SARAH’S STORY

-Hope is Alive-

by John Wheeler

(A true story)

My wife and I have had the honor to serve children needing out of home care since November of 1988. Feeling the leading of the Lord, we resigned our position as youth pastors of Evangel church and headed to Falcon, NC to become house parents on McCartney Cottage at Falcon Children’s Home. We moved in with our three year old daughter, Karen, to live with seven teenage girls. During our first year there, we saw the number of girls increase to twelve, the maximum for the cottage. After about 3 ½ years, we “left” the cottage for my wife to serve as the bookkeeper and me to serve as the Director of Campus Life. However, we found ourselves filling positions in cottages when vacancies occurred. I remember one time we were back on “our cottage” for 14 weeks while we searched for the right set of houseparents for the girls. After serving in the role of Director of Campus Life for the next 3 ½ years, I felt the need to further my education in this area of ministry. In August of 1995, a door was opened and we moved to Bethany, Oklahoma in order for me to work at Southwestern Christian University and obtain a degree in Human & Family Services.

It wasn’t long afterward we found ourselves in training to become foster/adoptive parents in Oklahoma.  What initially started out as a plan to adopt one of the girls that was looking for an adoptive family from Falcon, turned into us becoming foster parents to children needing out of home care in Oklahoma. Over the next few years, several of the children we cared for had their permanency plan changed from reunification with family to looking for adoptive parents. Needless to say, they didn’t have to look far.  Without going into details, on October 14, 2005, we celebrated the adoption our third child, making us the proud parents of five of the most awesome kids you’ll ever meet. Yet this story is not about them.

We recently were extended the privilege to attend an Adoptive Parents Conference that was put on by our state Department of Human Services. The goal of this conference/retreat was to provide some support and training for parents who have or are planning to adopt children. There was a marriage enrichment segment as well. Another major goal was to introduce and network adoptive parents with each other.  This weekend impacted my life and family in many ways. It was probably the first time in a long time that my wife and I were “childless” – part of the weekend package was to provide childcare for us so we could attend and not worry about the care of our children.

You see, there is some truth to the fact that foster/adoptive kids are typically a little more, lets say, energetic than others, and that sometimes presents challenges for securing childcare. However, the provision offered by the state for this particular event helped us to provide the best care for our kids while we were away for the weekend.  As foster parents, we have some unique “babysitting” stories to tell.  One of the most unique is that  after only babysitting our children for just a couple of hours one evening, this young lady went back to school the next day and changed her college major from early childhood education to something else – and that was just after spending one evening with our kids!  J 

Through the years, we’ve been involved and have interacted with foster parents, but this was the first time that we have experienced that breed referred to as adoptive parents. We left the retreat that weekend refreshed, encouraged, and inspired.

There were a couple of personal attributes that I discovered that were woven in the character of the adoptive families that attended. The first, and most obvious, was a genuine love. It was a love that extended beyond the boundaries of their immediate (what society calls biological) family. In fact, this love was so strong that many seemed to take offense to any reference that would attempt to differentiate between their natural and adopted children.  This love I observed not only transcended biological boundaries, but cultural and racial boundaries as well.

Almost as strong as the attribute of love, I observed an element of faith. A great majority of the families expressed their involvement with, or attachment to, a local church body. Their faith seemed to provide a measure of strength that produced a strong foundation for the love that surrounded the children to which they welcomed into their lives. As I listened to their stories over the course of the weekend, and I observed the elements of faith and love that were woven in. I noticed yet a third attribute that they possessed and it began to emerge in the lives of the children they were working with . . . something that most children have but can lose very quickly when they find themselves in the situations that generate the need for out of home placement . . .  and that is HOPE.

I would like to briefly share one special story of hope from my family with you. I’ll refer to this young lady as “Sarah.” Sarah is the sister to two of the children we have now adopted. Sarah was born in 1990 and became a ward of the court in 1998.  She’s now 15 and has spent almost half her life in foster and/or therapeutic care.  There were several attempts made to reunify the family, yet they all failed.  She came into our life on December 5, 2002. Her sister had been living with us for the past 18 months and we came to know Sarah from her visits with mom and the other siblings. When the situation called for Sarah and her brother to be removed from mom’s care, we requested for them to be able to stay with us because we knew the probability of them finding a place before Christmas was very slim. We felt, that even though she came from a therapeutic foster care setting, we wanted her to be able to spend the holidays, and at least a few months, with her sister and brother. Doing this would allow those working on her case to take the necessary time to formulate the best plan for her life. We were comfortable with her being in our home because we had worked with children with this level of need in North Carolina.

