July 18, 2024 • 17 mins
Whether you are a foster parent hoping to adopt, already adopted or a long-term foster parent, this episode is for you if you struggle with anxiety, overwhelm and desire to keep Jesus at the center.
I will share vulnerably several ways that I tried to maintain control and perfection while battling anxiety and worry. I had found myself fully shifted into a mindset of striving to control every aspect of our foster care and adoption process. In turn, I lost myself along the way.
I didn’t understand the importance of the 5 people I surrounded myself with and who and what I was rooting my beliefs in.
If you are struggling right now as a foster or adoptive parent, I am so thankful that you found this episode. I want you to know that you are not alone. You are seen, valued, loved and known.
After you listen to this episode, I would love for you to head on over and join our inner circle of foster and adoptive mamas. Our Facebook group is your gateway to valuable resources and connection.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/fostercareandadoptionforchristianwomen
Thank you for being here. Go grab your cup of coffee and let's dig in.
XO-Christine Marie
If you found this episode helpful, I would love for you to leave me a review on apple podcasts. This will help others just like you to find my podcast and be encouraged along their journey: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/what-to-expect-while-fostering-and-adopting-adopting/id1701306333
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
Music.
(01:18):
About trust. And can you truly trust God in the waiting?
I know there's a lot of you guys here who are foster parents in waiting to be
adoptive parents, hopefully through the foster care world.
There's also some of you who have dreams of adopting,
(01:39):
maybe through other agencies, or maybe just
wanting to grow your family temporarily while
fostering but no matter what has
led you here I am so thankful that you're here with me today and I just want
to share so many things that I learned were tied back to the topic of trust
(02:03):
but truly I struggled big time as a foster parent,
trying to navigate so many things that I was trying to control.
If you struggle with control or anxiety, you probably will resonate with today's episode.
I want to share this with you a little bit, kind of a glimpse into who I was
(02:25):
when I was a foster parent.
Maybe you'll connect with this person, but I did love Jesus,
my kids, my husband, but truthfully, I was consumed with worry,
emotions, and trying to be the perfect foster parent.
When I went into fostering, I wanted everything to be easy, and I realized very
(02:48):
quickly when that newness, when the adrenaline wore off, that it was so much
more challenging than I had ever imagined.
I truly felt like I was a ship lost at sea, but didn't want to share how overwhelmed I was or had become.
Because again, going back to I wanted to be the perfect foster parent.
(03:08):
I wanted the caseworkers to place children with me that were potentially available
for adoption because I went into foster care wanting to adopt.
And I truly struggled with trusting God 100%. I didn't know how to navigate
the journey or the unknown.
And then really, the thoughts, the negative thoughts, the overwhelming thoughts,
(03:34):
the stressed out, can I do this? Is
were what occupied my night time thoughts every single day.
And every day I woke up exhausted because I was trying to do all of this on my own.
You can probably gather that trust was my biggest struggle.
God 100% led me here to become a foster parent.
(03:57):
He placed having a child and adopting a child on my heart. But I quickly shifted
into a place of striving versus surrender because I just didn't know any better.
Like I said, I was trying to control everything.
I was trying to be the perfect foster mom with the perfect clean house,
(04:18):
with the perfect house, with the perfectly organized kids' bedrooms,
with the little sorting containers that would share like what their outfits were every single day.
When caseworkers came over.
I wanted them to see how incredibly well these children were doing.
(04:39):
And in the back of my mind, I was just praying and continually looking for our forever daughter.
And as you guys know how the story ends, we ended up adopting two daughters.
But here's the piece that I didn't know. When I went into becoming a foster
parent, I didn't understand the importance of children being adopted by their biological parents,
(05:05):
families, or extended families, or someone that knew the child or their biological
family. I didn't understand that.
And unfortunately for both of our daughters, that wasn't an option.
So fortunately, we were able to adopt both of them. But looking back,
I think I could have done more with other children.
(05:28):
I think I could have We've done more to help support.
The relationships with their biological families. But I'm just being really transparent.
I didn't understand, truly feel like the education piece for foster parents
and understanding their part in the big picture of long-term for these children's
(05:52):
lives isn't really shared.
The system, the caseworkers are in a really tough and challenging situation
to find homes for these children.
And they are, you know, just looking to place them as quick as possible.
And so there's a lot of deep, I guess, work that and conversations that should
(06:13):
be had that there just isn't time for.
And so I went in and ended up with quite a few children very quickly.
