Christian Development

Sitting in the Stands

My daughter is in high school and plays JV volleyball for her home school academy.  Tonight the varsity girls team played after her game so we stayed and watched.  Unusually, the varsity team played a different school than the JV team.   The team they played was from an academy also.  Not an academy where most of the girls come from two parent Christian homes where the income is middle to upper middle class with fathers and mothers who sit in the stands and cheer them on like my daughter does.  These girls came from an academy for foster kids.  They didn’t have parents in the stands to encourage them.  They did have ONE friend who sat in the stands with a sign who was cheering for them.  But no moms and no dads.  No grandparents.  Just a coach who was encouraging them and a friend or two.

The varsity team from my daughter’s academy creamed them.  But by the time that was happening, I wasn’t focused on the score any more.  I was focused on how these unique young women were playing the game. They were trying their best to win.  They were getting stomped on, but they continued to smile, continued to strive for every ball, continued to high five each other, continued to get up from the ground and play the next point.

For anyone who has played sports, that doesn’t seem very remarkable.  Everybody takes their licks now and then from a better team. But for anyone who knows anything about a child in the foster care system, this is completely remarkable.  As I sat in the stands tonight, I thought about the difference between my daughter’s team and theirs.  Having adopted two girls from the foster care system, I understood slightly better than most what was happening.  Allow me to give you a run down: We will call my daughter’s home school academy school A and the foster academy school B.

Girl from school A, the Home schooled Christian academy, serves the ball over the net.  This girl has been lovingly groomed by her parents to understand the values of love, trust, acceptance, faith, family, and joy since before she even understood that she was an individual.  She has been raised in a (usually) large family with a father that provides financially for her and protects her and a mother that creates a home of encouragement, responsibility and love.   Her mother and father care enough about her to educate her personally, most times at a personal sacrifice, which creates an opportunity for her to be in the top 10% of SAT scores of high schoolers across the nation.  She is better prepared than most girls her age to understand the principles of responsibility that would allow her to hold down a job, thrive in adult relationships, communicate in mature ways and create opportunities for others in her home, church and community.  In this circumstance, she has also been given Jesus, the most vital and important relationship a person can have.

As the ball soars over the net to the other side, girl from the school B waits to hit the ball. This girl is anxious for a number of reasons, most of which have nothing to do with the game.  She was taken out of her home sometime before she could really understand what was happening but too late to forget that awful day, which is seared in her mind forever.  Her mother was a drug addict and she does not know who her father is.  She had to fend for herself to receive food because her mother often forgot about her.  She was abused in many ways, not the least of which was neglect.  From her earliest possible memories, she has had to fend for herself.  She incorporated this process to such a degree that she now fails to allow others to enter her heart in the ways that are most important.  But this doesn’t matter much because she has been moved from place to place, as many as ten times, from foster homes that sometimes resembled families, to foster homes that looked nothing like a family.  In each of these places her survival skills have been strengthened but her emotional skills and ability to trust have atrophied.  She becomes more and more like two different people.  A bubbly teenager with bright eyes and an engaging personality on the outside, and a watchful, tiny, fearful and desperately lonely child on the inside.  This girl will only graduate from high school with a tremendous amount of help from mentors, social workers and teachers.  Even if she does graduate, within a year of her turning eighteen and being turned out of her last foster home, the statistics tell us that she has a 30-40% chance of being homeless for a time.  And why should that surprise us? She has not received the careful and loving support of a mother and a father.  She has not had anyone to teach her the skills so necessary to survive in the adult world.  She doesn’t understand the dynamics of proper communication and empathy.  She only understands that she must, at all costs, and in every way, for every possible piece of sustenance, fend for herself.  That is the one rule which trumps all other rules.  She will likely become pregnant at a young age, struggle with addiction to drugs or alcohol, and succumb to a relationship with a man who is the worst sort of man, an unemployed, drug dealing, abusive, lazy monster who will inseminate her and then leave when she begins to feel sick from the pregnancy.

So when I saw the girls from school B hitting the ball back over the net as well as they could, I cried out to God that people from families that have kids in school A would begin to see the need of the children who end up having to go to school B.  I asked God that they would understand how they could begin to help keep the next generation from experiencing anything like what the girls in school B have had to live with.  I prayed later with loud cries that God would open the hearts of Christian families to begin to see the incredible difference they could make in the lives of children by adopting them.

Adoption comes from the very heart of God.  It is the pre-eminent symbol he has chosen to use to allow us to see what He has done for us in Christ.  It is something which relays his very heart to other human beings. Christians, especially home schooling families with so much love to give, could be the conductors of life changing transformation to thousands of young people.  It is so costly that you will give up many things for it.  You will give up time, energy, sanity, money, and safety.  But it seems to me that God did the very same thing when he chose to adopt us.

I won’t tell you the score at the end of the game, but I went up to the coach from school B afterward and said, “Please tell your girls that they played with real class today. Real class.”

“Thank you.”  She said.   “We’ve been working on that lately.”

I was holding back tears.

If you would like resources to begin to learn about the journey of adoption, visit this site.

October 27, 2010 Posted by matttague | Adoption, Social and Cultural Issues | Adoption, foster care | 1 Comment