10/15/2021
The first time I picked up a child from our local DFCS, it was bedtime and they were asleep in a cot in someone’s cubicle. Another child we cared for slept in a hotel with a caseworker she’d just met for two days before they were able to locate a home to take her. Two of my children slept alone for days in a hospital before they were brought to our home. Every single night in our own city, children are sleeping alone, without their parents or familiar caregivers, without a comfortable bed, without a nurturing home environment.
The very children we demand protection for while inside the womb are same ones absolutely no one seems to care about once they’re born. The same women we chastise for considering abortion are often the same ones we refuse to support in raising the babies they kept.
Across our city tonight, babies are sleeping without their mamas or even a home. And very few seem to be bothered enough to notice.
Friends, it’s past time to do better. The Gospel is not passive “thoughts and prayers.” It’s not warm feelings of half-hearted charity. It’s not “maybe one day” or “I could never.” It’s uncomfortable, sacrificial, for-the-long-haul love. It means following through with our bold cry for the sanctity of life with day-in and day-out action. It means laying down our own comforts, desires, and opinions to lift up our hurting neighbors in times of crisis. It means caring that there are children all over our city, state, country, and planet without beds and then actually doing something about it.
You don’t have to be a foster parent to love and support suffering children, but you should do something.