As you guys know, if you've listened to some of the other episodes,
at one point, we had 11 kiddos total in our home. And I was still looking for my forever child.
(06:35):
And it's crazy to me to think back that chaos had become a normal part of our
family. And did I manage it well? Yes.
But I was asserting my control over every single situation, not in a bad way,
like a managing control way, but it wasn't surrender.
(06:56):
And that's where I want to be encouraging for you today is that you can trust God in the unknown.
You don't need to take 77 children like I did to try and find your two or find your one.
Because if you just lean into him and stay rooted in him, you will find the
(07:17):
child that he has meant for you.
If he led you here, he led you here for a purpose.
And I know though it's not the correct verbiage to say that I'm a foster parent
fostering with the intent of.
And the hope and the desire placed
on my heart by Jesus to adopt a child through the foster care system.
(07:38):
I've been told very clearly that that is not okay to say. That's not okay to have that mindset.
But I'm also here to say that people do. And if you do have that heart set,
I want you to know if God placed it there, it's okay.
But I also want you to work on learning what I didn't know,
(07:58):
which is that your role is
so critical as a foster parent to help these
children return to their birth families or some
extension of their birth family and if God does have that child permanently
planned to be your child then that's just as incredible too because you will
be able to say at the end of the journey I did every single thing to support
(08:21):
you being placed with a member of your biological family or reunified,
you will be able to share that story with them.
And you will have such peace because you will know without a doubt that God led you here.
I remember we had at one point five children in our home and we had two openings
and I hadn't gotten a call in a while and I was probably looking for a child to adopt.
(08:46):
And I probably had that internal I want to have a baby but it's not possible feeling.
Have any of you guys ever had that? It's so loud.
It never stops. It doesn't turn off. You can't pray it away.
You can't make it go away. Well maybe you could pray it away.
I believe something different now but it's just this biological desire to have
(09:09):
a child and that encompassed a lot of my decision -making,
and desire to continually say yes to placements.
It also had me say yes to baking cookies for the placement desk and bringing
them to them every single week that I had openings.
I told you guys I was going to share some stuff that I'm not really proud of.
(09:32):
Now, does the placement desk deserve cookies? A hundred percent.
And even if you are full, I would encourage you to bake some cookies and take
them down to the caseworkers, to the certification department,
to the people working in the front desk.
Their job is so hard, but do it with a pure heart because mine was pretty tainted.
(09:54):
I was self-serving and looking for another placement.
And I am only admitting this to you because I hope it helps somebody else make
better choices than I did. And I was extra helpful because ultimately I wanted to find my daughter.
But even once we had adopted our two daughters...
(10:18):
That feeling inside of a wanting a child never went away.
And that was the hardest part because I wanted to be done fostering,
but that feeling wouldn't stop.
What I know now is that feelings are feelings.
We all have feelings. It doesn't even mean that they're rational,
but it doesn't mean that that's what God's plan is for you.
And that was the missing piece for me. The missing piece was understanding and
(10:44):
knowing clearly where I was rooted.
Now, you know how they would say like the five people in your life are the most
important, like the top five people that you interact with and spend the most amount of time with.
Those are the most important people in your life because that's who you are.
You can tell a person by the people they surround themselves with.
And the place that I had gone is the five people in my life,
(11:05):
the most influential five people were other foster parents who wanted to adopt,
caseworkers and the attorneys and and the CASAs, and everybody else involved
in the child foster care system.
This was not the best rooting for somebody to stay rooted in God.
I was anchored and tethered to the foster care system.
(11:29):
I had gone away from going to church because our kiddos were too hard to go to church.
They couldn't be cared for in the current church nursery that we had or the child care centers.
And all I could see, my whole vision had become wanting a child and doing whatever
I needed to do to make that dream become reality and loving the foster children
(11:52):
that we had in our home and serving as many foster children as I possibly could, despite everything.
The sacrifice that it took to my own children, my marriage, and our family.
I became blind because my rooting was the foster care system.
I didn't have rooting and a circle of five people that were going to help keep me balanced.
(12:16):
I had five people who kept me in the cycle and running on the hamster wheel.
It wasn't healthy. I wasn't balanced.
And so my vision became imbalanced.
So what I want to share with you today is that it is okay to trust that God
led you here for a purpose and he has an incredible plan for you.
(12:37):
That if he led you here with the heart to build your family or grow your family
or foster these children, he will complete that in you.
But you don't need to manipulate other situations like I did so that you can
get and control the situation like I wanted to control.
Once you become so rooted in the world,
(12:59):
everything becomes so chaotic and overwhelming and the peace is gone.
