Lilly is a 10-day-old baby withdrawing from drug exposure in the womb.

Henry is 5 years old and has spent most of his life in foster care. He was separated from a home with his siblings to be reunited with his biological father who severely beat him. 

Katie is 19 years old. She has aged out of foster care but never learned basic life skills. If she wants to sleep with a roof over her head, her option is the local homeless shelter.

Jason and Ellie are 1 and 3 years old. They have experienced profound neglect and have the developmental delays to show for it.

Jacob is a newborn baby, also withdrawing from drug exposure in the womb. His mother currently lives under a bridge.

Tara is 10 years old. She’s now in foster care after a childhood spent caring for her infant brother and sister. She recently learned that her siblings were adopted without her. 

The names of these children have been changed to protect their privacy, but these aren’t fabricated scenarios or even stories borrowed from faraway places. These are real humans who entered my home or the home of close friends in just the last couple years. 

They came into care at different points in life. Some remember what living with Mom was like. Others only carry the memories of being passed from one house to the next. What they all share is a fundamental, unalterable need to be loved and to feel secure. 

If you’re like me, it’s easy to read a story and feel sorrow, indignation, compassion. But opening your home, allowing your life to upended, your heart broken, is much harder.

Tommy and I have had four children spend some amount of time in our home in the past year. With the impending birth of Jack, we dropped back to occasionally doing respite care, which means that we give a short break to current foster parents.

Our experience with foster care has been even harder that I imagined. I discovered that I’m not a saint. That I’m not as patient as I might look. That loving in action is miles harder than mouthing words. But I’m also learning what the power of God’s love can do through ordinary people.

I sent interview-style questions to three couples who are actively fostering and/or adopting children. My goal was to explore their perspectives and motivations in fostering. As I read through their responses, I was stunned by their passion and calling. These are real-life heroes who don’t ask for recognition or praise but daily lay down their lives to love children born to others.

Each of these couples are in their twenties or early thirties. I went to high school with two of them and Tommy was college roommates with another. Some have biologic kids and some don’t. They have a variety of careers, interests, and ideas of fun (from board games to rock climbing), but they share something incredible. I want you to hear their own words. I’m proud to know them and call them friends.

• Inspiration 

Chase, who is now a nurse anesthetist, was adopted by his stepfather and understands what a gift it is to give a child a father. His wife Erin was still in high school when she knew that someday she wanted to foster and adopt.

Moriah and Daniel felt strongly about foster and adoption while dating as they observed the difficult home life of her cousin whom they eventually adopted. 

MacKrea, who is a licensed social worker, talks about how much she wanted a horse as a child. Eventually, her parents saved up enough to make the dream come true, but by then, everyone’s priorities had shifted.

“[Dad] told me he almost had enough money to buy me my dream, a horse of my own. He was willing to commit to the ongoing maintenance costs until I was old enough to take care of it myself. But he told me that he couldn’t make that commitment AND the commitment to the calling he believed God had placed on our family.”

That calling was adoption.  

“My heart responded before he could even finish. ‘I want people to know Jesus more than I want anything else, Daddy. Why would I want a horse when someone else could know Jesus instead?’ That was the moment my heart shifted. I didn’t have words for it yet. I didn’t see the faces of the five precious children I’d parent before I was 28 years old. But that moment with my dad is the moment my heart clicked into place.” 

• The first few days

The beginning of a new placement is intense. No two children are the same, even if coming out of similar situations. When asked about emotions they felt on those opening days, parents consistently describe excitement and anxiety. Fear. A little self-righteousness. Worry about being self-righteous. Determination. 

One of the first questions a child asked me as she unpacked clothes into my scratched-up childhood dressers was, “Are you going to adopt me?” Tommy and I probably looked at each other like two turtles caught in the path of the same train. 

The beginning is a daunting, uncharted time. Emotions are high. Children are often anxious or frightened or home sick. As a parent, experienced or not, it can be hard to know how to respond.

One mom describes giving a child a bath on the first night. “I had to hide my face so as not to show him my tears. He was covered in bruises from head to toe and had a giant slash across his face.”

The complexity of feeling is captured in the way that same foster mom describes meeting a teenager. 

“She was only supposed to be with us for one weekend. I had no idea how to act around a 19-year-old. But I mostly felt sadness. Her story, her life, just crushed my heart. And after a single day, I felt motivation. I was so determined to help her. No one else was willing to take her after the weekend, and I was not about to let her go to the homeless shelter. I’m so glad I followed my heart.” 

