While most of us are with our families, enjoying party after party, gift exchanges, exorbitant amounts of food and singing songs like “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”, Christmas in foster care can be starkly different.  While our foster parents do an excellent job of making their foster children a part of their family, and loving them like their own, for our birth parents, it can be a very painful time.  For some, it is the first Christmas without their children. To some, it’s just another day. No presents are exchanged, and no special meal is cooked.                                                                                                                                       Over the past couple years, we’ve started giving some sort of Christmas gift to our birth parents, who are actively involved in their children’s lives through visitation at our agency. We decided to do something a little bit different this year for our parents. I’ve recently taken an interest in photography and purchased had just purchased my first DSLR camera this year, so we decided back in November to start taking really nice pictures of these precious kids and doing 8 x 10 prints for these parents. With the help of our awesome church partner, Chapel Hill and some community members in  Gig Harbor, who had contacted us asking how they could help, we were provided with 35 nice frames for these prints. I wish I could share with you these pictures, however,  we have to keep from posting any pictures of specific foster kids on the web.  Just know that they turned out so incredibly well. Giving these gifts to our parents went over beautifully. Many parents shed tears of gratefulness as they unwrapped these pictures, and told us where they would hang them in their home, or who they couldn’t wait to show. I, myself, was convicted heavily as to what I take for granted during this time of year. Even something like photographs, which are an abundant commodity to most Americans in our age of digital photography, email and facebook, can be the most treasured  and appreciated gift, in their simplest form.  - Sarah

The last few weeks, this infant has gone through a surgery to reconnect his bowel to his esophagus, after having been out of the hospital for almost a whole month. Due to a few complications with the recovery of this surgery, he’s stayed in the hospital much longer than expected. The sweet, tender-hearted foster mom has spent nearly every night over the last several weeks in the hospital with him, and all day long, along with her elementary-age homeschool kids and often foster dad. This family has accepted, taken on the ups and downs of such a huge medical problem, and chosen to love this little guy through it all. I asked the foster mom today, how she was doing, and if she was exhausted. Of course she can’t deny wearing out physically a bit, but it was her spirit that just inspired me. She told me, she wouldn’t have it any other way, than getting to love on this little boy. She wants to just give the love to him that he needs. She reminded me of a song by Stephen Curtis Chapman called “Something Crazy” where he quotes “It’s crazy when love gets a hold of you. And it’s crazy things that love will make you do.” This love only comes from one source, God, and although people might think she is crazy for giving the love away she does, when you’ve experienced the love of God, you really don’t have a choice but to give it away.

While most of my kids are very young, I have a few teenagers on my “caseload” (It sure would be nice if we could call it something other than a “load”, because I love my cases!). While I thought I could learn a lot from my little kids, I can learn even more from the older ones. I recently had a visit with one of the most amazing teenagers I know. She has been through more than most of you could begin to imagine in her short life. She is now in a very loving home where she has been able to grow into the woman she is now, while she gets ready to graduated high school and head off to college. I was sitting in her living room talking with her about what she wanted to do with her life. It amazed me when she told me her perspective on the world. She told me that the tragedies and struggles she had gone through in her lifetime paled in comparison with some of the tragedies that the rest of the world had gone through. She told me how thankful she was for the roof over her head, the clean water, and for a big backyard and her family. She told me that what she had gone through in her life was minimal compared to the people in places like Darfur and the Middle East. She told me she had a heart for the unfortunate. She wants to change the world, because she HAS SO MUCH.

She blew me away. Sometimes I think to myself that the kids on my caseload have been through more than most people could handle in a life time. I couldn’t believe that she turned it around and told me how blessed she was. It completely gave me a new perspective on trials. By the end of our talk I was brought to tears (which I’m sure every teenager loves, their caseworker all ‘touched’ by their life story…but she was cool with me ). Can I just say that I work with the most amazing children ever? God’s going to use all of these times, trials, victories and struggles for His good. I just am so thankful that I get to partake in this process in just the tiniest of ways. My job is one of those jobs that each and every day you walk away having grown a little bit more in your perspective of how deep of God is.

Sarah Snodgrass

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