I didn't have peace in my heart or in my life.
And when you truly lean on God, you will begin to slowly find that peace again.
So if you're in a place where you are recognizing some of the signs that I'm
(13:20):
sharing, and you're saying,
maybe I am in a place of striving, or maybe I'm so focused on adopting a child
or finding that perfect foster child,
maybe I'm so focused on that, that everything else is going to the side,
that I'm willing to sacrifice who I am to get what I want.
When it's meant for you and that perfect child, you will not need.
(13:45):
To sacrifice you in order to get the child placed with you.
And unfortunately for me, that anxiety and that need to control the chaos led
me to surround myself with only people who were in the system.
And that began to really have a really hard effect on our family and our children.
(14:08):
And it pushed me further and further away from God.
If you are in the situation where your entire world has become.
Caseworkers, attorneys, and people who operate within the system,
I want you to slowly begin to take steps or drastically take steps to find your
people that will anchor you in who you truly are.
(14:30):
One of those people you don't even need to find because he's already there.
And all you have to do is find time in the morning or find time at night or
find time in the middle of the day or find time when you're in the carpool line
to open your Bible and read one verse to connect with Jesus and what he says,
because what he says is so much stronger than what the world is saying.
(14:53):
Or listen to a podcast while you're doing the laundry or sorting the laundry
or cleaning the kiddos rooms or while you're making dinner or turn on worship
music in the house or get those little tiny wireless speakers that you can put
one in every bedroom and turn on worship music.
So no matter what room you're in, you're going to hear music and music will
(15:13):
fill you with joy because it can get really overwhelming.
And pretty soon, your worry, your overwhelm, your stress, your thoughts, it's so consuming.
That it will become every single thing that you are, and pretty soon it can become your identity.
It became my identity. I was a proud foster parent.
That was my identity. And that's not any of our identities.
(15:38):
That might be what we do. That might be how we serve.
But it's not who we are. And I allowed it to become my entire identity because
I was so stuck in striving, because I was so focused on adopting a child,
which God placed that initial vision in my heart.
But he also asked me to surrender the vision to him and let him figure out the pieces.
(16:00):
And I said, no, thank you. I'm going to take this and run.
So if you recognize any of yourself in this today, I would challenge you,
challenge you to lean in, lean in and listen to what he's telling you.
And I would challenge you to pray really bold,
strong prayers that God would remove any potential child that is not the right
(16:24):
child from your home or potential phone call that you'll get about a child.
I want you to step into praying big prayers that God will part the seas and
part the waters so that the right child will be placed with you.
And that doesn't mean the child for adoption, but the child that he wants you
to cover and care for. Get really vulnerable and surrender.
(16:45):
I challenge you to step into a season of trusting Jesus with your adoption and
your foster care journey and see what he will do.
(17:34):
Music.
Music.
(01:18):
About trust. And can you truly trust God in the waiting?
I know there's a lot of you guys here who are foster parents in waiting to be
adoptive parents, hopefully through the foster care world.
There's also some of you who have dreams of adopting,
(01:39):
maybe through other agencies, or maybe just
wanting to grow your family temporarily while
fostering but no matter what has
led you here I am so thankful that you're here with me today and I just want
to share so many things that I learned were tied back to the topic of trust
(02:03):
but truly I struggled big time as a foster parent,
trying to navigate so many things that I was trying to control.
If you struggle with control or anxiety, you probably will resonate with today's episode.
I want to share this with you a little bit, kind of a glimpse into who I was
(02:25):
when I was a foster parent.
Maybe you'll connect with this person, but I did love Jesus,
my kids, my husband, but truthfully, I was consumed with worry,
emotions, and trying to be the perfect foster parent.
When I went into fostering, I wanted everything to be easy, and I realized very
(02:48):
quickly when that newness, when the adrenaline wore off, that it was so much
more challenging than I had ever imagined.
I truly felt like I was a ship lost at sea, but didn't want to share how overwhelmed I was or had become.
Because again, going back to I wanted to be the perfect foster parent.
(03:08):
I wanted the caseworkers to place children with me that were potentially available
for adoption because I went into foster care wanting to adopt.
And I truly struggled with trusting God 100%. I didn't know how to navigate
the journey or the unknown.
And then really, the thoughts, the negative thoughts, the overwhelming thoughts,
(03:34):
the stressed out, can I do this? Is
were what occupied my night time thoughts every single day.
And every day I woke up exhausted because I was trying to do all of this on my own.
