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So today we spent three hours having our first home study visit for Foster Care. Yes, we want to do it again. You may ask why.

There is only one reason.

We have space and kids need homes and we want to practice pure religion (James 1:27).

For us it really isn't about anything other than that.

I know there are people who are saying, "Haven't you done enough?" What's enough when there are 397,122 kids in foster care in this country?

There are over 17,000 churches in Virginia. There are 2073 kids available for adoption. That statistics pushes me past the line of crazy. In Minnesota there were half as many kids available and only a third of the number of churches and that bugged me. If you know me at all you know that I am so incredibly passionate about kids having families that you recognize why these statistics push me over the edge.

This map shows the number of churches and the number of available children in each state. We have to do better.

Aren't we busy enough? Well yeah, we're busy. But we aren't as busy as we have been in the past. We have time for a couple more.

What kinds of kids you ask? Well, boys for one. Bart will be here without me here a few days a week so it doesn't make sense to do girls. And not a lot of them. Probably no more than 4 more. Probably just one or two -- only more if it's a sib group. And nobody that isn't in school yet. And nobody that's legally free. Adopting again isn't our plan.

OK, so I'm not stupid. I know that there may be a kid that ends up legally free that we cannot resist, but in order to be fair to them they better be older than 14 or 15. If we fall in love younger kids and I have to do puberty again I'm going to be very unhappy with myself.

So we want teenage boys, and if that's what you want, that's what you'll get.

I know, I know. We plan, God laughs.

But I'm up for the ride... whatever it looks like. So is Bart. We love our crazy adventure called life.

We also want to recruit others from our church to do respite care or be foster parents -- we want to go through this together, the way that churches should do. Who knows, maybe we can start a trend in Danville. If you go to our church watch out!

So we have a stack of paperwork to fill out. We have finished our first visit. We have been fingerprinted. My training has been waived (probably should be since I have LED the training multiple multiple times). We need two more visits. She needs to update our study. It will be a while.

But I loved foster care and hated giving it up. I love the idea that life can change -- that any given day I can wake up with one number of kids in my home, and go to bed with a different number. We had to stop doing foster care after only 3 years because we had adopted too many kids to get licensed, so I'm excited about that.

And one more question you might be asking.... "What if your adult kids decide to move down there and need a place to live?"

Well as you can imagine, we have a plan for that. We are going to either rent or buy a home for them to live in when they need a place, so that we can care for them, and provide them support, without having to listen to them argue with each other or watch them stare at their phones for hours on end (not that any of US do that, right?). And they will keep their stuff -- their dishes, their laundry etc. at their house so that it doesn't end up all over ours.

I like the plan. Some of our kids may end up back here in our house. Some might end up in this town with us but not in this house. And we will continue to help children who need a family.

And finally, even though it isn't our motivation, I hope that people will look at imperfect me and pretty close to perfect Bart, and say, "hey, if they can do it again, we can do it for the first time." Because for the sake of the kids I've been recruiting people to do this for decades...

Wanna join us?