Safe Families For Children

Our church is partnering up with an organization that Jay and I have been involved with called Safe Families for Children. Actually, the organization is Olive Crest and the program through Olive Crest is Safe Families. It is separate from the foster care program through Olive Crest. Basically, they have started partnering up with churches and volunteers to care for at-risk children who are not a part of the foster care system. According to their website, "Safe Families for Children is a movement of compassion designed to reduce child abuse and return the church to the forefront of caring for children, as it had been throughout history."

Our pastor has asked us if we would be willing to briefly share a bit of our experience at an upcoming service in order to encourage others to get involved, and I am finding it tricky to try to figure out what to say. Yes, we need others to get involved and it is a great organization to get involved with. At the same time, the experience has been a very difficult one for us and has really tested and tried us and our faith. That is a good thing, but not necessarily what will encourage others to come running for the same experience! I want to be honest about the reality that it might be difficult, but let people know that THEY SHOULD DO IT ANYWAY.

The child that we were caring for is no longer with us and I have not written about that here for a couple of reasons. One, I don't really know how to put into words my feelings about it all; and two, I want to respect the privacy of her situation. This online world is a crazy place and I don't know who will come across this blog. I ended up removing another post that I had written while she was with us, just because I don't know that it is appropriate for me to be sharing in this place things about her or her family or her time with us. I want to be careful with that.

So, without going into too many specifics, here is what I think I would like people to know about our experience and why I think it is important to get involved...

There's no nice, neat ending to our story, and it has actually been really difficult all the way through. I would love to say that the experience has been rewarding and amazing, but the more honest reality is that it has stretched our family and tested us like nothing else. That is a good thing too - so please don't let that thought be what keeps you from getting involved. Caring for a child who is not your own and who also has some very special needs is really hard, and our family faced some of our darkest times over the past few months as we dealt with this.

THAT SAID...we also began to see an amazing transformation of a little girl, and we saw our own kids loving her like a sister and learning to care for others. We were given the opportunity to love a child that desperately needed to be loved, and watch her learn to love and trust us in return. That was the amazing and rewarding part and why I would encourage others to get involved and do the same thing. Or, even if you can't take a child in, you can support others who are doing so. That's actually the current role that we are taking on - supporting another woman who is in the same spot we were in. Jay and I felt very alone in what we were doing and that's why we eventually reached out to Safe Families for their support. (Our involvement was a little bit backwards. We first took the child in, and then later found out about Safe Families as we were struggling through things. At that point, they came alongside us in what we were already doing.)

Ultimately, the reason that we chose to do what we did was because it was a real, tangible, sacrificial way for us to love "the least of these" with the love of Christ. The little girl in our care absolutely needed (and needs) to be loved and to know that she is loved. And, for two and a half months, we were able to do that, and are now able to do it indirectly by supporting someone else. Like I said, there's no nice, neat ending to our story, and it was messy and it didn't go the way I envisioned. I am the ever-optimist and dreamer, and I envisioned our story ending with this child becoming a permanent part of our family. That's obviously not the way it went. But, again, we provided something that she so desperately needs even though it was temporary, and we were stretched and we grew and we learned more about ourselves in the process. And, we learned more clearly than ever that we are not in control (an ever-present theme for us!), but God is. We cannot force things to go the way we think they should go. All we can do is be obedient to Him and trust Him in the process.