Jesus' Heart for the Vulnerable Children

Welcome to the Awakening Church podcast.

We pray this message encourages you and provides the hope and light of Jesus Christ.

Thanks for tuning in.

Well, Church, I want to introduce, um, I want to introduce Courtney to you.

She's gonna be preaching this morning.

Um, she is here with Foster the City, which is a partnership that we have.

Um, they are an organization that helps support kids in foster care, and they partner with local churches um in order to make that happen.

And you're gonna hear all about that um and what that looks like.

Courtney is she's the director of advocates of the East Bay.

So they kind of split up by region, and she leads all the churches in um all the church partnerships in the East Bay here.

Um, she's also a foster mom currently and an adoptive mom.

So she has all the angles of this topic, and I'm so thrilled for you to hear what she has to say.

Can we welcome her?

Thanks so much, Courtney.

Thank you.

All right, well, good morning, Awakening Church.

Um, it's truly, honestly, such a privilege to be here with you guys this morning.

I've loved this Live Local series, I've been following it online, and I've just been so um compelled by the messages that have uh been preached previously.

And I'm excited to talk with you more about uh the unhoused and the hungry and youth experiencing foster care, because even though you've already heard about the unhoused and the hungry, what I have to bring for you today is interconnected with that.

Now, youth experiencing foster care, when they age out of the system, they're basically sent on this pathway, honestly, to becoming unhoused or hungry.

And I want to share some of those statistics with you this morning.

Um youth experiencing foster care are twice as likely to develop PTSD than veterans who've experienced active combat.

All right, just let that sink in with you this morning.

One out of three will become unhoused and experienced food insecurity after aging out of the foster system.

50% will develop a substance abuse addiction, one out of two will experience unemployment by their mid-20s.

And for young women, there's an extra layer of vulnerability because 70% of girls who age out of the foster system will have one or more children to take care of by the age of 21.

Now, I want you guys to think about what it is like to experience this kind of baggage and these statistics over your life living here in the Bay Area.

Now, the reverse is true as well.

Not only are people are children aging out of the foster system sent on this pathway that leads a lot of them into being unhoused or hungry, but kids entering into foster care have experienced this as well.

In 2024, the primary reason for kids entering into foster care is because of neglect.

And neglect is basically a code word for poverty in many situations.

So 55% of kids that are entering into the foster system are there because of neglect.

So these social issues are all interconnected, right?

And one of the most meaningful upstream approaches that we can take to prevent these huge societal issues that we all worry about is by helping kids in foster care.

Now think about these issues: homelessness, um, food insecurity, human trafficking, incarceration rates, substance abuse, addiction.

All of these issues can be prevented in the lives of foster youth by you and I entering in.

Now, there might be some of you this morning that are thinking, how have I never heard this before?

How have I not heard that all of these societal issues are so interconnected?

Well, as somebody that's in the foster care space, as a foster parent and an advocate, I can tell you that foster care is what I like to call a quiet crisis.

Because kids in foster care demand confidentiality and privacy.

Think about what their stories hold, right?

Abuse, neglect, trauma, court cases, biological family complexities, right?

We don't hear these stories because the silence in some ways protects their confidentiality.

Now, what it doesn't protect is because we don't hear these stories and we don't see them, the need goes unmet.

And the church sometimes is slow to respond.

But I promise you guys that there are kids that go to this school that are in foster care.

I promise you that in your children's ministry, there are previous, current, and future foster kids.

So this need is real and it's tangible.

And that's why I'm here with you today because I can come and speak to you, right?

I'm here to speak on behalf of the kids who cannot speak for themselves.

And I'm here to share what I've seen and share how you guys can make a difference in the lives of foster youth.

So I'd like to invite you to turn with me to our anchor passage today, which is James 1.27.

Now, for a bit of context, the overarching theme in the book of James is this idea of faith and works.

And James says some bold things.

He says that faith without works is dead, right?

