just kept forgetting or running
out of time to actually call him. One
day, I get home from work and there was a message on my machine from him. Another God moment!! I never called him! I hadn’t talked to him in probably over a
year. He was just calling to see how we
were and if we needed anything. OK God,
I get it….I’ll get moving! We finished
up everything and got our license in May 2009.
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