Psalm 119:83 A Wineskin in the Smoke

Though I am like a wineskin in the smoke, I do not forget your decrees.

Psalm 119:83

Jeremy was our first foster child. He arrived in our home, stayed a couple of months, and then left, returning to a less than ideal environment. Almost immediately the social worker brought us another foster son, a newborn.

Five months later Jeremy came back. He had been through tough times. He stayed with us through the holidays, and then, before his third birthday, he left again, returning once again to an unstable situation.

At the same time, the process for moving our younger foster son out of our home and to his grandparents was picking up speed.

We always remembered these children were not ours, that foster parenting is almost always temporary, and that's the ministry God had called us to do. And yet this was wearing on us.

There was one evening when we returned from somewhere and sat in our car in the driveway, the baby asleep in his car seat. We were very much like wineskins in the smoke. Our hearts were broken, our energy was sapped. Our willingness threatened to leak out.

We had a tearful conversation that evening, there in the car. Can we continue to do this? It's harder than we expected. If we're this stretched out after less than a year, can we really keep going?

In the end we made the intentional choice to continue doing what God had so clearly asked to do. We also talked through the details of how we would keep our hearts, our marriage, and our life from becoming brittle and strained.

The key was to not forget the Lord's decrees. To live intentionally according to His Word, to focus on spiritual disciplines and on His calling.

We continued on for a decade, through five fosters sons, before God made it clear we should move on. He made it clear by entangling our lives with those of our former foster children and their extended families in so many ways that we no longer had time for new babies.

Our lives are still intertwined with the lives of those boys. Four of them, anyway. We've never seen Jeremy since then and there will always be a weak spot in the wineskin as we wonder how he's doing. But we trust in God to care for him, and we wait patiently for the day when our hearts will be healed.