Waiting For The Workers

When I was about fifteen my aunt received her foster license and shortly after had a young boy placed with her. He had had a difficult childhood and as such bore the psychological scars of those difficulties. Anyone who has been a foster parent of a child with a similar background can tell you, helping a child in that situation is difficult for a long time and it gets worse before it gets better. As her first placement this boy was an unfortunate task for her to take on. Nonetheless she took on the challenge and tried her hardest, but eventually she reached the end of her strength. She determined that the boy had a demon and tried various techniques of exorcism that didn't work. Shortly after that she gave him back to the foster system with yet more psychological scars. My aunt would never take in another foster child and the word went out across my family that foster kids were bad news.

"I needed to find Christian workers who loved the people they were working with more than the activity through which they were trying to reach them" ¹

I have a series of numbers that run through my head whose end result is the idea that if every church in the United States were to have two families be foster families we would end up with a negative number of foster kids.²³⁴ Math is great in its simplicity. If only this problem was as simple as X minus Y. Unfortunately the assumption that all those churches have a family (never mind two) that is called and gifted for that sort of ministry is not a given. Also, what do we do with the kids that will enter the system in the next year, and the year after that? What separates Pullinger from so many who have come before and after her is her love for the people she is working with and the desire for co-workers that share that love. It is that love that was the start of her success with the youth of the Walled City. The task of caring for foster children is not about getting enough people to take them in, it is a task of finding the people who already love these kids and are ready to do what it takes to welcome them in to their homes - to find people called to the task. If we do not do that then we will find ourselves in a situation like my aunt who was over her head without the gifting to care for this child.

Since the task is not simply about numbers then what are we, as ministers with a calling, to do? The answer is painfully simple; wait. Wait on God to make the workers ready, wait on God to bring the workers, wait on God to tell us when to move. This is a hard lesson to learn, one that even Pullinger had to learn late in the course of her ministry.⁵ Interestingly the workers God brought her were not the workers she would have picked. This is yet another reason forcing the issue is unwise, the right people are often not who we think.

I would love to be able to put the word out to every church in the United States that they need to appoint two families to become foster families and be done with it. But God calls us to a ministry of waiting before acting, which is largely what Jackie's ministry has been. I often feel like a kid on the last day of school waiting for that final bell indicating the start of summer as I wait for direction on how to further the work of caring for foster children. By God's grace the time will come and so will the workers.