Whether this is your first week with your first child at home or whether your sixth grandchild just graced this earth, you can relate. The work of parenting is all-consuming, sacrificial, and sanctifying to the core.
Read MoreFoster care is a complex ministry. We entered this new season with the intention to keep children safe. We now realize Jesus had an even broader brushstroke in mind. Certainly, our primary responsibility is to open our lives to a child from traumatic experiences. But we never considered the abundance of new people our lives would intersect—therapists, case managers, attorneys, CASA volunteers, WIC office employees, biological family members. At every turn there seems to be someone in need of the hope of Jesus. These new rhythms in our lives have jolted us out of our comfort and into a reality that our culture is far more broken than we ever imagined. Yet it’s given us a chance to share about Jesus more boldly than before this journey began...
Read MoreThe process of adopting our daughter went very smoothly and every step of the way the Lord continued to reveal His heart to us. Adoption is the perfect example of how God's Love works. When our daughter came to us she was so frail. At 1 year old she weighed just 14 pounds. She was dirty, undernourished, and terrified. She did not understand who we were or that we already Loved her deeply. As she grew she became stronger. Her fears gave way to joy and seeing her begin to smile at us as we talked to her filled our family with some much elation that we could not imagine how we had ever lived without her...
Read MoreMy daughter completed her treatment and returned home to begin rebuilding our family's relationship, but the road to restoration was a complicated one and shortly after she returned home, we found ourselves at odds again. I was determined to make our relationship work but all my best efforts continued to fail. Months later, sitting in a church service, I found myself once again unable to communicate what was happening in my heart. But this time it was not because of my battered relationship with my daughter; it was because I was suffering a stroke...
Read MoreAfter mourning this loss for a short time, we mustered all the resolve we could find and began our fertility treatments again. But this time our hearts were simply too broken to endure the rollercoaster process any longer. We discontinued the treatments and tried to come to terms with the idea that we would never have a child of our own. During this extended season a number of friends had suggested the idea of adopting a child. This was something that we believed in but the Hope of having our own biological child had always been our focus...
Read MoreSunday, August 30 was the most emotionally taxing sermon I have ever prepared for and preached. I dealt with the issue of abortion, delivering a polemical and pastoral message on the moral wrong of abortion. I looked at the question, “what is the unborn?” and answered that question from Scripture, Science, and Common Sense...
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