Hope

I'm getting ready to pack up for a quick weekend trip to see my cousins on land our family has owned nearly four decades.  So exciting! There are horses, cattle, fishing holes and creeks that run through it, and there's plenty of hiking.  It's beautiful country right at the base of Mount Magazine. 

But I can't shake a heavy heart tonight.....

My station aired the thirty minute adoption special, "A Place to Call Home:  Fostering Hope" last night that I've worked on for about a month. This special focuses on the nearly one thousand kids ages 14 and up in state foster care and the fact that no one really wants to adopt teenagers.  I also shared that there are roughly four thousand kids in foster care, but there are only about a thousand open homes.  And I reported that 221 teenagers last year aged out of the system without ever finding a family.

Can you imagine?  Never, ever knowing the comfort and love a mother or father or aunt or uncle or grandparent bring.  Not having a home to return to at Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays.  Only dreaming of what a foundation based on love and loyalty and respect feels like. 

Having never had a father that I truly knew myself, I can relate to the feeling of abandonment these children feel at times.  I'm an only child, and I was raised by a single mother.  She loved me deeply and because of that, I've been able to create a good life.  And even if something had ever happened to her (thank God it didn't, and she is still alive today), any number of aunts or uncles or grandparents would've taken me and loved me and raised me.  I am beyond grateful just knowing this. 

These children have no one.  They only have hope.  That you, that anyone, will come for them.  That what they feel inside - of being unwanted - isn't really true. 

I've heard some rumblings on Facebook from people saying that DHS is understaffed and that it's a hassle to apply.  Seriously?  If you have a loving, open, and willing heart, along with a decent home, you have the ability and chance to help just one child.   Like Michael and Alecia Corbin, who've adopted twins and a teenage boy.  Like Kim Tullos, who has fostered nearly thirty children in a five year time period. These people are heroes, and the children desperately need more of them.

I'm heading out for a fun weekend with my two kiddos who keep me on my toes.  I bet you're doing something fun, too.  I only ask one thing:  remember the children who aren't.  The children who are lost and alone and have no one.  Maybe there's a way you could help them. 

"You have not lived today until you have done something for someone who can never repay you.”
― John Bunyan