Reality Check

"You'll be dealing with emotional abuse for sure. For instance one of our children's father would lay her down behind the back tires and put his truck in reverse. He'd spin his tires to make her think he was going to run over her...you know, things like that." R. had been doing these meetings for almost thirty years. Speaking to prospective parents about foster care and adoption. I turned to Chris and said, "that could be our daughter." It starts to get really easy to not notice the amount of pain around you. The amount of children who need homes. We have nice cars to distract us, nice homes, happy smiling kiddos, warm food, high fives, an awesome church community. For a short amount of time I think I forgot how messed up our world really is. Chris and I made the prayerful decision to begin the process for adoption through the State of Texas a big change from where we started. We knew that starting this process would mean dealing with the effects of abuse and neglect. It's a biggie...the effects are usually life long companions to the children and there is loads of research that shows that children adopted from the state just don't do well. Scary? Sure...from our perspective most things are. Meeting new friends is scary, trying new foods, helping friends through grief is scary but we do it and it makes us stronger. It gives us tools to do things that are more challenging later on down the road. So we'll do it and God's gonna walk us through our emotions. He's the peanut butter in our PB sandwich. Right in the middle. So we're putting in our preliminary paperwork to get started. After that we have training hours that we'll have to fulfill and in that time we'll have our home study completed. It's a short amount of time, normally 120 days from start to finish then our caseworker will begin to find a child that will fit our family. We needed to remind ourselves that we're not looking for the "perfect" child. Just like our kids don't ask for the "perfect" parents. There's no such thing. We just know how to love each other, for now, that's enough. We're all God's children...thank goodness He takes care of the perfect part.