• The Risk of Attachment

Getting involved is scary. When combining humans with trauma, we arrive at an immensely complex equation with more unknown variables than known. What if you don’t connect to the kids? But what if you do? How do you make the decision to get involved when you know that there’s pain in it for you?

I asked these foster parents specifically what they would say to someone who expresses doubt about their ability to foster because they don’t want to become too “attached.”

“Ah, yes,” MacKrea says, “this is the most common response. I would encourage them to look at this statement and determine whether it is rooted in fear or peace. Do you have peace and knowledge that you are called to a different kind of love? Or are you scared of this calling God has placed on your life?”

Erin, a registered dietician with three biological children, answers this way, “Becoming attached is a wonderful gift that you can give a child. Attachment is healthy for child development; children need to be attached.  Attachment is good and normal and beautiful. Attachment is worth the possible pain to yourself.”

Her husband Chase takes the succinct route, “It’s not about you.”

Moriah describes a transformation of the heart as children come and go. “I’m constantly battling between my heart and my brain. My heart would tell them, yes of course you are going to get attached. You are going to fall in love. But you will learn to love them while you have them and pray and trust that God has their future in his hands. 

“If you don’t want to risk losing the child, the only option is to sign up to only foster children who are 100% adoptable. But if [you] are anything like me, you will start that way and then realize how many kids need homes and want to take them all. With each kid, your heart will get equally stronger and softer.” 

• The High Points 

If you’re pragmatic, it’s easy to look at fostering and see the quantitative hardship. The physical drain, unrelenting paperwork, doctors’ appointments, tantrums, sleepless nights, and messy house. But what about the intangible joys?

Moriah says her greatest joy comes down to that moment when the child grasps that they are loved. “You can see it in their eyes and their smiles when they realize it.”

MacKrea sighs in exasperation that I would even ask her to try to summarize the joys into a few sentences. “It’s difficult to pinpoint the greatest joy in fostering, because fostering has been one of the greatest joys of my life. The joys come from the privilege of knowing and loving each child. They have taught me so much about Jesus, healing, love, TikToks, sin, pain, cooking, religion, genuineness, basketball, ninjas, gentleness, growth, sleep… the list goes on and on. I know that I know that I know that I know I’m where God wants me to be. That has been the greatest joy of all.”

• Letting Go

The journey through foster care is a varied landscape from mountain-high joys to desert-dry lows where faith is questioned and stamina tested. When trying to encourage others to foster, agencies and other foster parents can be unhelpfully quiet when it comes to one of the most heartbreaking situations – child placements that have to end. 

Unfortunately, the end of a placement isn’t always because of reunification with a healthy, restored biological family. Sometimes an unexpected, distant relative appears from the sidelines, barely squeaks by the home study, and is given rights to the child. Or a previous foster family steps forwards and wants the child back.

Other times a child is removed because they require more intensive care. They may have violent behaviors, cause harm to other children, or be acutely suicidal. In these situations that feel too devastating to imagine upfront, how do you process and move forward? 

One foster mom talks about the end of a placement after a child was violent towards younger children in the home. “Losing [him] crushed my heart. And honestly, I’m still recovering from losing him. He was adoptable, some days I’d look at him and think he’d be my son forever. Letting that idea go and trying to make the best decision for him and my family was hard. I don’t regret him coming and I don’t regret him leaving. But I’m still hurt. All I can do now is pray for him, and it hurts me and guilts me that I can’t do more.” 

MacKrea and CJ went through a similar situation. “It felt excruciatingly painful, embarrassing, relieving, and exhausting. There really isn’t a way to concisely verbalize the experience. Both times I’ve let go it has been different. I hope it gets easier, but I doubt it. I will tell you that those experiences, while some of the most challenging and turbulent of my life, have somehow also held a thread of insurmountable peace that eventually won out. When I reflect on the times I’ve let go of children, I hold it in the same space as the moment with my dad when my heart clicked into place. In my mind, they are made of the same stuff. Both tracks align. They seem so inherently opposite, like some absurd juxtaposition…but yet they have a divine harmony that resonates in my soul.” 

For Chase and Erin, giving up a baby to a biological family member was devastating. “It feels like losing a child. We moved forward knowing that we trusted God with the child’s life while he was with us, and we don’t trust God with his life any less since the child is not with us. The amount of love God has for the child doesn’t change based on what house the child lives in. We also know that the amount of time he was with us was preordained, on a perfect timeline that was not our own.”

