One

Recently in a Facebook group I am a part of, I saw a young mom ask for help. She said she was battling with laziness and needed encouragement and truth to be spoken into her life. She could no longer use holding her sleeping baby as an excuse and needed to get some things done. Cue the “just hold your baby. They don’t stay little” comments. It’s true. They grow up fast. But can I gingerly tread out on this social media thin ice and say something with a hesitant catch in my voice? Yes hold your baby. There is a time to hold your baby. But sometimes we need to do the dishes or cook our families dinner or do some laundry. We do fellow moms no favors by making one another feel guilty for NOT holding our babies 24 hours a day.  I say this as a bio and foster mom of eight tiny babies over the years. Eight sweet and precious little ones who needed to be held to bond and learn to attach and feel safe. Holding that wee babe is holy work. And so is serving my family an...

This morning I encountered a comment about foster care and adoption and biological families that I had not yet heard. “I don’t know how they could do that to their children. I guess they’re just a different kind of people than we are – they just have no conscience.“ This is so very very untrue on several levels. Biological parents of these children are no different than we are. I mean this in two ways-first, the majority of the parents we have encountered in foster care truly do love their children. This sweeping assumption that they don’t love their kids is simply not true, nor is the assumption that the babies we have cared for have been abandoned or unwanted. Second, these parents have made a series of terrible and damaging choices that have crippled their ability to care for their children or even for themselves. And yes, the human conscience can be utterly seared and numbed by patterns of sin. But that does not mean that they are “a different kind person“ than me. We did not f...