Community

Photos – my love.

Those that know me understand my love for photos. I am always snapping a picture whether with my phone or my Canon 6D. I run my own photography business, so it’s a passion and a hustle.

When it comes to foster care, you better believe I will be snapping ALL the photos. My poor son (our first ever placement) has waaay too many photos to count, one of just about every outfit we put on him as a baby/toddler. Other photos that were important to me were the ones of him with the people in his life. They have meant so much to him and to our family.

We didn’t know how long we’d get to be a part of each other’s lives, so I took all the pictures I could! One, for me and two, for him to take if he should return home with his bio family.

As it is National Foster Care Month, I’ve been challenging myself to write more often. My FAV person to follow on Instagram is a blog call Foster with the Family. She set up a daily topics to write about. As I came across her topic of community, I started writing way more that just an Instagram post. It need to be on my blog.

So… c o m m u n i t y…

Foster care can feel so lonely, but let me tell you about our people…

These photos are only a few to represent all those that have surrounded our family in the first three years of foster care. What an amazing community we have! They have loved us with such care and kindness. They have learned alongside us and supported us in this journey. We are forever grateful.

These people (so many more not pictured) have prayed continuously for our little guy, his bio parents, the system. They’ve prayed for our parenting and patience through the frustrating times. They’ve celebrated the good news and cried with us during the bad. We LOVE these people. 

We are thrilled  and honored to adopt our boy soon,  but the hard journey doesn’t stop with adoption. Throughout the rest of our boy’s life, we will have conversations about his story. His beautiful story with a messy start. It’s our community that will help us in our adoption journey, always showing our boy how much he is wanted and loved. They will help us encourage us as adoptive parents and support us as we have the hard conversations of adoption.

Jesus has been using our community to speak love and encouragement over us. Foster care is hard guys. Really hard. We need our people.

Thank you God for our friends and family. You have blessed us immensely with them. We will never take it for granted.

Our community has brought meals, babysat, prayed with and for us and some have become foster parents themselves. My question to anyone reading this is — how will you support your foster care community? It doesn’t have to be a “Change the whole world,” kind of thing, it needs to be a “How is God calling me to follow Him in James 1:27,” kind of thing.

“How can I care for the vulnerable and support the foster care community?”