You can probably gather that trust was my biggest struggle.
God 100% led me here to become a foster parent.
(03:57):
He placed having a child and adopting a child on my heart. But I quickly shifted
into a place of striving versus surrender because I just didn't know any better.
Like I said, I was trying to control everything.
I was trying to be the perfect foster mom with the perfect clean house,
(04:18):
with the perfect house, with the perfectly organized kids' bedrooms,
with the little sorting containers that would share like what their outfits were every single day.
When caseworkers came over.
I wanted them to see how incredibly well these children were doing.
(04:39):
And in the back of my mind, I was just praying and continually looking for our forever daughter.
And as you guys know how the story ends, we ended up adopting two daughters.
But here's the piece that I didn't know. When I went into becoming a foster
parent, I didn't understand the importance of children being adopted by their biological parents,
(05:05):
families, or extended families, or someone that knew the child or their biological
family. I didn't understand that.
And unfortunately for both of our daughters, that wasn't an option.
So fortunately, we were able to adopt both of them. But looking back,
I think I could have done more with other children.
(05:28):
I think I could have We've done more to help support.
The relationships with their biological families. But I'm just being really transparent.
I didn't understand, truly feel like the education piece for foster parents
and understanding their part in the big picture of long-term for these children's
(05:52):
lives isn't really shared.
The system, the caseworkers are in a really tough and challenging situation
to find homes for these children.
And they are, you know, just looking to place them as quick as possible.
And so there's a lot of deep, I guess, work that and conversations that should
(06:13):
be had that there just isn't time for.
And so I went in and ended up with quite a few children very quickly.
As you guys know, if you've listened to some of the other episodes,
at one point, we had 11 kiddos total in our home. And I was still looking for my forever child.
(06:35):
And it's crazy to me to think back that chaos had become a normal part of our
family. And did I manage it well? Yes.
But I was asserting my control over every single situation, not in a bad way,
like a managing control way, but it wasn't surrender.
(06:56):
And that's where I want to be encouraging for you today is that you can trust God in the unknown.
You don't need to take 77 children like I did to try and find your two or find your one.
Because if you just lean into him and stay rooted in him, you will find the
(07:17):
child that he has meant for you.
If he led you here, he led you here for a purpose.
And I know though it's not the correct verbiage to say that I'm a foster parent
fostering with the intent of.
And the hope and the desire placed
on my heart by Jesus to adopt a child through the foster care system.
(07:38):
I've been told very clearly that that is not okay to say. That's not okay to have that mindset.
But I'm also here to say that people do. And if you do have that heart set,
I want you to know if God placed it there, it's okay.
But I also want you to work on learning what I didn't know,
(07:58):
which is that your role is
so critical as a foster parent to help these
children return to their birth families or some
extension of their birth family and if God does have that child permanently
planned to be your child then that's just as incredible too because you will
be able to say at the end of the journey I did every single thing to support
(08:21):
you being placed with a member of your biological family or reunified,
you will be able to share that story with them.
And you will have such peace because you will know without a doubt that God led you here.
I remember we had at one point five children in our home and we had two openings
and I hadn't gotten a call in a while and I was probably looking for a child to adopt.
(08:46):
And I probably had that internal I want to have a baby but it's not possible feeling.
Have any of you guys ever had that? It's so loud.
It never stops. It doesn't turn off. You can't pray it away.
You can't make it go away. Well maybe you could pray it away.
I believe something different now but it's just this biological desire to have
(09:09):
a child and that encompassed a lot of my decision -making,
and desire to continually say yes to placements.
It also had me say yes to baking cookies for the placement desk and bringing
them to them every single week that I had openings.
I told you guys I was going to share some stuff that I'm not really proud of.
(09:32):
Now, does the placement desk deserve cookies? A hundred percent.
And even if you are full, I would encourage you to bake some cookies and take
them down to the caseworkers, to the certification department,
to the people working in the front desk.
Their job is so hard, but do it with a pure heart because mine was pretty tainted.
(09:54):
I was self-serving and looking for another placement.
And I am only admitting this to you because I hope it helps somebody else make
better choices than I did. And I was extra helpful because ultimately I wanted to find my daughter.
But even once we had adopted our two daughters...
(10:18):
That feeling inside of a wanting a child never went away.
And that was the hardest part because I wanted to be done fostering,
but that feeling wouldn't stop.
What I know now is that feelings are feelings.
We all have feelings. It doesn't even mean that they're rational,
but it doesn't mean that that's what God's plan is for you.
