The Cost of Foster Care

Just as when you are preparing to grow your family through biological ways, parents prepare for the costs that they know of.  They know that they will need all the baby gear and diapers.  They also know that it will cost them sleep and maybe some other inconveniences.  Once the baby is born the new parents soon discover that there are so many other costs to parenthood that they never considered;  their job, body, car, beauty of their house, or whatever other thing they treasured before their baby came.
Foster Care is similar.  Foster Parents prepare with home visits and paperwork in addition to the gear needed for children.  They have the other costs as well.  The parental inconveniences that are good at refining parents of their own selfishness are there too.  But there are other costs as well.  Like other parents, you don't know what child you will welcome into your home.  You can't control the future and do not know how long the child will be in your home.  The difference is that awareness of the reality of those circumstances.  A foster parents welcomes a child that could have biological and emotional problems that come from their previous home. The only difference between that and a biological family that has a child with special needs is the choice.  Foster Parents choose to do this whereas parents with children with special needs do not choose. The Foster Parent also acknowledges that they have no foreknowledge of how long the child will be in their home. This is also the case with biological parents.  Ask a parent who had to bury a child.  The difference is the admittance of a lack of control, and acceptance that grief is a part of that.
Those two differences are huge in people's eyes and prevents people from becoming foster parents.
Choosing to love an unknown child that could have needs beyond what you know is a cost.  Admitting that you do not know and have no control over how long a child will be in your family is a cost.  Loving always has a cost.  They only reason both kinds of parents embrace the cost is the benefits.  Is it worth it?  So many times the cost isn't even considered because the benefits far outweigh the costs.
Are there any benefits to foster care?  There are spiritual benefits.  My adoption in becoming God's child cost my Father in heaven his Son.  Romans 8:14-16  Although Foster Families may not be permanent families it is the same action that God took with welcoming me into His family.  So Steve and I choose to mirror or reflect God's action of welcoming us by choosing to welcome the child that He brings to our family.   In that choice grow closer to Him.  Secondly there is the reality that the foster child will probably move on to another family. I have to completely acknowledge and trust God's sovereignty.  We get to experience and see Him move in very big movements in our family and know that His grace will hold  and sustain us.
  It also changes us.  Just like biological parenting, the inconveniences are ways that we are changed.  We become more patient, loving, giving not because these things are just automatically beamed into us, but because we are grown in painful and annoying ways.  Babying crying is one the ways the God is giving us more patience at the moment.  Sometimes the daily cost seems too much and the benefits sometimes do not seem worth it.  I think I needed to remind myself of the benefits today because I forgot with all this crying and poop.....I mean the tools in which God is changing my heart.