In the Old Testament whenever the people of Israel had a new experience with God they came up with a new name for Him.
El was a standard name God with ideas of strength and power
El Shaddai meant God all sufficient
Jehovah Jireh meant God will provide
Jehovah Shalom meant the Lord our peace
The Old Testament really drips encounters with God so, there are a lot of names. My most recent experience with God made me think of a name for Him: El Loki. In norse mythology Loki is known as the trickster God. There are times when I wake up and realize that I'm not entirely sure how there came to be 10 people living in my 1500 sq/ft house. (The post below this would be part 1 and this would be ... you guessed it, part 2).
We found out about a family of 6 children who had gone into foster care. Another long-time foster family from our church that was caring for the 3 oldest suggested that we might be able to foster the 3 younger kids. Hearing that for the first time was like the first time I saw a quadratic equation. (Ray thinking to himself: "self, there's number and letters in that there math problem..."). It just wasn't even something I could process. To continue with the math analogy, 1 teenager does NOT = 3 children under the age of 5. Priority, regarding a sibling group, is that they stay together. Regardless of what happens with their parents the agency handling foster placement wants to keep brothers and sisters together. I told one of my friends once that if a brother had been placed with Mother Theresa and a sister had been placed with the Pope, the coalition would remove them from those homes if Hitler said he would take them both (obviously a wild exaggeration but you get the point). All three of the youngest kids were in separate homes. One of them was in a really great home that had done incredible work with him. The coalition (agency handling foster placements) placed the other two girls in our home. Almost overnight I went from a father of 2 to a father of 4. Within months that number went up to 5.
I remember hearing that my wife was pregnant with our second child, Gretchen. I remember feeling... well, honestly a bit indifferent. Now, I would fight til my last breath to protect Gretch. She is funny and beautiful and hard headed and precious to me but when I found out she was coming I wasn't incredibly excited. My first child Asa changed my life.
The equation went from:
me
me + Jody
me + Jody + kid (asa)
... and I was pretty much fulfilled. I didn't feel like our lives were missing anything. Before Asa, no kid. Asa's here? Bingo. We have a kid. I loved him so much I didn't really know how I could feel that way about another child. Hollywood would show a dramatic scene where I watch my wife deliver Gretchen and then the soundtrack swells to a crescendo as I bound through a field with my new daughter in my arms in slow motion. But, that wouldn't be real. It took a while.
That only serves to illustrate the point that going into fostering wasn't out of some quest for fulfillment for me. I firmly believe you don't have the right to say something, anything is an injustice unless you're willing to do something about it. Children shouldn't have to wonder if they're loved or not. Children should be safe. If the people who have these thoughts cross their minds even occasionally don't do something about it who will?
So, I put on my serious pants and thought, "we can make a small impact on a couple kids' lives even if we have our hearts broken in the process".
