Fostering Children: Saying yes to the goodbye while knowing that love remains  

Disclaimer: Opinions expressed in this guest post are solely those of the author.

When people hear that my husband and I became foster parents, they usually assume it began with a carefully planned decision. I am sure they imagine we researched foster care, completed training, and intentionally set out looking to foster children. But our story is different. 

How homeless ministry led us to foster parenting

At the time, we were already deeply involved in serving families experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles through our nonprofit, SOFESA. Our work has never been about simply providing services from a distance. It is rooted in true and authentic accompaniment by way of walking with families through instability, crisis, trauma, setbacks, victories, and the years-long process of rebuilding their lives.

Through our work, we encountered a homeless mother with six children who was pregnant with her seventh. Like many of the families we accompany, they became part of our lives relationally. We knew their struggles, their personalities, their fears, and their dignity beyond case files. We pray with families, worry about them, celebrate progress with them, and walk with them through setbacks.

This mother in particular struggled deeply with a meth addiction. At one point, I helped her get into rehab, and for a while there was hope that things might stabilize. But addiction is brutal; the “no cost” programs were insufficient, and eventually she relapsed.

The deeper we came to know her story, the more we understood how much trauma had shaped her life long before addiction ever entered it. As a little girl, she lost an older sister to kidnapping, sexual assault, and murder. Her parents, shattered by grief, turned to alcohol to cope. With no support for the trauma she went into survival mode at 12 years old.

Though her story does not excuse the neglect and harm her children experienced in her care, it changed how we saw her. She was not simply an addict. She was also a deeply wounded human being carrying pain most people cannot even imagine surviving as an adult, let alone as a little child. 

As circumstances surrounding the family became more serious, it eventually became clear that two of the children, ages 10 and 12, specifically needed a safe place to be.

Looking back now, it felt less like we “decided” to become foster parents and more like God slowly allowed circumstances to unfold in a way that made it undeniable these children were supposed to be in our home. So we said yes, and began our foster parent journey for the first time. 

Enter into their chaos

People often romanticize foster care, but the reality is far more complicated. Foster care is not simply opening your home. It is opening your life to children carrying enormous trauma and instability who may struggle to trust adults because adults have repeatedly disappeared or harmed them.

These are children who have learned survival behaviors in environments because it was necessary — children carrying grief too large for their age and trauma they don’t even know how to process or understand. 

One of the children, the 10-year-old boy, had spent much of his life isolated in a run down shack with almost nothing around him except a TV, a VCR, and one movie: The Hulk. That was the world he knew. So when he became angry, he became the Hulk.

One night, he was on the top bunk bed in our home during a meltdown. He started screaming and thrashing his arms in this exaggerated Hulk like manner. His entire little malnourished body was filled with rage and pain and chaos; honestly, I did not know what to do, so I prayed.

I remember feeling completely overwhelmed and asking God to help us reach him because nothing we were doing seemed to work. And in that moment, I felt prompted to take him outside and tell him to run across the front yard and touch the fence. So I trusted God and did just that.

He started running across the front yard crying and screaming. He touched the fence, then ran back to touch the other side. He was completely dysregulated, overwhelmed, exhausted, and emotionally unraveling right in front of me. Back and forth he ran across the yard, screaming and crying.

And then I felt another prompting: run with him. So I started running too. Back and forth across our front yard we ran together for what felt like forever, but was truly only about 10 minutes.

He screamed. He cried. He ran with everything he had inside of him. And I just stayed in pace with him. Eventually, he stopped, turned to me, and collapsed into my arms. He finally let me hold him.

That moment has stayed with me for years because it taught me something profound about trauma, children, and sacrificial love: Many times healing is not found in having the perfect words or techniques; it begins when a child realizes someone is willing to enter into their chaos with them instead of abandoning them there. 

Living with uncertainty

One of the hardest parts of foster care is living with uncertainty. Our foster son and his sister were sent to live with a relative after only one year with us. You can deeply love children while having very little control over what ultimately happens.

Court hearings, changing plans, reunification efforts, social workers, delays, setbacks, and emotional highs and lows become part of your normal daily life. People sometimes speak about foster care as though foster parents are rescuers and biological parents are villains. But our experience was far more painful and complicated than that.

Many biological parents are carrying devastating trauma themselves like the mom we encountered. Addiction, homelessness, abuse, violence, poverty, and generational brokenness do not emerge from nowhere.

Often foster care exists because entire families are suffering. Again, that does not erase the pain children experience, but it should change how we see everyone involved.

One of the most heartbreaking things for me was realizing how deeply a mother can love her children while still lacking the stability or healing necessary to safely care for them. That tension is difficult to explain unless you have lived it personally. 

And then eventually comes the part that almost everybody has shared their negative feelings openly about: saying goodbye.

In foster care, goodbye should never be a surprise. You should begin the journey knowing eventually the goodbye will come. To me, that is the most important part of the call to foster: saying yes to the goodbye. I think our faith prepared us for that reality differently than many people might expect.

Real love does not disappear simply because daily presence changes. Foster care is a reflection of that reality.

Walking in sacrificial love

The Gospels do not call Christians to care about suffering only in theory. Jesus consistently moves toward the vulnerable, abandoned, forgotten, and those living on the margins. The Church has always taught that authentic love requires presence, sacrifice, and responsibility toward one another. Scripture presents humanity with the question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” (Genesis 4:9) and the life of Christ answers with a resounding yes.

The Gospels constantly teach us that real love is sacrificial. Christ does not love only when it is safe, guaranteed, or painless. It is quite the opposite. He pours Himself out completely, not just knowing suffering and loss are part of that love but willingly going deeply into it.

You love fully even while understanding you will not keep what you love in the ordinary sense. You choose attachment and presence anyway. You choose to give children safety, stability, affection, patience, and belonging, even while knowing your heart will most definitely break.

That does not make goodbye easy. It still hurts deeply. But love that is rooted in Christ draws us closer to Him.

Being foster parents taught us that in Christ, love is never truly ended by goodbye, because even loss and separation cannot erase the communion created through sacrificial love.