Sometimes Eating Crow tastes Good.

I’m Bbbaaaaccckkkk!!! After a long sleepless hiatus, I have been thinking it is time to re-engage my brain and start blogging. Nothing really SPECTACULAR has come to mind. A few angry retorts to the anit-breast feeding freaks have come to mind, maybe a post or two about the sanctity of life and America’s disinterest in that subject.

(sidebar: was talking to the guy running for state Senate on Sunday.  I asked him if he was prolife and he said that he was personally but he did not think it was the governments job to mandate such things and that everyone should be allowed to live their life how they want. I guess that everyone does not include the unborn.)

But today I had an experience that I want to share.  First, I will be honest. I have a bad attitude about Packs of Hope, a ministry at church. Packs of Hope are backpacks filled with necessities for kids that are suddenly removed from their homes and left with nothing.  Let me be clear, I am not against the child. I am against a government that takes the responsibility to remove a child and then leaves them with nothing. When I got my pack and opened it, I was even irked by one of the statements “This may be the only new clothes this child has ever received”. As a constant shopper of used clothing (I don’t even buy new for myself), this irked me as well.  It seems to insinuate that the child may have  been deprived by wearing used clothing. But this year I sucked it up and got two packs. Lori O “checked” me out and told me she heard that people sometimes got a discount at Walmart and Target if they showed the Packs of Hope certificate.

At my shopping trip at Target today, I found a few items, so at check-out I showed her my little piece of paper and ask her about the discount. She didn’t know (and like a good associate radioed to ask) but then she said “ When did they start this? “

 me (ignorant and barely paying attention),” I don’t know, a few years ago” 

Target girl, “Cause they didn’t have this when I went into foster care. “

Me (suddenly paying attention and already ashamed because of my bad attitude),” I am so sorry.”

And since nobody knew the answer to my question about the discount, she and I got a chance to chat while a few different people were radioed.  To be honest, I think she was so open because she looked at my kids and figured I had adopted and/or fostered and that I would get it. I did. She told me that she was “dropped off” at her foster home at midnight with nothing. She told me how she and one sibling were together but the other two siblings lived in another foster home. They were all together for one hour per week. I asked if she was ever reunited with her parents and she was reunited with her mom and eventually her mom got all four kids back. She told me she loved her foster family. They were still family, and the situation made her family bigger. And as you can imagine the exchange made me a little teary. I told her how happy for her I was that things worked out so well. I left and went home.

I don’t have a final verdict to give about foster care system and all of its many problems. And probably none of my bigger picture beliefs have changed. But right at the moment  that this young girl and I began our exchange about her PERSONAL experience in the foster care system, I felt that God was telling me to get over myself.  I needed to offer this tiny bit of help and use another platform to share my big picture ideals.