And he asserts that genuine faith is demonstrated by action, not by what you believe or by what you say.

And he has some bold things to say here in this chapter.

I wish we could go over all of it, but we're gonna jump to verse 27.

It says, pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you.

Now, in the original language, this phrase caring for, it means drawing near, pursuing, risking serious personal involvement.

And do you know that's exactly what the early church was known for?

They were known for responding to the needs of the vulnerable and living counterculturally.

Now they did this imperfectly, of course.

If you read the New Testament, they uh they really make some mistakes along the way, but I want to point you to Acts 4, 32 through 35.

And let's hear how the author describes the early church.

All the believers were one in heart and mind.

No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had.

With great power, the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and God's grace was so powerfully at work at all of them in all of them that there were no needy persons among them.

For from time to time, those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales, and put it at the apostles' feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need.

Now, can you guys imagine being part of that kind of community?

One that is so centrally focused on the mission of Jesus that they're willing to give up their home and their property and their comfort for the sake of other people in their community.

I mean, honestly, I struggle to see how this kind of life looks in 2025.

And maybe you're like me and you look at this passage and you're inspired by it, but you're kind of paralyzed in a way because you don't know how to move towards that kind of radically generous, embodied compassion.

Like, how do we live this out in 2025?

What I don't want to happen this morning is that you're so paralyzed by this kind of generosity that you take no steps, that we leave this room no different than the way we came in.

But what I want this morning, I'm praying, is that God would baptize our imagination, that he would allow us to just imagine what it would look like if all of our priorities and all of our values were aligned with his and we leave this room and we actually look like this.

Let's just imagine together.

And I know that's not easy.

I know it's it's easy to say, but it's hard to live out, and right, that's what James is even talking about in this in this chapter.

This is easy stuff to say, this is hard to live out in action.

But I know it is possible because we saw the early church real people wrestle through this kind of radically remarkable generosity.

And what I love about the early church is even in the New Testament, as you see them stumble, you see them double down.

They're doubling down on centering their lives on Christ-centered service.

They make a mistake, they respond.

They're confronted, they change, right?

And so this morning, that's what I want for us to consider.

Is there something in our thinking that needs to change so we can align more wholly with Christ?

That's what I invite you into this morning on the behalf of vulnerable children, because I crave this kind of faith in the foster care space.

I crave that we would be so compelled by the radical, reckless love of Jesus that we want to be able to tolerate the fact that there are children in our community, children that go to this school, children in your neighborhoods that don't have a safe and loving home.

Let's not walk away from today disassociating with that reality.

Let's let it soak in.

Would we be bold enough in the context of community here to really address this?

Now, James 127 isn't just a command, it's a description of a way that the early church was already living out this kind of radical generosity, this embodied compassion.

Now, in the early church, there was a or in ancient Rome, there was this practice where when a baby was born, it would be laid at the feet of its father.

And the father would have a choice.

If the father picked up his child, that would be a way of him accepting the responsibility of this life.

It was a way of signifying that this child belongs to our family, right?

But the father would have another choice.

If he refused to fix uh to pick up the child, he would be released of all responsibility.

And the child would then be taken outside of the city gates and left there to die in an uh in infant exposure.

Okay.

But the early church, the radically generous, gritty, compassionate early church, they had a practice too.

When they heard about this, when they knew about this happening in their community, they sought after.

They went out and looked for vulnerable children in their community.

They would walk outside the city gates at night, listening for the cries of abandoned infants.

And when they found them, they would scoop them up in their arms and they would take them home.

And Tertullian, a second-century apologist and author, he writes that the church was known for this practice for hundreds of years.

And he says that there's three ways that the early church would respond to this.

First, they would take the child home and give them all rights as a family member.

They would adopt them, give them, give their family to this child.

Or two, they would look for children who were gravely ill that were left to die.

And with compassion, then they would they would bring them home and treat them with dignity and care for them until their last breath.