Sarah came to us very troubled and emotional.  She believed with all her heart that she was the cause for her mother’s substance abuse problems, that she was such a bad kid, that her mother had to do drugs to cope.  All Sarah longed for in life was to genuinely feel the love from a mother, who was totally incapable of providing it, at least to her. It was obvious that Sarah was treated much differently than her other siblings by her mom. We witnessed that on countless occasions.

Sarah remained with our family for the next two years.  Prior to living with us, she had gone from placement to placement, from regular foster care to therapeutic care and also spent time in institutional placements. The majority of those placements were disrupted and terminated as a result of how Sarah was choosing to deal with her situation, mostly acting out in very inappropriate and sometimes violent behaviors.  Our family was not exempt from witnessing those behaviors.  However, we quickly were able to see her earnestness and desire to overcome her fears and anxieties and for a permanent change.  She was a fighter, literally.  She was born prematurely and had a twin brother who died at birth.  To this day, she carries the physical scars of where various tubes were inserted near her collar bone while she fought to live.

Our family made a commitment to Sarah, which we would be there for her as she works through her problems. We worked with her to help her understand that there are choices she can make to help her begin to walk out of this horrible season of her life.  Over the next months, that commitment at times seemed like it would literally tear our family apart as she went through the various emotional cycles of dealing with the hurts from her past and learning that, even though she was not responsible and can’t do anything to change the past, she has within her grasp, the power and ability to change how she deals with that past and pursues her future. I could tell stories of our “roller coaster” lives over the next two years, but that is not the focus of my story. I’ll suffice to say we became familiar with just about every service available (some on more than one occasion) that existed to assist Sarah through this season of her life.  We also became familiar with every school official, along with the dispatch phone number and several officers of the Bethany Police Department.

When it was clear that reunification with mom was not an option, our family considered adopting Sarah, along with her sister and little brother. However, as time progressed, it became clear that it would be in Sarah’s best interest for a foster/adoptive home to be located that would have fewer children and a family dynamic that didn’t include her siblings.  This was one of the most, gut-wrenching, heart-aching decisions our family has ever had to make.  It took our commitment to Sarah to a different level. Our challenge was to get her to understand that we were not deserting her, but that she needed something we were not able to provide, a family where she could be the “oldest” child and not have siblings close to her age.  Because of the children already in our family, it was best for us to become “aunt & uncle,” not “mom & dad.”  The next weeks and months were wrapped up with major emotional episodes as we all came to the realization of this truth.  Finally, Sarah was beginning to understand and she began to have a small amount of hope rise up in her spirit.

We decided to make an adoptive family wish list.  Sarah’s ideal family would be a young couple, early to mid 30’s, perhaps with a toddler, preferably a little girl, and, while we were wishing, a pet.  It didn’t take long for the reality to set in of how miraculous locating a family like that would be. While there may be families like that who exist, they were not looking for a 15 year old teenage girl, who, while she had made significant progress –from D’s & F’s in school to A’s & B’s – and that including being transitioned back into “mainstream” classes from specialized classes. She was even accepting the fact she was not the reason for her mother’s poor life choices, that her mother made those choices all on her own. However, she still had some significant social and emotional issues to work through. For a while, realizing the ideal family for Sarah became even more frustrating because statistics were indicating that this wish list was impossible to achieve. There were a great number of children out there, with far fewer problems to overcome than Sarah and no families were available for them. Looking at the statistics Sarah was facing, things looked hopeless.

One thing we tried to instill in Sarah was that, with God, hope is very much alive. He’s not bound by statistics. One day we were contacted by someone who, over two years ago, visited our church one Sunday morning and met Sarah. Our church family was very instrumental in helping us to convey this message of hope to Sarah and she was one that would very openly, sometimes a little too openly, share her requests and desires. On that Sunday morning, our pastor had called for a time of prayer for people with special needs and Sarah responded. This lady observed Sarah come forward and was drawn to pray for her. Later, she shared that she noticed something in Sarah’s brokenness that day that reminded her of her childhood. Now, some two years later, she had remembered Sarah and wanted to know how she was doing.  We, of course, relayed that she was in need of an adoptive family to which she and her husband expressed an initial interest.  We didn’t hear back from them for weeks and figured that reality set in and the interest had fled.  Miraculously, we discovered that was not the case.  Instead, we learned that they had been praying and seeking the Lord for His guidance. During the months before contact by this lady, our family went through some of the toughest experiences with Sarah. Because of intensity and frequency of the emotional and explosive behaviors of Sarah, it seemed that we were going to have to make a decision to find alternative placement. The statistics were too overwhelming.  This hope Sarah had been hearing about seemed so non-existent.

