This article is by Jillana Goble, an author, advocate, nonprofit founder, and — with her husband, Luke — parent of five children ranging in to age from pre-teen to adult. Her book, A Love-Stretched Life, chronicles what she’s continually learning on the suspension bridge between reality and hope.
Twenty years ago, as our plane touched down in New York after my husband and I had spent a stint working at a Guatemalan orphanage in our mid-twenties, we turned to each other and asked the question, “Where are the vulnerable children here?”
I had no idea at the time that the answer — foster care — would change the very lens through which I see the world and my faith. I thought foster care was about rescuing a child from a horrible situation. Little did I know that foster care would rescue me from a life of unexamined privilege.
With the exception of a poster I saw walking out of the gym in my late teens, I can’t remember ever hearing about foster care when I was growing up. There was zero mention of it in my suburban cul-de-sac. I never heard anyone talk about it, let alone personally engage it. The question “Where do vulnerable children go when they don’t have a safe family who can adequately care for them?” had never really crossed my mind. It was far outside the realm of my personal experience of having a safe, loving family, and I didn’t see much difference in my circle of friends.
Every Sunday our family attended church, where a few hundred people came together in a building located off a main road in our suburb. I remember singing, “Jesus loves the little children.” I remember participating in impactful “mission trips” helping to build and paint medical clinics just over the border in Mexico. (For a split second I was fired up to become a doctor so I could help even more, but the fact that I was squeamish at the sight of a drop of blood dashed that idea.) I knew scripture about the vulnerable being close to God’s heart. Yet I can’t recall a single sermon that nudged people off the high-speed freeway of well-constructed lives, generous intentions, and manicured lawns, and directed them to explore the disruptive exit ramp marked “Foster Care.”
Thankfully, more and more faith communities today, with varying degrees of commitment, attempt to hang a spotlight over this exit ramp. But despite having been immersed in many Christian contexts at that point in our lives, my husband and I hadn’t seen or heard any connection between the church and foster care. We attended our first foster parent training class with Child and Family Services in 2003, bringing only our experience of working with orphaned children in Guatemala, our good intentions sprinkled with faith, and a hazy concept of foster care gained from a safe distance.
If I had put together a mixtape of sound bites (clearly, I became a teenager in the late 80s) of what I thought foster care was before living it, you’d have heard, “Foster care is kids needing to be rescued from awful situations and people.” “Foster care is all about helping a child.” “Foster care is when you get to love a child who’s never been shown the love of family.” After all, I had watched the movie Annie. My favorite part is when Annie and Daddy Warbucks find each other, wiggle their way into one another’s heart, and arm-in-arm belt out songs about togetherness and not needing anyone but each other.
But on the foster parenting journey, it’s not just a matter of if the going gets tough but when the going gets tough — and going it alone is a recipe for burnout. A sole scripture verse and swoop of rescuing compassion is not going to get you through. Many Christians can spout James 1:27: “What God the Father considers to be pure and genuine religion is this: to take care of orphans and widows in their suffering.” In fact, this verse is often quoted when talking about kids in the foster care system, but here’s the thing: kids in foster care are rarely orphans. There are parents in the equation.
The very goal of foster care is to reunite children with their parents, once they are safe and healthy. According to a study released in 2021 by the Department of Human Services in my home state of Oregon, reunification with a parent happens 54.7% of the time. When we hear James 1:27, the focus is always on the children. And while it’s right for the child to be centered in the middle of the picture frame, we tend to miss a holistic opportunity to see the suffering parent — oftentimes in the pit of substance abuse, untreated mental illness, domestic violence, or incarceration. Just like their child, the parent is often a product of the same overwhelmed, dysfunctional Child Welfare system. Most Child Welfare-involved parents are not flush in healthy community.
If they had robust support, their child wouldn’t have become a ward of the state with someone with a government badge standing in as their caretaker. A holistic vision of foster care invites us to express care (when safe and appropriate to do so) to the parent of the child we are fostering and see how they are also suffering. Foster care expands beyond just the child and overflows into the family when a foster parent becomes part of a biological parent’s trusted community and safety net, remaining a supportive presence even when the child goes home. This vision is a far cry from my original preconceived sound bites of foster care.