Or three, when they would find children that had already been left and already passed away.

They would bring them home and they would mourn them.

And they would bury them with dignity.

Now, what if this is what the church was known for?

For being a place that so values human life, so values the children in our community that we would radically, radically give our lives, offer our families, offer our homes to these kids.

These early Christians stepped into situations marked by illness, disability, poverty, social stigma, and they weren't choosing children who were gonna make their lives better or easier.

They chose children who needed love the most.

This isn't simply just a picture of a family growing.

This is a picture of incredible risk.

We see through all scripture, the Old and New Testament, that one of the purest expressions of a relationship with Jesus is how we treat the vulnerable, the marginalized, the outsider, the foreigner, the fatherless, the voiceless, the powerless.

Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you.

Now there's a second half to this verse, right?

And for years I used to kind of wonder what's the connection here?

Seems kind of disconnected.

But as I spent time really wrestling with this, I realized what is the world corrupting us with?

The older I get, the less I think that this is about the things I was taught as a kid, like watching rated R movies or like listening to the wrong music, or you know.

I think the most persuasive invitation that the world has to offer us is to choose our own comfort.

I think that's how the world corrupts us.

By convincing me it's okay to build my life around me, around my security, around my success, my happiness, my house, my kids, my country, my money.

These are all things that the world tells us we should worry about.

Our cultural narrative revolves around me preserving my comfort and my personal peace.

We push away anything that's hard and broken, we try to shield ourselves from it, we try to prevent this in our future, we try to keep our kids from it, right?

But what if the gospel reality demands different priorities?

The longer that I walk with Jesus, the more I recognize that comfort is the greatest danger to a living and breathing faith.

And comfort is the very thing that we're taught to seek after.

I see a lot of young people in this room.

If you hear anything from me today, young people, comfort will not give you the life that Jesus promises.

As Jason Johnson, a pastor and a foster dad, writes, he says, we cannot rightly lift our hands in worship of a God that steps towards us in our hard and broken, and then use those same hands to push the hard and broken of others away.

When comfort and security becomes our highest priority, we instinctively start building this case for why we shouldn't move towards the vulnerable.

And in protecting ourselves, we actually build a shield between us and the people that God has actually called us to care for.

When I was in high school, I knew.

Someday I'll do that.

Someday.

But I had a lot of excuses why someday wasn't today.

Let me share some of them with you.

When I before I started fostering, my biggest, biggest reasons for not pursuing it was I was single.

I lived off one income.

I lived in the Bay Area, and I was living off of a church income.

I was a kids' pastor at the time.

Try to imagine that working, right?

I had a studio apartment, I didn't even have a room for a child.

Um I needed to work full-time.

How was I gonna have child care?

I didn't know anyone else that was fostering.

I um hadn't had never been a parent before.

Would I even be good at this?

How would my extended family view this?

You know, I mean, was the timing right?

I had so many reasons to not do this.

And I didn't wake up one day and all those reasons were suddenly like fixed, right?

I didn't wake up one day suddenly brave or ready.

I just became unwilling to let my comfort dictate my obedience.

And every time I took one shaky step forward, God met me with provision that I couldn't have planned, community I couldn't have orchestrated, and courage I couldn't have manufactured on my own.

And the miraculous piece of all this is that God has used me in ways that I was absolutely sure I wasn't strong enough for.

There was nothing about me that was extraordinary.

When I told my friends in community I was doing this, they were worried for me.

Can she handle this?

This is a lot.

Does she understand what she's doing?

I was positive I didn't have the emotional capacity to hold the stories that I've needed to hold.

But you know what?

God has shaped me through it.

God has formed me.

He has pulled and stretched and humbled me through this process.

But more than anything, I've been carried.

Because I can tell you without hesitation that when you follow Jesus into the mess, he carries you through it.

Here are some pictures of some of the kids that I've had the privilege of caring for.

