A Beautiful Mosaic

Snapshot 1: Celebration!  We are celebrating with our oldest, long-term youth recently about her acceptance into her top choices for college in the fall!  What huge obstacles she has overcome to make this possible, and we are so proud of her!  She will more than likely be moving into our Transitional Living Program for Girls later this month to practice Independent Living before being completely on her own this summer.  We will miss her but know God has huge plans for her and this is a step in the process.  We are excited to continue to have a role in her life as her sponsors once she leaves care. Snapshot 2: Worship!  Michael and I were compelled this week to try one more church that we never visited when we first moved here and had since heard great things, and I was biting back tears throughout the service this morning at the refreshment I felt in the atmosphere.  I was connecting in worship, gleaning from the sermon, and encouraged by the spir...

We live in a digital age.  Microsoft has spoiled us - when we can not backspace or "undo" mistakes, incredulality and frustration occur on all levels.  We are accustomed to cutting and pasting: taking one item in its fullness and directly translating it in its exactness and precision to another location.  And it is a rather faultless function.  What I "cut" out is exactly what is "pasted" into its new location.  It's simple.  It's clean.  It works.  And I can't help but wonder if this simple philosophy of word processing has seeped into our philosophies and policies of life.  But oh how dangerous.  How dangerous it is to think that a human being can be cut out of one environment cleanly, easily, and swiftly and translated into a new environment in a perfect, faultless order.  No; people cannot simply be cut and pasted.  Well, we cut and paste them all the time.  The average child in foster care has been i...

courage to confront courage to ignore courage to fight when i don't want to anymore courage to pray courage to believe courage to give when you may not recieve courage to be firm courage to rise above courage to find more reasons to love this courage i need this courage to live the life You have called me to breathe and to give and this courage i know can only come from You and so i realize again i am nothing without You.

the silence has been long, I know, and I have definitely missed blogging!  here is a bit of what has been going on in our lives in the last month as form of an update and also explanation for my silence: -we ended January and began Feburary with two consecutive SUPER SHIFTS (our long week + weekend shift that we do once a month).  we normally don't schedule these back to back and will try our best to avoid doing it again, but it was necessary this time and kept me away from my computer on the weekends and found me sleeping whenever I could catch a free moment.  -we also ended January by counting 16 youth who we had worked with in our home during that month.  as several of our long-term girls had transitioned out for various reasons over the last few months, we had several short-term girls come in and it was a rotating door for awhile until we reached this record high.  it gave us the opportunity to know and work with a wide variety of girls and be educa...

I had never seen bags that size under my own eyes.  The complete exhaustion that was so utter in fact that it left me sleepless when I laid my head down for that long-awaited 5pm nap on Friday came after our January "Super-Shift," which is the delightful time once a month when we work our full shift + the shift our alternate usually works.  We get a few preceding days off before this starts to "amp up" for the experience, which always seems a little backwards.  These are great shifts in that they give you long stretches of time with the girls to really establish relationships, structure, etc., but because of the 24/7 nature of our work, they are also completely exhausting to the whole self...especially when they include extraordinary circumstances.  This was one such shift.  We welcomed a sibling set of 4 sisters the night we went on shift and spent two full days trying to in addition to assimilate them into our home, get their school enrollments ...

my prayer today for you, for me, for the girls at Barton.

I was making a quick trip to the public library with one of our older girls to check out an ACT-prep book and ended up having to wait for a few brief minutes as she perused another aisle of interest.  The tiny "new book" rack caught my eye.  I quickly picked up a memoir that looked somewhat interesting since I have developed a strange fascination with this genre over the years, and I checked it out.  Little did I know what the book was until I got home...or how much the story had to say to me. It was "A Stolen Life" by Jaycee Dugard.  Maybe you remember her.  The girl that was rescued from living in the tent community in her kidnappers' backyard for 18 years.  Definitely not a book I recommend to very many as she holds back no stops in telling her story and it can be incredibly graphic in the first half.  However, I believe I was meant to read this book, and I am really glad I did. Jaycee's life and childhood were literally snatched awa...