New Home Brings Temporary Relief to Foster Community
December 15, 2024
Two years ago, Living Hope commissioned a team to research needs the church could meet in the foster care community. Through prayer and God’s direction, the church on November 15 celebrated the opening of a temporary home for children awaiting placement with foster families. Daniel Super, one of the team catalysts, serves as a church elder and foster parent alongside his wife, Kayla. Super gave a passionate praise to God’s providence, thanks to the church and community for their investment, and the need to continue ministering to foster needs in Bowling Green.
The following is Super’s speech the morning Foster House, Inc. opened its doors for foster children.
“My wife and I have been foster parents for a while. We’ve had a few placements in our home, one of which has led to adoption. We didn’t really know what we were getting into. I remember a discrete point of time after the second or third class where you have to be trained as foster parents, I said to my wife, ‘How have we lived our whole lives and not known that this was happening? How did no one with whom we interacted tell us about these needs?’
We weren’t surprised that the world was broken. We weren’t surprised that brokenness led to innocent children in its wake. We know as Christians that the world isn’t as it should be. We know that God did not design a world to need foster care. We weren’t surprised at that, but we were surprised at the prevalence and the wide-spread need.
We found that as we brought other people into that sphere, now our family knows about it and our friends know about it. People in our church and with whom we interact, everybody started also saying, ‘How did we not know about it?’ People say the same thing over and over, ‘How can I help?’ Because once people see the need, they feel compelled to help, too.
It was hard for me to understand. I knew the need, and I had people in front of me asking how to help and I didn’t know what to say. I’d say, ‘Well, be a foster parent.’ But they said they couldn’t be a foster parent for any number of reasons right now at this point in my life, how else can I help? We started talking about that as a church and we had other committee members who started working on this the past couple of years. We started asking, ‘How can we as an organization, what can we do to address the need with the people who really want to help?’
“One of the needs that became apparent was kids were being taken away from their parents in their most traumatic times of their life and then they’re spending night at DCBS (Department for Community Based Services) offices without a proper bedroom and without a proper shower facility. We said that is not ok, we can do something about that, and it can’t be that hard.
We were right about the first two things. The third thing, it was way more complicated than we thought it was going to be.
I just wanted to take one minute to make much of what the Lord has done to provide for this and involve the people in the community that have done something to provide for this.
We said if we’re going to have a house, we need real estate in Warren County, Kentucky. That’s going to cost a lot of money. And guess what, as soon as we said this was something we wanted to do, we had the money immediately. Now we have a house, but that house has to be under some sort of organization. We had attorneys who said, ‘That’s what I do. Let me do it for you.’
Then that organization needs to be a non-profit with the IRS. We had CPAs who said, ‘That’s what I do, let’s do it for you.’
Then this organization needed to be in good standing with the city ordinances, and we had an attorney who said, ‘That’s what I do, let me do it for you.’
And the city planning commission said, ‘We’ll figure it out. Even though we don’t know how to do it, we’ll do it for you.’
Then we had this physical house, but it is not ready for kids. It needed a little bit of work. We had organizations, plumbers, electricians, contractors and landscapers, many of you who said, ‘That’s what I do, let me do it for you.’
Then we walk in this house and it’s beautifully renovated and it needed furniture, and a furniture store said, ‘You need furniture? That’s what we do, let me do it for you. Let’s give it to you.’ They gave us a whole shipment of furniture.
Then another furniture store heard we didn’t have all the furniture we need, and they said, ‘Let’s send somebody out there to see what else you need and we’ll give you the rest,’ and they did it for us.
Then they staged it for us.
Then it’s still not stocked with all the things you need to make a house functional. So we made a list on Amazon and Target of hundreds of items and those lists are empty right now because the community said, ‘Let us do it, we can help.’
Fonda Walker’s garage looked like a FedEx facility. Now this house is stocked full.
What I want to say is let’s make much of the Lord’s providence, let’s make much of the community that said, ‘We want to help. If you give us a way to help, we’ll help.’
One more thing: This is providing relief of a symptom. This is not fixing the problem. It’s worth celebrating and it’s worth doing. Thank you for doing it. I don’t want to undermine my own point. But this is not fixing the problem. The problem is the world is broken and all of us need Jesus. We need to make sure people know that. But on this side of eternity, we’re still going to need people to take care of kids who are a product of that brokenness, and we need foster families. You’re clearly invested enough to keep supporting this and we want to compel you to keep helping us support this. But also, join us in meeting those root issues. Ultimately that’s our mission.”