And that was the missing piece for me. The missing piece was understanding and
(10:44):
knowing clearly where I was rooted.
Now, you know how they would say like the five people in your life are the most
important, like the top five people that you interact with and spend the most amount of time with.
Those are the most important people in your life because that's who you are.
You can tell a person by the people they surround themselves with.
And the place that I had gone is the five people in my life,
(11:05):
the most influential five people were other foster parents who wanted to adopt,
caseworkers and the attorneys and and the CASAs, and everybody else involved
in the child foster care system.
This was not the best rooting for somebody to stay rooted in God.
I was anchored and tethered to the foster care system.
(11:29):
I had gone away from going to church because our kiddos were too hard to go to church.
They couldn't be cared for in the current church nursery that we had or the child care centers.
And all I could see, my whole vision had become wanting a child and doing whatever
I needed to do to make that dream become reality and loving the foster children
(11:52):
that we had in our home and serving as many foster children as I possibly could, despite everything.
The sacrifice that it took to my own children, my marriage, and our family.
I became blind because my rooting was the foster care system.
I didn't have rooting and a circle of five people that were going to help keep me balanced.
(12:16):
I had five people who kept me in the cycle and running on the hamster wheel.
It wasn't healthy. I wasn't balanced.
And so my vision became imbalanced.
So what I want to share with you today is that it is okay to trust that God
led you here for a purpose and he has an incredible plan for you.
(12:37):
That if he led you here with the heart to build your family or grow your family
or foster these children, he will complete that in you.
But you don't need to manipulate other situations like I did so that you can
get and control the situation like I wanted to control.
Once you become so rooted in the world,
(12:59):
everything becomes so chaotic and overwhelming and the peace is gone.
I didn't have peace in my heart or in my life.
And when you truly lean on God, you will begin to slowly find that peace again.
So if you're in a place where you are recognizing some of the signs that I'm
(13:20):
sharing, and you're saying,
maybe I am in a place of striving, or maybe I'm so focused on adopting a child
or finding that perfect foster child,
maybe I'm so focused on that, that everything else is going to the side,
that I'm willing to sacrifice who I am to get what I want.
When it's meant for you and that perfect child, you will not need.
(13:45):
To sacrifice you in order to get the child placed with you.
And unfortunately for me, that anxiety and that need to control the chaos led
me to surround myself with only people who were in the system.
And that began to really have a really hard effect on our family and our children.
(14:08):
And it pushed me further and further away from God.
If you are in the situation where your entire world has become.
Caseworkers, attorneys, and people who operate within the system,
I want you to slowly begin to take steps or drastically take steps to find your
people that will anchor you in who you truly are.
(14:30):
One of those people you don't even need to find because he's already there.
And all you have to do is find time in the morning or find time at night or
find time in the middle of the day or find time when you're in the carpool line
to open your Bible and read one verse to connect with Jesus and what he says,
because what he says is so much stronger than what the world is saying.
(14:53):
Or listen to a podcast while you're doing the laundry or sorting the laundry
or cleaning the kiddos rooms or while you're making dinner or turn on worship
music in the house or get those little tiny wireless speakers that you can put
one in every bedroom and turn on worship music.
So no matter what room you're in, you're going to hear music and music will
(15:13):
fill you with joy because it can get really overwhelming.
And pretty soon, your worry, your overwhelm, your stress, your thoughts, it's so consuming.
That it will become every single thing that you are, and pretty soon it can become your identity.
It became my identity. I was a proud foster parent.
That was my identity. And that's not any of our identities.
(15:38):
That might be what we do. That might be how we serve.
But it's not who we are. And I allowed it to become my entire identity because
I was so stuck in striving, because I was so focused on adopting a child,
which God placed that initial vision in my heart.
But he also asked me to surrender the vision to him and let him figure out the pieces.
(16:00):
And I said, no, thank you. I'm going to take this and run.
So if you recognize any of yourself in this today, I would challenge you,
challenge you to lean in, lean in and listen to what he's telling you.
And I would challenge you to pray really bold,
strong prayers that God would remove any potential child that is not the right
(16:24):
child from your home or potential phone call that you'll get about a child.
I want you to step into praying big prayers that God will part the seas and
part the waters so that the right child will be placed with you.
And that doesn't mean the child for adoption, but the child that he wants you
to cover and care for. Get really vulnerable and surrender.
(16:45):
I challenge you to step into a season of trusting Jesus with your adoption and
your foster care journey and see what he will do.
(17:34):
Music.
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