You can loop through them.

Each one of these kids were removed from their homes due to allegations of abuse and neglect.

And then a social worker was tasked to place calls to find a stranger to take them in.

And here's the thing honestly, I have absolutely zero doubt in my mind that if one of these children were with me today, and I said, awakening church, here is a vulnerable child.

This family, this child needs a temporary family.

Can someone step up?

I'm positive that we would have a waiting list of families from this church ready to take this child in, but that's not how it works.

We actually have a waiting list of children in Santa Clara County waiting for a home.

And she moved in.

She'd never been to church before, and so on her first Sunday after church, I asked her, Hey, did you like church?

What did you like about it?

And I was sure it would be like the donuts or like the kids' ministry games, but her response stopped me in my tracks.

The Jesus stories.

She'd never heard them before.

Here in her most vulnerable, defeated, scared time.

In her life, when she's been sent to live with strangers, she hears the stories of Jesus and she is inspired by them.

Right.

Now she continued to live in our home, and um, throughout the months, she became more curious about Jesus.

And um, one night I walked into her room and she was being a little too quiet, you know, so I had to like go check on her.

And she had been writing in a journal.

I have a picture here for you.

She called this her Jesus Journal.

And then she was filling it with stories of Jesus that she had learned.

And now this is a kid that I could not get to do her homework.

I mean, we're talking like major meltdowns around anything academic, and here she is, like writing the words of Jesus, right?

And even though this girl was so loved, I love her so I still do.

I love her so much.

She had really hard things she was dealing with, deep traumas.

And when kids have trauma, they talk to you through their behavior, right?

So there's some behavioral stuff going on in our home.

And we got her every service the county could provide.

We're talking about like therapy in-home supportive services, therapeutic interventions, and things just continued to get worse, up until the point where there was an incident where she actually had to be put on an eight-day cycle to and I just felt so defeated.

God, where are you in this?

And I got to the point where I just couldn't do it anymore.

And I called her social worker and I said, I I need you to move.

I can't do this.

Someone else has to.

I need you to take this kid.

So I gave them 14 days to find a new placement, and I was just heartbroken.

I felt like such a failure.

Right.

And then a couple days later, I was in my kitchen doing dishes, and she walks up to me and says, Mr.

Courtney, hey, can I get baptized?

I decided to follow Jesus.

I just again like froze, like, what?

What is happening here?

This up and down of this journey.

And I hug her and I sit with her and I we talk about what that means.

And I just felt the Lord like just working on my heart.

Just day by day, just enough.

The loaves and fishes of your life.

I will do something in it, just be faithful.

So I removed my notice and she stayed with me, and um slowly and surely peace started entering back into her home, and the behaviors decreased, and smiles started coming back on both of our faces, and within three months, she was able to reunify with her mom.

Which was always the goal.

But it felt impossible at the time.

And since then, I've had the privilege of getting to know her mom and developing this friendship.

And um, they even came to church with me a few times and sitting next to her as we worship, just saying, God, look how you turned this story around.

Look how you showed up.

And what I've learned from this is I don't have everything to offer these kids.

But what I do have is the presence of God.

And I'm reminded that we bring his presence with us where we go.

So what if there are people in this room where God is asking you, would you bring my presence to the vulnerable?

Would you bring me where it's dark?

Would you, would you let my light shine, right?

Where's the darkest?

You are the one that brings him with you.

And there are kids in Santa Clara County who need the light of Jesus.

You know, I think about the darkest places that I've been at with these kids where I feel like I have nothing to offer them.

Just a couple months ago, with my current placement, I had to bring her to her mother's funeral.

And I just remember as she was getting dressed, just sitting there thinking, God, I can't fix this, I can't make this better, but I can bring your presence with me.

Can you bring the presence of God into the lives of these vulnerable children?

I'll tell you right now, looking at this room, I see a lot of a lot of hope here.

