Oh the Paper Work!

Just chugging away through this paper work! Tomorrow, we go for background screening. Next week, we have doctor physicals to assure we are physically fit to care for children. Then, we continue completing these forms.

Parenting Styles

We've hit the half way in our MAPP class!!! It's an exciting point. This past week we received a LARGE stack of paper work, and we were assured that this is the first of MANY stacks of forms. These papers were a part of the matching process. We answer deep and personal questions about ourselves to assure a child is a good match for us and we are a good match for the child. In the past week, we've combed our past and dreamed about our future. We've answered questions from our potential parenting style to what side of the bed we sleep on. (just kidding on the last one...but it feels like we went that in depth). 

We've also started our family scrapbook. This is the book that will be shown to the child when we are first introduced to them. They won't meet us in person first but will learn about us through this scrapbook that we put together. We feel like this is the most important scrapbook we will ever make. Neither one of us is that crafty, so we are incredibly thankful for the internet and websites such as shutter fly, snap fish, and mix book. 

In our last class, we learned about the "faulty/coercive" parenting styles, the things that don't work when raising kids. Our homework assignment was to go out and practice those styles and see how they turn out. It was the funniest homework assignment we've ever done. In essence, we were to go out and do it all wrong! We "practiced" on youth group kids, co-workers, and friends. So we apologize if we seemed a little "off" this past week, just chalk it up to "practice." Ha Ha! Hopefully, next week, we'll be learning about the proactive and proper parenting styles....maybe we'll get to practice those as well. 

Praying for that child or children who will soon enter our home. They may not have grown inside of us physically, but they are growing in our heart. We love them more and more each day. We love taking this unconventional path to parenthood. 

Below is a CBS news story about children waiting to be adopted. The children in this story are just like the children we will be adopting (foster care children). Not babies...but real-life, hurting children. 

James 1:27- Religion that is pure and undefiled before God, the Father, is this: to visit orphans and widows in their affliction, and to keep oneself unstained from the world.

Loss, Grief, and Love

The first third of the MAPP classes have been completed. It is becoming more and more apparent to us that these children that we will welcome in our home will have not had the "normal" childhood. These children have been robbed of some many simple pleasures and rights of childhood. They have dealt with more than their fair share of grief and loss in their life. Our hearts break as we continue to hear the stories of loss...loss of family, home, siblings, innocence, childhood, and...Love. 

We will be more than parents to this childhood, but grief experts...helping them through this great sadness. Grief is not always a natural process, and little ones do not know how to grieve. We may have to teach them how to express their sadness. Many children in the foster care system feel that they have lost everything because of something they have done. They think they are somehow undesirable or defective. They act out behaviorally to test to see if you really love them or care for them like you "say." They just yearn to be loved as themselves. The children have lost all basic necessities of life (love, comfort, and security). However, they may be lost, but they have not been forsaken. They have a heavenly Father who loves than more than any earthly human. God understands their loss. He lost his own family as well. Jesus was separated from His Father, and God the Father was separated from His son, Jesus while on earth. God understands the feeling of loss.  

Adoption is so close to heart of God. He does not forsake the children. He has adopted us spiritually into the family of God, and it only makes sense that we would bring the fatherless into our earthly families. What a beautiful picture of God's extravagant love that he lavished on us lowly sinners. 

It is a huge privilege and responsibility to love these children for being themselves and nothing else. That's how God loves us....He takes us as we are....a beautiful disaster. Isn't that what Love really is? Accepting the person with all fault, flaws, and baggage. With all of the loss and grief in their life, I look forward to loving the children God is preparing for us. It may not be the normal family, but it's the family God intended for us. 

This song has been very special to us as we've began this adoption process. We will love this child/children for being them just as God loves us as us! 

Love Me for Me by JJ Heller

Ephesians 1:3-6

All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ. Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure. So we praise God for the glorious grace he has poured out on us who belong to his dear Son.