Normally here in Michigan when a big storm is near, we get the candles ready, find a radio, get cozy, and maybe even step outside to watch the clouds roll in.
Right now as I type out these words, people down south are getting ready for hurricane Dorian. God help them and bless them.
In life, when it comes to storms outside of the meteorological kind, it feels like there is no amount of prepping that you can do to ready yourself to get smacked in the face with a catastrophe.
We began our foster parent journey in May, and have been riding that roller coaster which entails, sharing space, attention, behaviors, schedules, and exhaustion to name a few things we’ve been dealing with.
The husband and I trained for this, so we thought. We prepped, read books, did bible lessons pertaining to foster parenting, we thought we knew what we were doing. We’ve got this!
Ha! So naive! Our little, is a sweet girl who’s experienced more trauma than I care to share. But she can be equally salty to that sweet, and what we’ve learned about ourselves is invaluable; we don’t have this! We are not as amazing at parenting as we thought maybe we were, lacking much needed patience.
The caring for a child and her everyday needs is just one track to this double-coaster like the Gemini at Cedar Point. There’s also the “system” and her bio family to work with, and that my friends, is a whole other ride and test of patience. Oy vey!
Here is where I went wrong with my storm prepping. You have to prepare, and care for your season at hand, every single day. I get lazy sometimes with digging into the gospel, and finding bible lessons. But when I do select a lesson from my nifty, little bible app on my phone, it’s like getting hit by lightning! In the best way possible, I swear!
I’ve just completed three different lessons by three different authors, and it felt like each person spoke directly to my heart. But, it wasn’t a person speaking to my heart, but rather, The Holy Spirit. God knows my heart and what I need, so why do I hold out so much relying on my own poor knowledge?
Here is a link to the book, ‘Enemies if the Heart’, by Andy Stanley.
