Fostering

By Faith Overton

We have taken on a foster child these past few months and the journey has been enlightening . At times it’s just like all other forms of parenting: time consuming , exhausting and all worth it . What I find we often don’t hear about is what about the biological parent? What they just go through having their child taken out of their immediate custody . I can’t imagine what that feels like but through the time I’ve been serving our little foster I have some guesses . One common theme is guilt and shame . All of us parents can understand how easy it is to internalize blame while raising our kids . Society doesn’t make it easy to raise quality humans these days let alone if you don’t have a close family , solid support system nearby it’s practically impossible . So why is it we can give grace and mercy to foster parents but not the parents of the actual foster themselves? It’s because we think on some judgment scale we re better then thee people . I’ve riddled myself over this and it’s the only thing I can come up with as to why we don’t share some sense of compassion towards these parents . Our own sense of judge and jury over another parent ends up limiting us to extending love to a group of people who desperately need it . You have no idea the things there people have to do in order to be reunited with their children again . Now listen I know there are those who abuse the system , who don’t care , and rightfully need those under their care taken away safely . However , I was raised to believe that we shouldn’t judge their circumstances as we don’t know their journey . We can be a life changer to these parents and all parents for that matter by simply not judging them . If your heart can’t seem to find compassion or you skip into becoming the judge of another’s heart do this : keep it to yourself as it’s your issue to work through not anybody else’s . I hope just sharing small tibits of our journey helps encourage those out there on the fence about fostering . This has been my calling since I was young but our specific case was definitely all God telling us it was time to go to work !