I’m thirteen years into walking alongside Jennifer, whose third child I fostered (and later adopted) and whose fourth child I fostered and then returned to her care — twice! We have experienced this holistic view of foster care together. The pictures of our families standing together on my front porch throughout the years, our arms wrapped around one another, is truthfully one I’m glad I didn’t see before simply having to live it. And this is why: I would have sprinted the other way out of fear from all I had yet to understand about how love can multiply and not divide.
Jennifer and I have had no blueprint for building a relational bridge together over the last decade. She and I both readily admit we have experienced a lot of strong emotions with and toward one another over the years. As Jennifer and I speak in classes monthly to state caseworkers and foster parents, we don’t sugarcoat the hard parts of our mutual story. Without fail, people are quick to point out at the conclusion of our sharing, “Jillana, look what you’ve done for her. You’re amazing!” I cringe and I gently, yet quickly, set the record straight, “Look at what she’s done for me — I am not the same person I was before!”
Foster care has given me a softness for a mountain of things I would have previously judged without understanding. Foster care has shown me the struggles of others, so distant from my own — and yet it’s placed this glaring truth in front of me: we all miss the mark. What we struggle with may look different, but without any support system around me, I might be standing in the very place parents whose kids are in foster care now stand. Foster care has given me an invitation to see and hold suffering that at times seems beyond comprehension. It’s also reminded me that along with being well-versed in primary and secondary trauma, this is also true: a humble offering of undivided presence, though it feels inadequate, is still something.
True kinship with another mom, two of whose children I have fostered, has turned on its head any notion of who’s the giver and who’s the recipient. There is mutuality.
With mutuality, there is no room for heroes. People often throw out the hero word to describe foster parents, like candy tossed to the masses at a parade, which is frankly a much more alluring picture than people who get tired and cranky and just want to shut out the world at times. Our alternative is to squarely confront the truth: we’re no different from anybody else. It comes down to our willingness to see and respond. The hero hype doesn’t empower. It only serves to disillusion others and sometimes even deceive ourselves. Authentic heroes would never use the word hero to describe themselves. Instead, they would confess they are ordinary people who put one ordinary foot in front of the other ordinary foot and walk the path and do the next right thing. This rarely feels heroic or courageous.
Foster care is not convenient — things worth doing rarely are. But difficult and worthy are not mutually exclusive. Courage and convenience do not go hand in hand. When it comes to questions about foster care and what our responsibility is in the realm of vulnerable children, fear and untimeliness often drown out the possibilities before we even discern answers to these questions. Many people would rather not be invited to consider this worthy inconvenience.
Twenty years ago with our first foster placement, I quickly realized there’s a canyon of a divide between taking nice, neat notes in a crisp, new journal and experiencing the unquantifiable ripple effects of abuse, abandonment, and neglect as they play out before me by children and adults impacted by foster care.
Worthy inconvenience invites us to embrace the tension in our own lives — between the significant and the ordinary — and move toward others in a way that is focused on relationship and not rescue. Worthy inconvenience compels us to be transformed by love, knowing we have infinitely more to learn from others than we could dare hope to teach. As I strive to see the image of God in all people, I realize that sometimes it is God who comes to us disguised as the best worthy inconvenience.
COMMENTS
4 responses to “Worthy Inconvenience”
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Absolutely love this
No heroes. Mutuality. As a former and maybe future foster parent, these words resounded. As Ben Madison said at the NY conference, the system is a freaking $h!t show. Yet the precious people who find themselves in any part of it need the love of Jesus equally and desperately. Thank you Mockingbird for this guest post!
Thank you for sharing this perspective, and for your ministry! I’m praying for an opportunity to foster one day, and my thought is much the same as yours—born in another family, I could’ve been the child in visitation rooms and strange homes and families and schools.
We need to be open to foster care, prayerfully considering it. God wants us to serve those who are struggling. Providing a safe and nurturing environment and collaborating with the parent as you work on getting the child back into his family is vital. We are called to be salt and light. We may not change the world but we can change a child’s world.