A very good friend and mentor of mine is a foster parent.  She currently has eight boys in her home under the age of 15. She has often talked to me about becoming a foster parent and I always had a list of “buts” for her.  I’m sure she felt the same way I feel when someone tells me they could NEVER homeschool their children.  I almost always ended our conversations about fostering with, “I could NEVER let them go!”  We were chatting the other day and she was talking about the boys and that the agency she fosters through had called and asked her if she could take two more. Seriously!!!  They needed her to take two more?  Five of the boys she has are foster children.  She told me that the children’s home was out of beds and one little boy was sleeping in a foyer.  In that instant, God changed my heart.  I felt it!  I felt myself go from, “I could NEVER do that!” to “I could NEVER stand by while a child suffers…in any way.”  I was lost in tears.  After talking with her, I instantly called my husband.  I don’t know how he understood a word I said through my uncontrollable sobbing, but he did.  As I relayed the story of the child in the foyer, I believe God changed Mark’s heart too.  Mark told me to find out what we need to do to become foster parents.  Normally, we would have spent a lot of time in prayer about such a decision, but we both just knew.  We start our classes in a couple weeks.  We are shopping for a bigger vehicle.  We are excited!  BUT, we are also scared.

So, in the meantime, I reached out to a high school classmate that also is a foster parent.  I sent her a Facebook message asking if she could give us any insight that would be beneficial to us.  I told her my biggest fear was the letting them go back part.  I don’t know what I expected Shelly to write, but it certainly was not what we received.  My husband and I sat reading the two-paged response with tears flowing freely down our faces.  Here is part of what Shelly Hedges Monfort blessed us with,

“We are often asked about foster parenting and why we continue to do it  – people tell us they would really like to become foster parents, “BUT” – “but we would get too attached and wouldn’t want to give the kids back”, “but we would just get really mad and frustrated with the parents when they don’t do what they need to do to get their kids back”, “but we don’t think we could deal with the frustrations of the system”………………………

Fostering parenting is hard – no doubt about it.

It’s hard when the kids you’ve loved and cared for in your home go back to their parents and you worry, every day, about their safety and well-being and know that you might never see them again.

It’s hard to think about what a kid has been through when you buy them a new pair of shoes and every night they take them off, put them in the box they came from WalMart in, and hide them behind the couch so nobody will find them and take them. 

It’s hard to think about how many times a kid has gone to bed hungry when they sneak in to the kitchen at night when everybody else is sleeping and take food to hide under their bed to make sure they always have something to eat.

It’s hard to answer a kid’s questions like “why don’t my mommy and daddy want to see me?”  “why didn’t they come to our visit?” “why does mommy love her boyfriend more than me?”

It’s hard when you have loved a kid for 5 + years, think you will be adopting that kid, start the paperwork to adopt that kid, and something changes and that kid goes back to their parent / parents.

It’s hard when 2 newborn babies that you have loved for more than a year, stayed up all night with, stayed at the hospital for days on end with, watched go through painful medical procedures and then had to learn how to do those procedures yourself eventually go back to their parents. 

It’s hard to focus on the good things about being a foster parent and ignore the dark and gloomy “BUTS”……………..

BUT! What if you could give a kid a warm, safe place to sleep with clean sheets and blankets and read them a bedtime story and let them feel what it’s like to be tucked in and kissed goodnight and not have to be afraid to fall asleep?

BUT!  What if you could give a kid a warm meal every evening, around a dinner table and make them feel important by having conversations about how their day was, what they are looking forward to, and all those other things families talk about around the dinner table?

BUT! What if you could make a kid feel like they mattered just by sitting with them a little bit every evening and helping them with their homework or making sure they had all the supplies they need for school?

BUT! What if you could relieve the adult burdens a kid feels and allow them to just be a kid?

BUT!  What if you could give a kid a glimpse of what it’s like to live in a house where people don’t hurt each other?

BUT! What if you could see parents, for the first time in their lives, make their kids a priority and kick a drug or alcohol habit so they can get their kids back?

BUT! What if you could see a father, who hasn’t seen his son in 8 years, come back into his son’s life, work hard to learn how to be a good father, and get custody of his son.

BUT! What if you could make such an impact on a kid’s life that they always stay in touch with you and years later come back to thank you for taking care of them and loving them?

BUT!  What if you eventually get to adopt the kid you have wanted to adopt for 3 + years?

BUT! What if you could see the kids that you have loved and cared for in your home take some of that love with them and pass it on to their own kids making the world a better place for their generation and generations to come?”

WOW! What a beautiful, heart-felt way of giving us the good, bad, and ugly.  What a heart that sees the glory and love in the smallest gesture to a child.  What a glimpse of how God must see us despite our sin.  Shelly ended her “love letter” to us with this,

“Our heart hurts sometimes – sometimes it hurts A LOT, especially when we come across  things that remind us of the kids we have loved – a toy at home that a kid has left behind, a sleeper in the laundry that we forgot to send home with a kid, or see a kid’s favorite food on the shelf at WalMart.   We have come to realize during the past 12 years as foster parents that God has given us the ability, capacity, or some other word that fits here, to love and not give up on children that are not ours and that, at times, are difficult to love and would be quite easy to throw the towel in on.  Sometimes, when things are really hard and the dark and gloomy “BUTS” are even harder to ignore, we take a much needed break to regroup and refocus, BUT, foster parenting is how we intend to leave the world a little bit better than we found it.”