The Strawberry Bag

Let me tell you what integrity looks like at 9pm on a Tuesday when you're driving home from TJ Maxx with a bag full of strawberry-print everything — a water bottle, a little travel pouch, a few snacks with the red fruit splashed all over them — and you're crying so hard you can barely see the road.

That's the version nobody puts in the brochure.

Integrity. We talk about it like it's a muscle, a character trait you either have or don't. Doing the right thing when no one's watching. Wholeness. Being undivided. But nobody tells you that wholeness sometimes feels like being split in half. That doing the right thing sometimes feels like it might actually destroy you first.

Here's what I know: in foster care, integrity is not a feeling. It is a daily, sometimes hourly, act of obedience that frequently costs you something you didn't plan to give.

It would be so easy to cut ties with biological families. So. Incredibly. Easy.

I won't romanticize it; these are often relationships full of history and hurt and people I would not have chosen to weave into my family on my own. And then I think about Jesus. Who could look at me — the defiant me, the test-every-boundary me, the walked-away-and-came-back-crawling me — and say the exact same thing. And stayed anyway.

I didn't choose these relationships. But they belong to my children. They carry their history, their culture, their past that had pieces worth keeping. My kids' mental and emotional health is just as real as the physical and spiritual needs the world decides are more visible and more urgent. So we keep the ties. We show up. We make it work. Not because it's easy, because it's right.

Our oldest daughter has given me a masterclass in tested integrity.

Snuck out — check.

Missed curfew — check.

Didn't call or text — check.

Crashed a friend's car without a license — check.

Arrested for stealing — check.

Went off the grid for six months after turning 18, and aging out of foster care — check.

At every single one of those crossroads, the easy exit was available. We could have been done. We could have had a very reasonable, very understandable reason to say: we tried. Instead, we leaned in. Stayed. Kept showing up. Not because it was natural or comfortable or clearly going to work — but because I had said out loud, publicly, that this is what I believed foster care was. And I had to decide if I meant it.

I am capable of so much more than I believed. And I did not walk it alone. I grew more connected to my Savior through that hard than in any comfortable season I can name.

But the moment that broke me open, and I mean that literally, was three years into placement with our soon-to-be daughter.

She had already been through two failed reunification attempts. We were 60 days from finalization. Three years. We had been calling her our strawberry girl — this little detail that had become her thing, her identifier, her bit of sweetness in the middle of all the complicated.

And then the third attempt came.

My bible study group, in what I can only describe as a perfect display of God's sense of humor, chose that exact season to read Job. Insert very wide eyes here.

Reunification is the goal. I believe that. I have said that out loud, publicly, more than once. But there is a version of believing something that is theoretical, and then there is a version that puts you in the TJ Maxx aisle at 9pm buying strawberry-print snacks and a water bottle and a little travel pouch — because these are her special trip things, the items that only come out for the visits, and she lights up every single time she sees them because it means time with her family and something that belongs just to her.

And then you get home and you put the bag away in the closet.

Every time you pull it out again, something in you comes apart just a little more.

That is integrity. That is doing the right thing when nobody is watching, and by nobody, I mean not a single person would have blamed me. The system would have shrugged. The caseworkers had seen it before. Everyone would have understood if I said I couldn't do it one more time.

I held the bag open anyway. With shaking hands and tears I kept wiping on my sleeve. Because she was excited and that was real, and her joy was worth more than my pain had any right to claim.

Every. Single. Day. the easy exit is available. Especially in the seasons closest to loss. I resist it because of one thing: trust. Not confidence in the outcome, trust in the God who holds it. Even if it ended, He would provide something greater. He was teaching me. Training me. Showing something through me that I didn't have a vantage point to see clearly yet.

Sometimes you have to do the right thing without being able to see the result. That's not weakness. That's the actual definition of faith.

"To the one who is victorious and continues to do my work until the end, I will give him authority over the nations."— Revelation 2:26

Patient endurance. Those are the words. Not perfect. Not pleasant. Patient.

This is my temporary home.

It is my children's temporary home.

I am running a race dedicated to my Savior, and that means I will require patience, and there will be hard turns. Some of them will look like a bag full of strawberries that you pack and unpack and pack again while your heart slowly, quietly, learns how much it was made to hold.

If you're in one of those turns right now, hear me:

You are not doing it wrong because it hurts. Integrity isn't supposed to feel like nothing. If it cost you nothing, it wasn't integrity — it was just convenience wearing a good name.

The cost is the proof. Lean in.