How Investing in Others Creates Family

 

*This foster care journey was originally published in Becky Bereford’s Brave Women Series. You can access the full story on her website at beckyberesford.com.

 

Stay. That’s the word I got from God after receiving the publishing company acceptance letter—my first potential job in my field of study. The pay would be a promotion from my current gig at the Boys and Girls Club Teen Center.

Stay—an uncomfortable word for someone like me. Driven by to-do lists and accomplishments, I was a 23-year-old recent grad who wanted to change the world yet often let the world define me by my resume—by what was, or more acutely, what wasn’t yet on it.

Surprisingly, I obeyed. Without knowing the exact reason, I dialed the number and turned down the job offer. I presumed my time wasn’t over with these teens just yet.

Staying meant more late evenings befriending teenagers, learning all the greatest ‘70s Wii Rock Band songs, helping students with homework, and running dodgeball games in the gym. I prayed my time with the teens would instill in them a sense of worth, almost all of whom had experienced much more pain and hardship than I could confess in my ten years their senior.

 

A few months passed and then two girls walked through those club doors whom, in hindsight, I realize were the reason for God’s instruction to “stay.” Their group home mom introduced them to me as Nicole and Natalie Brown, twins about to turn 14. But I was too busy doubting they would like it here to remember much else about the conversation. Their similar faces seemed to stonewall me—this young, perhaps naïve woman who stood before them in her Boys and Girls Club polo.

 

I would later learn…

 

*Click the button below to read my family’s full foster care story: