Becoming a foster mom has been the single most formative experience of my life. All the little flaws I try so hard to hide bubble to the surface. Sleep deprivation will do that to you. Slowly I’m learning how to manage my temper, how to guard my tongue, how to put someone else first. I suppose I should have learned these things before I turned forty, but someone it was never so urgent before. There is no putting a “Christian happy face” on for a four-year-old. He can see right through it.
Yet, the most important thing this whole experience has taught me is not about me, but about God. I am finally getting a clue about what it means to say, “I am an adopted child of God.” You don’t have to be a foster parent to know this. Anyone who answers the call to love a child with whom she shares little or no biological connection—stepmothers, adoptive mothers, foster mothers, custodial grandmothers—understand this instinctively. You don’t have to be a blood relation to carry someone in your heart.
God is the same way. The only blood tie your heavenly Father needs to bring us into His family is the one His Son offered up from Calvary. He knew and loved us extravagantly while we were still a twinkle in our father’s eye. Since I first became a foster parent, I’ve discovered three principles of “alternative parenting” that help me to understand what God must go through with us:
“Love hangs in there, even when it makes no sense.”
“Love risks even the good for something better.”
“Love is the most powerful and irresistible force in the universe.”
When our kids first arrived, there were three of them including five-year-old Cheyenne. The previous foster mom, Phyllis, said that Cheyenne and Christopher loved scrambled eggs with cheese, and so I whipped up a batch for our first breakfast together as a family.
Cheyenne eyed her plate suspiciously as I set it in front of her. “Eew. What’s that?!”
“Eggs. Scrambled eggs.”
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