Hope in the Midst of Hard
When my wife and I started our journey to become foster parents eight years ago, we started a blog to share our journey. The blog was called “Walking Upon the Waters,” referencing a song and story from the Bible that captured our hearts and the call on our lives to foster. While we’d post logistical updates of fostering and eventual adoptions, we also strived to share what compelled us to choose this journey and the hope and grace that sustained us. To share how our faith called us to go deeper and how it was challenged and made stronger.
Sitting here eight years later, we are in the midst of a long season of perpetual hard, and the deepest and darkest waters we had imagined.
We have always strived to protect our boys’ stories. They were in foster care for all the reasons kids are usually in foster care. They had a hard hard start to their life and still have a long road ahead.
*****And before you go down that road, know the stories of their first families, AKA bio families, was also hard and tragic. We’d be in the same situations had our roles been switched. While this is a whole other post, please don’t vilify, generalize, or use politicization to write off the substantial needs and injustices to the groups, individuals, and communities running through your head right now.*****
Our boys had unique dynamics to their stories. Factors that we knew would be challenging and could result in serious hard as they grew older. Many of those fears have become our reality the last few years. Our sons are sweet, funny, compassionate, and unbelievably amazing boys who we love with all of our hearts. However, they have substantial special needs, not easily visible, that sadly result in unspeakable hard.
While we are hopeful for breakthrough through extensive professional help and neurological miracles, we are worn and bear many emotional and physical scars.
We’ve been torn with what to say, how much to say, who to say it to. We strive to protect them from the judgment and assumptions of others towards them and generalizations that ensue for others with similar stories. However, recent months have resulted in many more becoming aware of our reality. We are sharing more now, because we do believe in prayer, and there are aspects of our story that might resonate with others in their own hidden battles.
With the realities of this last year, especially with the toll of the pandemic, we see so many who are beyond worn. As my wife (ER nurse) says, “pain is what the patient says it is.” The suffering and battles you’re facing impact you the way they impact you. And yes, while we are sharing our personal level of hard, and feel compelled to go even further expressing the magnitude of our crisis, the reality is everyone experiences their own level of crisis and hard. Many experience it alone and struggle with that ever present, hidden battle.
Many are coming to this post via my woodworking channels with Six Eight Woodworks. There, I’m pretty upbeat, positive, and such, sharing my love of woodworking...yay self-care! I will also regularly show the boys working with me or happy family pictures and adventures, like many of your friends and family do with social media. For me, I love and need to hold on to those genuine smiles and happy moments. I need to celebrate them when they happen. However, we all know how easy it can be to start comparing and this can make the weary, worn, and wounded that much more so.
It’s a reminder I have to give myself constantly with social media vs reality...and feel it might be something someone else needs to be reminded of too.
While we have had many hard aspects of our journey with foster care, adoption, and working to meet our boys’ needs, we have had two years of scary hard with many a sleepless night, being left beyond empty, spent, having cried all the tears there are to cry. The battles we wrestle with daily, absolutely take us down, and are utterly crushing.
However, that trust and faith that called us out into these waves, into this journey, gives us just enough to get back up.
We absolutely have those moments where we can’t see a way out, yet keep going back to that hope that anchors our soul. We keep going back to our faith in Jesus, that gives us an inexpressible joy, when it shouldn’t be possible.
“Faith makes a fool of what makes sense. But grace found my heart where logic ends.” (“Here Now (Madness)”)
To those of you who aren’t Christ Followers, I can only imagine how a lot of this sounds. I know many of you have been hurt personally by “Christians” or a church. You’ve been hurt or seen the sad Americanized and politicized faith I claim... I weep. I truly weep for what has occurred in the name of Jesus that is the furthest thing from his heart. I do invite you to look to the actual words of Jesus; the love, grace, joy, hope, and peace that following and trusting him truly brings.
My life is an utter roller coaster right now, as I know it is for many of you. When I struggle with all of the hard and the many types of battles; while I might not see a magical or supernatural solution, I have a hope. I experience a profound peace. I experience an inexpressible joy that shouldn’t exist. Not a toxic positivity that’s fake and contrived, or a perpetual happy, but a real, genuine, and pervasive joy. A confidence. I experience all of this and am able to go deeper into these waters because of Jesus.
I love this quote from Madeline L’Engle: “We draw people to Christ not by loudly discrediting what they believe, by telling them how wrong they are and how right we are, but by showing them a light that is so lovely that they want with all their hearts to know the source of it."
With tears in my eyes, know this is my heart for you. This light in my darkness has forever changed my life. It sustains and propels me with purpose. Friends, whoever you are and wherever you are, I pray you can experience it too.
“You love him even though you have never seen him. Though you don’t see him, you trust him; and even now you are happy with a glorious, inexpressible joy.” (1 Peter 1:8)
“Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer.” (Romans 12:12)