Young people who can then build their futures and mind of knowing I want to be the person who builds my life around the vulnerable.

I see people in here who might be bilingual, who can speak to kids in their their most broken season and their heart language.

The kids I currently have in my home speak Mandarin.

And I wish that I could speak to them in the way that they would feel the most loved.

Maybe you can do that in your heart language.

Maybe you're single.

Man, if I could tell you the the I've seen so many powerful single foster parents.

Right.

There's all these barriers that we build for ourselves saying we can't do this.

I'm not strong enough.

I'm not good enough.

I'm too busy.

I don't have the resources.

Don't limit God.

Don't limit God with your life.

God can do so much through you.

I wish I had so much more time to tell you all the ways that I've seen this in the lives of my foster kids and my friend's foster kids.

But I have a story here that I want to share with you.

It's in a video we're gonna play in a moment of a church not too far from here who's been able to live this out in action.

So take a look.

We got invited to a Foster the City dinner.

At that dinner, there was a video of Bethany and Brian, two actually foster parents, and that kind of convicted me to just ask my wife, maybe we should just pray for the next three or four months just to see what is our involvement in this world of vulnerable childcare and foster care.

We started praying and thinking about it, and nothing was just telling us no, so we just kept moving forward and pretty much got certified, found out that we were certified in December, then got a call pretty much like a week later.

Very, very quick turnaround.

That first placement was a shotgun for us.

I'd say that that first placement was hard, not because the child was hard, but hard because God had to work in us to prepare us for this kind of ministry.

Choosing suffering was just something so, so very contrary to what we were ready for.

Social worker visits, lawyer visits, all these things happening all at once, and my wife and I not fully being on the same page, at least initially, and it was tough during that first month.

Um, but you know, God started to work in our hearts as we started to realize, oh wow, this is this is something still still so very good.

It took us some time though, that first place was hard.

One of the great joys of mine has been to see new life enter into these children's stories with with this conviction that every child is made in God's image, that every child matters to God.

Because my fellow pastor Ryan himself started fostering, our church got to see this up close.

Not just hearing about foster ministry happening in another church, but they were seeing it happen right here in our congregation.

That then led very quickly to us getting signed up with Foster the City, getting coached and mentored by the wonderful people there.

Pretty soon we had identified advocates in a new life.

Before we knew it, the vast majority of our membership was involved directly with foster ministry somehow, whether as certified parents or as support friends on support teams.

Very early on, we realized that embracing foster ministry at our church would not be a cakewalk.

Our church is primarily, not exclusively, but primarily Asian American.

In Asian culture, foster ministry is just really not a thing.

If it is ever talked about, it is almost always rejected, almost always denigrated.

I think of one family, for example, that informed their parents that they would be receiving certification and welcoming foster children into their home.

The main challenge there was that the home they were living in was owned by his parents.

And his parents made it very clear: if you do that, you get out of our house.

That family packed the things up and moved to another place in order to comply with their parents' wishes or demands and still be able to step forward in faith with foster ministry.

We definitely rely on our church body to step into this ministry.

I remember when we were going to take in our teenager for the first time.

I share it with the leadership team, you know, be praying for us when we're considering this.

And Amos sends me a message and says, Ryan and Chen, thank you for serving in this way.

New life stands with you.

That was so memorable to me and so impactful to me that my lead pastor would say that to me.

So it's it really is a church family collectively doing this.

We've always seen it not as like this is Ryan and Chen's ministry, this is New Life's ministry.

And I'd say that's what I have felt throughout these years is to see that hey, every single one of our church members that are involved in foster care, they see this as their own ministry, and they want to care for these children.

We don't view New Life Community Church, our church, as a particularly special church in the sense that we are particularly well resourced compared to other churches, or that we are a big church, we are not a large church.

If we have been able to do this by God's grace, certainly God's grace can equip other churches to do it as well.

I've no doubt that any church that knows Christ, that has his word in their midst, can do this.