• The Greatest Fear

The end of a placement often feels like the end of the world. It cloaks itself as the living, breathing manifestation of a fear common to all foster parents. As MacKrea summarizes, “I fear that I won’t be enough.”

Or as Moriah shares, “My greatest fear in fostering is to fail a child or hurt my family. I don’t want to just be another home where they come and go. I want to help each child who comes into my house no matter how long they stay or why they leave. But I also don’t ever want a placement to hurt the relationships I have with my husband and kids.” 

Fear, guilt, the sense of failure – those feelings are enough to stop anyone’s work, but these families continue to move forward and love other kids because their strength and purpose are supplied from outside of them. 

Erin explains, “Losing [the baby] made us step back and realize that we could lose any child. We did a lot of internal reassessment on how much we were trusting God with our kids, both physically and with their souls.  We had to face finding our joy in God and not in our children or our worth in how well we were parenting. It was very sobering.”

• Sharing Advice

Each of these foster families have been battled challenges and traumas and circumstances unique to them and their kids. Despite that, common themes run through the advice they’d give to a new foster parent.

Moriah and Daniel say to always put your family first. “Before accepting a placement, make sure that it’s the right choice for your marriage and other children. Secondly, with a new child, don’t expect any two kids to be the same, even if they went through the same trauma. But one thing that will always be the same is that every kid wants to be loved and wants to be safe. If you can do those two things, everything else can be figured out day by day.” 

MacKrea and CJ ask you to be honest with yourself and others. “It’s the most challenging thing I’ve ever done. It’s brought up the most ugly and the most beautiful pieces of myself. If I don’t acknowledge this, lean into it, and learn, grow, and heal, I’m hurting the children I’m raising even more than I’m hurting myself. It will feel natural and perfect some days, and others it will feel like trying to chew bricks—painful, unnatural, and completely not good for you. Let Jesus love through you. If you choose to receive his Love and be that Love to the children in your home, there will be no other experience that will draw you closer to Him.”

Erin and Chase put their brevity to good use, “Be flexible. Know you can’t plan or be prepared. Expect the unexpected.”

• A Holy Motivation 

A beautiful kind of love runs through every word and every story shared with me. As expected, I heard heartwarming stories of children growing and healing. Milestones met. Behaviors changed. But I was surprised at the heartache that wove itself into the stories of every single one of these families. Loss, grief, pain. 

I asked them what motivates them to continue fostering. For MacKrea, it’s as simple as breathing. “Breathing in God’s love for me and exhaling His love for others is how I choose to live. Loving other peoples’ kids is my calling. I don’t know how long God will have me do this. But I know it is where I am supposed to be now. I know it is one of the things I was created for. The children I’ve had the privilege of loving along the way have been beyond inspiring. But Jesus is the real reason.”

For Moriah, all she needs to do is consider the lives of her own daughters. “Seeing my own children and thinking about how their life would be different had they not been in my care or adopted, motivates me to continue to help others. But honestly, it doesn’t take much to motivate me to want to foster. My heart is so soft and broken for children in foster care. I’d take them all if I could and I wish I could take more.”

Erin is fueled by a higher purpose. “Foster care is hard, but we don’t run from hard things. Lean in, you are called to go to them. We pray that foster care is the gospel on display in our living room, the work of Jesus on display. As the lyrics go, ‘If not us, then who will be like Jesus to the least of these.’”

In Summary 

Fostering is a calling and not a “one size fits all.” It’s crucial to frankly assess yourself and your family before opening your home. If your motivation to foster is fueled by guilt or pressure or well wishes, it won’t be enough to sustain you through the hard times. Your car will run out of gas. Not everyone is called to make the same sacrifices.

Is it a meaningful, beautiful, rewarding sacrifice? Yes. But it can also be crushing. Unless you start the journey with eyes wide open, you could end up doing more harm than good.

However, as my friends often remind me, everyone can and should support foster children and their families. Consider this list of practical ways to care:

1) Become certified as a babysitter or respite provider. Requirements vary between states, but this usually requires a background check and CPR certification. Being able to give foster parents a break for a few hours or a weekend can be the difference between burnout and the strength to persevere. 

2) Drop off meals, groceries, or coffee. 

3) Be there to listen. Check in regularly. 

4) Don’t be afraid to let your children get involved. Arrange playdates, invite them over for dinner and movie night.

5) Buy clothes and diapers, toys and books. The stipend doesn’t cover all of the “things” healthy kids need to grow.

6) Pray. As each of these families would readily admit, it’s really Jesus doing the work. They’re just the means to His ends.