Surrounded
There is only one image that comes close to describing what yesterday felt like. Sunshine. Not the polite kind that just warms your face through a window. The kind that radiates, out of your chest, out of your eyes, out of the room itself. The kind you can feel from across the building. We were not having a good day. We were not celebrating a milestone. We were made of light. And I don't know how else to say it, so I'm just going to leave that there.
Here's the thing about foster care that nobody tells you in the orientation packet. Most of it is invisible.
The court dates happen behind closed doors. The case reviews happen in conference rooms with fluorescent lighting and folding chairs. The termination of parental rights, the legal moment that has to happen before your child can ever be yours, happens in a private courtroom that most of the people who love your family will never see the inside of. The caseworker meetings, the supervised visits, the intake paperwork, the court-ordered therapy, the uncertainty that becomes such a permanent fixture in your house that you stop noticing it until someone points it out — all of it happens quietly.
Quietly and, for long stretches, alone.
I don't mean that foster families don't have support. I mean that there is a very particular kind of loneliness that comes with loving a child the world doesn't legally recognize as yours yet.
A particular kind of silent that is required of you, because details are confidential, because healing is private, because the story belongs to the child, not to your Instagram.
You swallow things. You carry things. You choose the whole child over your own need to be understood, over and over again, in rooms where the only witnesses are you, your spouse, and God.
For 1,642 days, a lot happened in rooms like that.
We walked into court yesterday and then into church and I want you to understand what happened to me the moment I looked around the room. We were surrounded.
Not in a polite way. Not in a "we had a nice turnout" way. Surrounded in the way that makes your knees want to give out a little, in the way that makes you put your hand over your mouth and stand there for a second because you cannot process the visual in front of you fast enough.
People. Everywhere. People who love our family. People who had been sitting with us in the invisible parts, the prayers nobody announced, the meals left on porches, the texts at 11pm when we were losing our minds — all of them, gathered.
And then our school brought every single classroom. Every. Single. Classroom. To watch the baptism of our girls.
I don't have a composed way to tell you what that did to me. I genuinely do not. I stood there and I thought: they are here. They actually showed up. And our daughters get to see this. They get to see what it looks like when an entire community decides that their story matters, that they are worth celebrating, worth praying over, worth pulling kids out of class for. They get to know, in their bodies, in a memory they will carry the rest of their lives, that the world is full of people who showed up for them.
That is not a small thing. That is enormous. That is actually everything.
The thing about foster care is that it trains you to function in the quiet. You get good at it. You get good at not needing the witness, not needing the acknowledgment, not needing someone on the outside to see the weight of what's happening inside your home. You get so good at it that you forget, a little, what it feels like to not be alone in it. Yesterday reminded us.
We were never alone. Not for one day of those 1,642. We were just doing a lot of it in rooms most people never saw.
But God saw every single one of those rooms. He was in every conference room with the fluorescent lighting. He was in every private courtroom. He was in our living room at 2am when we didn't have words left. He was watching and working and building something that we were too close to see clearly. And then yesterday, He let the room fill up, and I think He let us see, for just a moment, a fraction of what He's been seeing all along.
A family He built out of 1,642 days. A community that refused to let it go unwitnessed. Two little girls who are deeply, unmistakably, permanently cherished.
People keep asking me how it feels. And I keep coming back to this: it doesn't feel like an ending.
I know it looks like one from the outside — the case is closed, the chapter is done, the legal business is finished. But it doesn't feel that way from the inside. It feels like the first sentence of the actual story. The one we get to write together now. The one that starts with: they are ours, and we are theirs, and nobody is going anywhere.
That's not the end of a chapter. That's the beginning of the whole book.
I don't know who needs to hear this today, but if you are in the quiet right now, if you are in one of those fluorescent-lit rooms where the weight is enormous and the witness list is short, I need you to hear me say it plainly: You are not alone. You were never alone. The invisible doesn't mean unseen. It means the One who sees you is bigger than whoever else is in the room.
Stay in it. Swallow what needs swallowing. Keep loving the whole child, even the parts that cost you something. Keep going to the conference rooms and the private courtrooms and the 2am living rooms. Keep doing it quietly when that is what the child needs.
Because one day, maybe in 1,642 days, maybe sooner, maybe longer, you are going to walk into a room and look around and find it full. And you are going to feel it in your chest: sunshine, radiating out.
That day is coming. And it will be worth every single quiet day that came before it.
Yesterday was so much more than a legal proceeding. So much more than a baptism. It was a reminder, in the most overwhelming and beautiful way I have ever experienced, that God has surrounded our family with people who love us — and that our girls are going into the rest of their lives knowing exactly what that feels like.
We carry that love with us forever. And forever, as of September 15, 2026, is exactly what it is.
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