The way that it grows people, the way that it mobilizes the church to action, the way that it allows people to live out their Christianity in a very, very tangible way.

What is a way that I can participate as a Christian that really actually does make a tremendous difference in this world?

I would say that these are all blessings of foster ministry.

I would encourage any and every church to make it a part of their church culture and their church DNA.

Thank you so much, Courtney, for coming and sharing with us.

Can we thank her?

So, how a partnership with Foster the City works is that the church invites people to become foster families.

So you have one foster family, um, one foster parent or two foster parents, and then so they're within our church body.

And then four people sign up, four individuals or couples sign up to be what's called a support friend to wrap that family in support in order to make it a more community effort and more manageable and more possible for these kids to be cared for well.

Um, in that church that we just heard about, their congregation is about a hundred people each week, and they have 16 foster families, and then they have 45 support friends.

So if you do that quick math, you can tell that that's almost their entire congregation is involved in caring for kids in some way.

And so that is meant to inspire us.

And Marta here, this is my friend Marta.

Can we welcome her up here?

Thank you.

Marta leads, um, she co-leads our foster the city ministry here at Awakening, um, along with Melissa Slattery.

She also has been a foster parent and is an adoptive parent.

Um, and so she's here to share with us a little bit of her story and how you can get involved.

So, Marta, what inspired you to take that first step to be a part of um foster care, of caring for vulnerable kids, and also what um inspired you to lead this ministry here at Awakening?

Okay, so the first part of the story is um it's one of those stories where God has kind of called me my entire life, and I keep ignoring it or saying not yet.

Um before my husband and I met, we both separately had had people in our lives who were adopted from foster care.

So when we did meet, we were kind of on the same page about it.

But of course, you know, got married young, started working, had one kid, had another kid, moved to the bay, had another kid.

Um, and then we were at a church um with three young kids, and there was a family there who also were in the same phase of life as us, kind of in the thick of it, and they began fostering, and they were strictly fostering, they didn't want to adopt, and they kept taking in um, you know, babies or emergency fostering.

Um and she was a close friend of mine, so I got to actually walk alongside her in that.

And during that time, uh foster the Bay, now foster the city, um had come to our church and uh established some advocates and created a support network around that family.

Um and those advocates ended up kind of launching and moving and leaving and had asked me to step into that role, which felt really natural because I was friends with this family.

Um from there I became a support friend, and then I'm like, this is this is cool.

Um I s and then I started kind of training some other foster families who decided to become licensed.

Um and then uh my husband and I decided to go to our own uh launch meeting.

And this is after you go to the initial interest meeting where you find more, you know, more about becoming a support friend or a foster family, you can go to what's called a launch meeting and they kind of you learn even more about actually how to become licensed and the resources in your direct area.

Um and then from there we uh we're like yes, let's do this.

We started the process, our house was not big enough.

We're like, well, we can't do this, and then God provided a bigger house for us.

It's a longer story, but it happened.

Um and then the pandemic happened, and we're like, well, definitely not yet.

Um during the pandemic, uh family friend, a friend of a friend, um, had a family member that needed a foster family to take care of this baby.

And they asked us, and we were like, well, okay, I guess this is might be our sign we need to just forge forward, even though we're in the mini middle of the pandemic.

We ended up connecting with an FFA, which is a foster family agency, a nonprofit that we licensed with and made it really easy for us.

Um that child did not end up coming to stay with us, but we did become a resource family, foster family through that.

Um during the pandemic, um, I was working as a nurse in the hospital.

My husband was working full-time from home.

We had three kids on distance learning, and we just started taking kids in.

Um, we had five kids in our home total.

Um and our fifth was our current daughter right now, and many of you have seen her and met her.

She was with us from 10 months, and then we adopted her at three years, and um yeah, it's we ended up coming to Awakening about a year after, or about the time that we adopted her, actually.

