5 Reasons We Love The Foster Care Community

By January 23, 2020 March 12th, 2020 Blog
We want to see people everywhere supporting the foster care community and experiencing Jesus together. This isn’t just a great tagline here at The Forgotten Initiative, but it’s the vision we’re passionate about. It drives us, motivates us, and we couldn’t be more excited about it!
Foster care is about much more but not less than the children and youth who enter and exit its system. Surrounding each of those little people are big people—the grown-ups. We care about agency workers, foster parents, and biological parents too! We know that each group of people matters. 
Here are 5 reasons we love the foster care community and think you should too: 

1. We love Jesus. 

We have to start here, because our care for the foster care community is fueled by our love for our Lord. It’s Christ’s love for us that keeps us in the game. We simply don’t have enough gusto on our own to love people well in a sustainable way. It’s namely that Jesus came to us here on Earth, lived a perfect, sinless life, then in an act of incredible mercy and grace switched that sinless life for our sinful imperfection by dying on the cross and rising again, that makes all the difference for us. It is Christ that propels us to love others. 

2. We love people.

Out of an overflow of our love for God, we love people. We believe that all people were created in the image of God. Therefore, all life is precious in His sight. God is precious, so too are people He created. That means all people have dignity, worth, and value simply because they exist. We remind ourselves often of this truth when confronted with sin and brokenness that make things here on Earth heart-wrenching. God created us all with purpose, and we want to affirm His goodness by focusing our minds on both loving Him and loving others. 

3. We love workers. 

Okay, let’s go a little further. Not only do we love people generally, but specifically, we love agency workers. Work is good. It was created for our benefit and for our good in its origin. But with the entrance of sin, work is now often hard. This is evident in all types of work, none more evident than in the labor of child welfare. Workers often face the brunt of disgruntlement. When sin rears its ugly head, workers are on the front lines. So, we love the foster care community, and we vividly see the need to love agency workers who are people with tough jobs in front of them.

4. We love parents.

Parenting is no easy task regardless of the situation or the specific role. Guiding and instructing little hearts that they may love the Lord takes incredible humility, patience, and prayerful dependence on the Holy Spirit. It’s a daily—moment by moment—focus on the matters of most importance, mainly that we would be modeling Christ’s love. Foster parents step in to care for children they did not birth, to respond to histories they did not write. It’s good and right to care for one other, to care for children. Foster parents have an incredible opportunity to show compassion and mercy. We love foster parents—traditional foster parents, specialized foster parents, relative foster parents, anyone caring for children. But we also love birth parents—parents who need to know the Lord’s compassionate love, too.

5. We love children. 

And without a doubt, we love children. We pray bright futures and big dreams for each child in foster care. We desire that children would know that they are loved by both God and the people He has placed in their lives. Children are a gift from God—each created uniquely and beautifully. We have an incredible responsibility to shepherd and care for them well.
We’re a ministry made up of people who just want to love people because we love Jesus. 
It’s incredibly harder to do than to theorize, but we’re praying that the Holy Spirit, through God’s Word, would teach us day by day how to do that better. We’re praying for wisdom and clarity to reach our neighbors through our outpouring of care and commitment to love them as Christ loves them. 
Join us in loving the foster care community.
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Holly Gnuse

Holly grew up with a heart for adoption but didn’t know much about foster care. God used an internship with a local child welfare agency to make her aware. Coupling that experience with knowing the joy of the Gospel, Holly is passionate about connecting the local church to the foster care community. Holly and her husband, Scott, were married in December 2013 and are enjoying the crazy adventure of life together.

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