It starts with yourself

Well, the hubs and I are in the trenches of foster care classes and boy....I'm exhausted.

Foster classes are mentally tough.

Don't think for an instant, that they will be easy.

Sure there is the getting off of work and driving for an hour to just barely make it on time, if not a few minutes late. The three hours of concentration when your hungry and you haven't been home all day and then there is the homework each week and the mountain of paperwork to complete. And lets not forget the home inspection.

But it is mentally tough.

Some people get upset at the horrible injustice that has been done to kids in the system. The hurt they have seen and how vicious adults can be to children. They might think "Oh, I want to help kids" "Those poor kids, I just want to wrap them up in a hug and love them,"

Other couples might be infertile, not able to have any children of their own, or they might have lost their children through death and miscarriages. Adoption of newborns is crazy expensive and so they might think, "I'll sign up to foster and then maybe we will get to adopt our foster child and then we will finally have a family." They try to not think about how the point of foster care is to reunite the child with their parents, about how hard it will be to give the children back.

In fact at some point both my husband and I have thought of all those thoughts.

But what I wasn't thinking was that if anyone needs "saving" it's got to start with saving ourselves.

Foster classes make you think. Hard. About all the hurt in your own life. All the loss you have experienced. It makes you wade through the trenches of your own hurt, the pain you've just tried to stuff down inside and forget about.

Things I don't want to think about. Losing my mom to cancer, miscarrying our baby on our one year anniversary, not being able to have babies since, losing grandparents and friends, soured relationships between other close family members, losing a family business, losing your health and financial security, jobs and losing our home and all our belongings and so much more. And that is just since we've been married. Five years.

I thought, sure, I've had to deal with a lot so has everyone, I feel like I've worked enough of it out.

But then foster class says, what about your childhood? Did the people close to you nurture you? Did they push you too hard? Did they try to control you? Did they ever say mean things? Did you have a fantastic awesome PERFECT relationship with your parents?

Well no.....no one has had a perfect relationship. And so then foster class asks you to remember it all. Disappointments that your dad didn't come to your games as a child because he was working, that your mother didn't have time to read or play with you, all the times you were bullied in school and so on.

It looks at the dirty. The sadness. The stuff you don't want to remember let alone write it down on a piece of paper and give it to your caseworker so they can see what a hot broken mess your life was or is.

But foster class doesn't care about you. It cares about those children. It says you can not help a child go through the pain, if you haven't dealt with the pain of your own life.

It says you can't lead a child to forgive, if you haven't forgiven those who have wronged you.

Foster class teaches you about triggers. How a smell, or a sound, or something a child may see, can trigger a trauma response. Essentially, meaning the child will feel all the emotions they felt at the time of the trauma all over again. Panic attacks. Triggers.

Foster class says that a child who comes into your home with trauma and emotional baggage, will trigger YOUR trauma reminders.

Let that just sink in for a minute. That means the little girl that was abused and might want to tell her foster mother about the bad man...not knowing that her foster mother was abused herself. That means that the foster mother could be thrown into a flashback of terror.....making her not very effective at helping the little girl.

That means the foster dad who is still hurt that his dad put work before their relationship, is going to struggle with helping the foster kid through the pain of a father who abandoned him.

Foster class says you can't help the child, unless you have saved yourself from your own emotions.

Foster class says you gotta unpack your own baggage.

Foster class is tough.

But Jesus doesn't call us to easy.

Jesus calls us to do tough.