Unreached But Not Unreachable
I’ve had the privilege of knowing some families who have provided foster care for a number of children. What a challenging ministry! It takes a lot of patience and understanding to help kids who have been hurt by hard circumstances in life.
My husband and I have never been foster parents, but we did act as temporary guardians for a troubled teenager for about two years. It was a friend of a friend kind of situation, and we were saddened to hear that nobody in her family was able to take responsibility for her care. We thought that by providing her with a stable home, we might be able to help her.
It was a much harder task than we expected. We had none of the training that foster parents receive. Her grandmother retained custody but assigned us legal guardianship, and we were off on a new adventure! We tried to treat her the same way we did our own children. We made sure she had more than she needed, including a big birthday party with plenty of gifts, and all the clothing necessities she could need. I had no clue how to fix hair for black girls, so I paid my friend’s daughter to braid her hair regularly. I tried to cook foods that she liked. We added her to our car insurance and began to teach her how to drive. We had some fun together, but more often than not, she stayed in trouble. I didn’t understand her obsession with stealing things, and many of our friends had things come up missing after she had been around them—wallets, cash, cell phones, movies and video games, electronic devices, etc.
Aware that she had suffered much family hurt, I took her to counseling. We taught her about God’s love and got her involved in our church. We tried EVERYTHING to try to connect with her, but she pushed us away and fell further and further into rebellion. We gave her ultimatums regarding her behavior, but she continued to ignore the rules.
She began sneaking out at night while we were sleeping, meeting up with questionable friends, doing drugs, breaking into apartments, and making many other rebellious choices. It came to the point where I was spending so much time dealing with her, that my youngest daughter’s schoolwork began to suffer (we were a homeschool family).
We made the difficult decision to contact her grandmother and tell her we could no longer allow her to live in our home. She ended up going into foster care, and later, jail. I don’t know where she is today, but I hope that someone has been able to help her.
I struggled when she left our home. Didn’t we do everything God wanted us to do? We tried to love her, but she just pushed our love away! She chose to steal, living like a pauper, when we were willing to shower her with anything she truly needed. She preferred rebellion to obedience and refused the love we tried to offer. I questioned God, asking Him what we had done wrong. As I grieved for this young girl whom we had invested so much time and energy into but had been unable to reach, God had a message for me. He showed me that I was no different from her. God had done all of those things for me, and I had responded to Him in the exact same way that she had to me.
He gave me love but I pushed Him away. He called me to obedience, but I chose rebellion. I was living like a pauper when He wanted to give me riches. I had closed my heart to the gospel.
And I began to see….
I began to see that God isn’t finished with her yet. Maybe I was just called to plant those first seeds. And I pray that in time, she will open her heart to the One who can love her in a way that nobody else ever has. I pray that someone can reach her for the gospel, even if it isn’t me.There is still hope for her.
Because we are more alike than I realized. And hope got through to me.
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