And Ashley had approached me about becoming an advocate here, and I said, why not?

So here I am.

A lot of um not yet, and just taking small steps forward in faith is really our journey, our family's journey.

That's amazing.

So those small steps of faith.

How can how can people get involved with this?

So I would really recommend going to an interest meeting.

Um all of the stuff that foster the city puts out is so informative, inspirational, helpful.

Um and it really is a way to figure out okay, well, maybe I can't become a foster parent right now, but this is just not but how can I help somehow?

Um it's just a great way to get connected to the community.

Um that's what I would do.

Yeah, yeah, we have a link here.

You can also sign up outside um and online.

Uh that interest meeting is low commitment.

Low commitment, yeah.

Your commitment is to attend the meeting and it's virtual, it's so you're in your house.

Um, the commitment is really just to learn more if you sign up for this meeting, not to fully become a foster family or a support friend.

Um, it's just to learn more about what foster the city does and um how you can be a part of it.

Um for people who are sitting in here right now who are um maybe like you were at the very beginning of your journey, feeling something from the Holy Spirit saying, Maybe this is for me, maybe God wants to do something through me, but I don't know.

I'm hesitant for so many reasons, so many legitimate barriers in my life.

Um just feeling that hesitation, what would be your encouragement for them?

I think just asking God, like, do you want me to do this?

These are the barriers that I have, this is why I'm afraid.

And I think God will take you to the next step.

I think, and also just take a little baby step, go to an interest meeting, um, go hang out with a friend who's fostering or who's adopted from foster care, find out more information.

Um I think that the idea of taking on a child or being involved in it is scary, and that's normal.

It's scary to have your own kids, it's scary to have to get married, it's scary to have a baby, but you just do it because I don't know, you feel called to, or you you want to grow your family, or you want to serve the church, or God just meets you.

I and I like how Courtney talked about baptizing your imagination.

I think that's a really great visual because I think we can baptize our imagination in fear.

There can be you can imagine all of the things that would be hard or that would be scary.

But what about imagining things that would be good?

And like for example, I have three of my own kids, and something people say to me all the time, well, isn't it hard on your kids?

Isn't it like scary to bring another child into your home that isn't part of your family?

And yeah, that was a that was that's a that's a valid concern.

But I would say my kids have loved it, they've enjoyed it, they've grown in ways that I never thought they would.

They are so good with her.

They are it it's been a joy, truly, it's been a joy.

Yes, it's hard.

Kids are hard.

I'm not really like a kid person, you know.

I mean, honestly, I have four of them.

But you know, God opened my heart to it and it's grown me in ways that I never thought were possible, honestly.

Yeah.

Thank you so much, Marta.

Can we thank her both for being up here this morning and sharing her story and also for what you do here at Awakening?

Thank you so much.

I'm gonna invite the worship team back out because we are gonna close our service with worship.

Um, but I just want to say outside, um, there is a tent out there, or there's a table, actually.

It's not under a tent, it's under the overhang, and there's a big banner that says serve.

And Marta and Melissa, and I think Courtney will be outside.

Um thank you.

We'll be outside to answer any questions that you have and um help you get uh signed up for one of those interest meetings.

But they can answer questions from all different angles of this because they all play different roles, but they um all know this, uh they all know foster care pretty intimately based on different experiences that they have.

So if you have questions, even some of the personal things, the personal barriers that you um sense, they would be the people to ask, and they will be outside right after service so that you can ask them questions and take a next step in order to serve the vulnerable kids in our community.

Well, church, we are gonna worship.

We're gonna end by worshiping God.

So would you stand with us?

And we are gonna sing and glorify God with our lips and with our hearts and with our minds.

So would you worship with us?

We hope you are blessed by this message.

Please subscribe to our podcast for access to every episode as they're uploaded.

And hey, we'd love to connect with you.

Take a next step by filling out our virtual connection card at awakeningchurch.comslash card.