Shannon’s Story:
In fourteen days, I received fourteen calls about fourteen foster babies. The plight of these desperate children weighed heavily on me. But Jesus loves the little children, so God already planned to provide for each one.
In the nine months before those fourteen calls, I lived out a paper-pregnancy for us to become qualified foster parents: sitting through every class, hosting every home inspector, dotting every i and crossing every t in a pile of papers so high it put Everest to shame. We already had two sons, ages four and two. Along the road to certification, another foster parent suggested we specify a placement for children younger than our sons. At the end of my paper-pregnancy, we prepared for the placement of a child under eighteen months old.
When you tell family and friends you plan to foster babies alongside your two preschoolers, opinions and hot-takes flow as freely as the wine at a country club wedding. Granted, these advisors meant well. They loved us and wanted to protect us. But Marshall and I had promised each other to take a faithful path over a safe one. A million little yeses to the Lord had led us to create a fully licensed foster home for a baby in our city.
The first call came one Friday morning while I was wiping spilled milk and Cheerios from brick floors.
“Could you take a three-month-old baby girl going through withdrawal?” The caseworker sounded entirely too casual. His impatient tone frustrated my desire to get off the phone, call Marshall, do some research and call him back. Our certification agency had warned us this caller would be short and not sweet. So I simply said yes. The call lasted less than two minutes.
I spent the next three hours doing all the things I had wanted to do before saying yes. I finally put the boys down for an afternoon nap, and the phone rang again.
The anonymous caller barked, “Could you take a fifteen-month-old boy currently in the ER with twenty-one broken bones?” Turns out the baby girl from the morning’s call had been placed in another home thirty minutes after I hung up.
“Yes, of course,” I answered. How could I say no?
By dinnertime, the baby boy with broken bones had a crib at his cousin’s house, and I had a craving for a glass of pinot noir.
The next thirteen days played the same song in different styles—a baby left at the hospital, a child born on drugs, another one beaten, another found at a crime scene. But either the caseworker chose another foster home, or the officials located a family member, or the case changed. None of those fourteen calls led to a child at our front door.
One call came in the middle of the night for an eighteen-month-old boy, but not his four-year-old brother, who would go to another home. The brothers had witnessed horrific violence, but caseworkers planned to break up the brothers to expedite their placement. After the call came at 1:00 am, we crawled out of bed, texted our home group and prayed for the boys to stay together.
After hearing nothing for hours, we called for an update at 4:00 am. A caseworker had made a mistake and left both children at the first home, where foster parents spontaneously agreed to take both children, even though they had initially agreed only to take one. Exhausted but thankful, we stumbled back to bed.
One morning in December, I answered a call about baby fifteen, a boy with no known name or exact age. Workers knew only that a friend-of-a-friend-of-a-neighbor had agreed to babysit for two hours. Four days later, she still had him. Concerned for his health, this woman brought him to Child Protective Services. Scabs and rashes covered his plump body, probably caused by bad eczema or an untreated strep infection.
Baby fifteen was our first foster baby. We called him “Old Man Larry” because he smelled like an old man after we applied all of his skin creams. When I changed his clothes, he winced and moaned but never cried. In our classes, we had learned that sometimes children stop crying after an extended time when their cries go unanswered. I wanted him to wail with crocodile tears like my boys did when I gave them sliced instead of diced bananas. But he only stared at me wide-eyed, brow furrowed and fists clenched.
Eventually we learned his name, and his skin began to heal. Old Man Larry spent his first birthday and Christmas with us, and over time he began walking, smiling and even crying. We were relieved to finally learn his history included no bad guys, just broken lives in need of redemption. Later, he moved in with his grandmother, who adopted him. The day the caseworker drove him away, snow drifted down as she inched carefully down the street. Snow in Texas is rare, but that day God sent snow and gave Old Man Larry a permanent home.
Our next foster baby came three months later. The following summer, she and her big brother became a part of our family forever.
But every December I recall that early season of fostering, especially when we sing,
Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
Till he appeared and the soul felt its worth.
The thrill of hope, the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn.
This Christ who put on frail baby skin and dwelt in our darkness offers the only hope for each of the fourteen children from those fourteen calls.
And for Old Man Larry.
And for me.
And you.