We held on, even when it was beginning to tear our family apart. Little did we know that the whole time we were going through the tormenting season with Sarah, God was working the whole time, answering a prayer for a family prayed by Sarah almost two years earlier, and preparing the family He had for her. She didn’t have to look for a family, they came looking for Sarah, specifically Sarah and no one else.

On October 14, 2005, at the adoption of our son, Ryan, his sister Sarah, along with her adoptive mother, attended and celebrated with us. In a few months, I’ll have the honor of seeing  Sarah, on her special day as she stands in front of the same judge, with the same attorney, along with her adoptive mom and dad (in their early 30’s) holding her little sister while their pet dog anxiously awaits her arrival back home. On that day hope will truly be realized.

My message to you is that no matter what the situation may seem and what the stats may prove, hope still exists.  Even in a time when we get a phone call from our social worker, that in one county of our state, during a 24 hour period, they took in approximately 50 children needing immediate placement . . . hope exists. May God awaken his body to a need that is very dear to His heart. It is my prayer that the body of Christ will be awakened to the need around them and come to the understanding that we, as families of Christ’s church, are very able to extend our arms in a very practical and real way to children in need. From my experience, our state agencies are very open to the body of Christ reaching out to these children, who just need a home and a caring family to help them through a tough transition in their life. It is my prayer that one day, instead of hearing, “we’ve got all these children and there is no available room,” we’ll hear the report that foster and adoptive families are calling departments of human/social services to let them know, “we have room in our family for children needing out of home care and they are welcome to stay as long as they need.”

Side Bar

Statistics for Children Needing Out of Home Care

One child out of 25 lives with neither parent.

An estimated 550,000 children were in foster care as of March 31, 1999, a 35 percent increase since 1990. About 120,000 of these children were waiting for permanent adoptive families.

(State of America’s Children Yearbook 2000, Children’s Defense Fund)

In 1999, adoptions were finalized for more than 17,000 foster children; another 18,000 children were living in foster homes, waiting for adoptions to be completed, and about 20,000 foster children were legally available for adoption but had not yet been placed in their new homes. (CRS Report for Congress: Foster Care and Adoption Statistics)

According to national estimates, one million children in the United States live with adoptive parents, and from two percent to four percent of American families include an adopted child. (National Adoption Information Clearinghouse)

James 1:27 reads in The Message, “Real religion, the kind that passes muster before God the Father, is this: Reach out to the homeless and loveless in their plight, and guard against corruption from the godless world.” Other Biblical translations use “orphans and widows” to depict this people group that we are admonished to care for, if our religion is to be real. Children in our nation’s foster care systems are essentially “modern day orphans.”  We, as the body of Christ, have an obligation to reach out to this ever-growing number of children. How many empty bedrooms exist in our congregations across the land?  How many members are there, sitting in our pews, who are awesome parents, gifted by God and may be wondering, “what is my role in the body?” We only need to look in our immediate communities and most of us would identify children who need a loving, caring, Godly home.  Most for a short period of time, others may be longer.  It is this writer’s opinion that maybe we have missed the call for years now and our governments have stepped in and are trying to meet a need that God has specifically designed His body to meet. Be that as it may, there are windows of opportunities now opening across our nation for the body of Christ to impact a group of children that number over half a million.  Our nation is in a season where they are looking for foster homes instead of group homes to place these children. We, as congregations across this country, have the opportunity to allow our “House of God” to become a “group of homes” and reach out to these homeless and loveless children in their plight.  May God indeed, “Make Our House A Home” for children in need as long as the need exists.

If you would like more information on how you and your church can make a difference in the lives of children needing out of home care in your community, you can e-mail john@extendedhandsfoundation.org or brian@extendedhandsfoundation.org.

Also find us at www.extendedhandsfoundation.org.