Because He Lives

"Most people only do this once." Most people only become a parent once, and become childless once. Most people have a few kids, raise them to adulthood, and then those children become adults, leave their childhood home and go out on their own. Us? We become parents on a few hours notice, and we might become childless again just as fast, and come back to empty cribs and empty schedules. We are foster parents without biological or adopted children, and that puts us in a very unique position.

I worry about most of the same things other foster parents do when our kids leave us, because for however long they've been with us, I've been responsible for making sure they are safe and healthy and loved. Being asked to suddenly just stop feeling those things and let someone else whom I've hardly met take that over is honestly like asking the impossible. But there's more to a child leaving than that when that child was your only child. When a child leaves my house, my motherhood leaves with them. When I hand over my foster-child, I hand over a part of who I have been for the last however long I've fed, and changed, and played with and sang to and cuddled, and comforted that child and tucked them in at night. Suddenly I have no-one who I am responsible for keeping happy and healthy and safe anymore, and suddenly all this love and protectiveness that I have for my kids has nowhere to go again. We make that transition that most people only make once, over and over and over again and to a much more permanent end than most parents ever experience. Over and over and over again it's worth it. And over and over and over again it hurts like crazy. And over and over and over again, it leaves me longing for the day when I have a child who I will never have to say goodbye to. One I can look in the eye and say "I will be here for you every. single. day. until the Lord calls me home." We never intend for a foster-child to fill that void in our lives, but the taste of parenthood it gives us leaves us longing for parenthood the way the Lord intended: permanent and uninterrupted.

I did one of those "ask your spouse" things on facebook the other day. One of the questions was "what am I afraid of?" Matt's answer to what I am afraid of? Childlessness. My husband knows me well. When faced with the idea of a foster-child leaving, half of my fear is for the child, and half of it is for myself. I love being a momma. It's literally all I've ever wanted to do with my life. Every night when I was a little girl I would go to bed imagining I was grown and married and raising my children, and I couldn't wait to grow up and do just that. I always thought I knew exactly what my purpose was. I knew it from the time I was 4 years old. I even jokingly refer to my Children and Family Ministries BA as my "Homeschool-Mom Degree." Yet, here I am: 26 years old, married for four and a half years, and three and a half years into unsuccessfully attempting to conceive and carry a biological child, and I've realized I have an identity crisis. If I wasn't made to be a mom, then I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing instead.

Being a foster-mom has allowed me to fulfill that purpose when I have a child under my roof. I am grateful for the opportunity to work out this calling in this way, and in some ways, yes, It has been a salve; it has been a privilege to see God bring healing and love to hurting hearts (ours and theirs). However, if I'm not careful, it can leave me more discontent and afraid than ever before. I allow a good and godly calling to become my identity, and the thought of losing that identity on top of a hard goodbye to a child I love becomes terrifying and crippling to me some days. As a foster-mom with no forever kids, I have to constantly be checking my heart and my motives for what I'm doing, because the temptation to desire for a foster-child to fix the sadness in my life caused by infertility and miscarriage is always there. If I give in to that temptation, I am no longer here for the right reasons. If I cease to pray for their birth parents and biological family, then I am failing in this calling. If I am crippled with anxiety over the thought of an empty crib, I have ceased fulfilling a godly calling, and have bowed down to the idol of motherhood.

I was talking with a counselor recently about the line between godly desire and idolatry, and he explained that an idol is made when a good-desire becomes a demand of God or someone else. I've had to reflect on exactly what this means for a couple of weeks, and have realized that if I demand motherhood in order to fulfill God's command to be joyful and content in all circumstances, if I believe that I cannot follow God's law without being a mother, I have made an idol of it and have implied in my heart that Christ's death and resurrection were not enough for me to be set free from sin, but that I must also have something else in addition to it. But the reality is that "by his divine power, God has given us everything we need for living a godly life." (2 Peter 1:3).

This doesn't mean that a foster-child leaving is easy. It doesn't mean that making the transition between not-parent to parent and back again is to be done without grief. It is, however, to be done with our trust and identity placed firmly in Jesus Christ and his all-sufficiency. After my first miscarriage, I spent a long time processing what had happened and what my response had been, and I found myself asking these questions of myself: "if I have to go through that again, will I be able to glorify God more tomorrow than I did before? Will I be able to see the difference between my selfish desires, and righteous grief and anger at the fallen nature of our world and lives better next time? What am I doing now to prepare myself to glorify God more and see truth more clearly when the next hard thing comes my way?" Through nothing other than God's grace and mercy and work in my hard heart, I really was able to do so when I faced the death of two more of my children. My post "When Sorrows Like Sea Billows Roll" remains to this day my favorite thing I've ever written, not because of me, but because through writing it, I was able to see just how radically I had been changed and sanctified by God's goodness and love over the hardest two years of my life. I pray that he will continue doing that work in my heart as we continually place ourselves in the back-and-forth nature of being foster-parents without forever children, so that I may love God, our foster-children, and our children's families better each day.

Being foster-mom is wonderful and it's hard, and it's scary, and I'm not doing this perfectly. I need grace and mercy and forgiveness and sanctification every single day, so that tomorrow I can glorify God more than I did today. Then when goodbye comes, and I say goodbye to another child and I set aside motherhood one more time, I am not lost and aimless in this life; my hope, my purpose, my identity, and everything that I need for life and godliness are perfectly supplied in Jesus Christ, because he lives.

Because He lives, I can face tomorrow
Because He lives, all fear is gone
Because I know He holds the future
And life is worth the living, just because He lives.