I am involved in a pro bono thing where I help teenage kids in foster care with some legal stuff and yesterday I got to meet my first one. Well, did you hear about the woman who works at the pound...she has 8 dogs!
As I'm driving home talking to my husband on the phone and telling him about how great these teens are and the program he actually says "we need a bigger house"...Are we going to adopt a 16 year old with dreams of entering the marines and just having someone to write letters to that cares about him??? Too early to tell but what I do know is that we definitely do need a bigger house!!!!!!!!!!!!
This experience has got me thinking though about an entirely different demographic than I have ever thought of before. Our Foster care Licensor has in our file that we prefer to foster children ages 18 months to 7 years. A lot of this is because our almost-adopted daughter is 3 and I think it just makes sense to have kids near the same age in a home practically speaking.
The other thing is we are 28 & 30 years old. I feel like I am just too young to be a parent to a teenager but then again, there are thousands of moms who are 28 and have 13-14 year old children. Plus, we lead a youth group program for our church for the past 2 years and when we take the teens on a retreat for example, I've found that my "parenting" just naturally adapted to their age. And the funny thing is, they really are still kids, just bigger ones =)
That's the tough part about the kids I see in the program I'm involved in and the overwhelming number of teenages in foster care. A lot of them live in residential facilities and group homes and are basically learning to be somewhat self-sufficient so when they "age-out" of the system they can survive out there.
A smart young man told me that he just wants to have someone to ask him about his day, someone to make him supper, and a somewhere to go home to for Christmas.
Let's not forget the older kids that have less and less hope of ever being adopted. Maybe God is calling you to help a kid join ROTC or another branch of the military...maybe God is calling you to help a kid get into college...maybe God is calling you to add one more picture to your wallet and one more place setting to your dinner table =D
Then the Lord God called to the man...where are you??? Genesis 3:9
Blessings!
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