Picture this...

Our reasons for wanting to become a foster family are really not that complex.  This isn't a decision we made lightly but honestly, it isn't one that required too much thought.  I vividly remember being in church during worship early last year and seeing the words to the song Hosanna up on the screen. I seriously love that song for so many reasons. But the words that struck me the most that day were these:

Heal my heart and make it clean

Open up my eyes to the things unseen

Show me how to love like You have loved me

Break my heart for what breaks Yours

Everything I am for Your kingdom's cause

As I walk from earth into eternity

I decided that day to make that my prayer for myself and my family.  I was pregnant with Charlotte at the time and my mind was so focused on what kind of mother I wanted to be and what I wanted the family we raised our kids in to look like.  And that was it.  I wanted to love like Christ loves me, and to have my heart broken for what breaks his.  I wanted everything we had, everything we did to be fully devoted to God's kingdom.  This is a crazy scary world we live in and to me that seems like the only way to survive.  To be constantly focused on the eternal life ahead of us and hope that my kids see that and adopt our tunnel vision as their own.

I quickly learned that the prayer for a broken heart really works.  The heartbreak I had always carried for OKDHS was amplified and made very personal.  Greg and I were bombarded with information about the foster system in our state.  We had many discussions about it and both agreed on what we wanted our future family to look like.  A beautiful picture of kids with different stories and histories that can all come together under our roof.  And that picture makes us both so unbelievably excited, hopeful and, well enter the superlative of your choice here.  

I mentioned earlier that this decision didn't honestly take a ton of thought.  Prayer, discussion and research: yes.  Thought: no.  Let me hit you with a little statistic, at the beginning of last year there were 8,046 children in OKDHS custody.  8,046.  That is a ridiculously big number.  Too stinking big.  These are children who through no fault of their own have had to be removed from what they knew as their home.  I heard through a friend earlier this year that the shelter where too many of these kids are living had to bring in a load of extra cots so these children had a place to sleep at night.  

After learning all that we did about this system that is in such desperate need for help the decision was really pretty simple.  These facts were just too hard for us to swallow.  They make my heart hurt.  Which was my prayer all along, so I guess we're doing something right.

James 1 says "Religion that God accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress…"