Safe Families for Children

"God sets the solitary in families;

He brings out those who are bound into prosperity..."  - Psalm 68:6

What does it mean to be the hands and feet of Jesus?

We grew up in church learning about Jesus, where He walked and had His ministry here on earth, and we know we're supposed to be like Christ in every way; but what does that look like in our day-to-day?

I had to come to terms with realigning my walk with my talk in a very real way over a year ago in the restaurant of a local hotel. It was there that we met our pastor and his wife to talk about a program called, "Safe Families for Children"; and I had gone prepared with lots of questions... and they were all written down, to be exact!

"Safe Familes for Children" was founded 13 years ago in Chicago, Illinois, by a man named Dave Anderson. Dave saw the gap widening between children who actually qualified for DCSF protective custody (i.e. they were being physically endangered by the adults around them), and children who had loving parents but were facing a personal crisis so overwhelming that they were literally unable to care for their own children.

Dave created a program where parents could voluntarily place their children into the care of loving, intact homes, where they could be cared for until the date agreed upon by both parents and host families. With their children in safe hands, the placing parents could now pursue areas they needed to work out in their lives to get their own homes back to a status where their children could return to a safe environment.

Safe Families is a remarkable program, mainly because it runs entirely on volunteers! No one who hosts a child ever receives a check (as in typical foster care) and the parents don't get incentives to achieve their goals before their children are returned to them. It's all voluntary. It's simply Christ's people stepping up to help a family who has no other support structure to fall back on. It's the Church being the hands and feet of Jesus!

I wish that I could say I wholeheartedly threw myself into the ministry of Safe Families - but honestly, I tip toed into it with a lot of hesitation. I questioned the legality of it all, wondered how the accountability worked, and was generally more concerned about outside influences on my own children, than for the children of hurting families.

Thankfully, our pastor's wife saw through my fears of the unknown, to my genuine desire to minister to hurting families and she spoke wisdom into my nervous little heart! 

My friend reminded me that when Christ stepped from Heaven into the darkness of this world, He did so, not to pluck us out of the darkness, but instead chosing to walk beside us while we were yet in the darkness - never leaving us or forsaking us; offering us His blessed Hope and salvation.

Slowly, I began to understand Safe Families was created to walk beside hurting families and be a safety net for them - someone they can trust to care for their children while they're working out whatever crisis is going on in their lives. Someone to talk to when they really miss their kids or have had a hard day and need encouragement! Someone to call when they've run out of money for diapers or need to find another place to live.

To date, Safe Families has spread internationally; serving over 24,000 children through it's program of Christian hospitality. And that's exactly what Safe Families does... give Christians a way to open up their homes in the Biblical spirit of hospitality; no strings attached, no expectations from the placing parents... just offering love to their children as Christ loved us! And the children we've had the privilege of hosting have blessed us, in as much as we've blessed them!

In 2015, our family hosted 4 children in 2 separate 3-week hostings, and 2 other sibling groups for 24 hours of respite care for another host family in our community. Luke and I quickly caught onto how the Safe Families program worked and fell in love with this opportunity for our whole family to serve God together!

Every child has a different background story on why mom or dad needed someone to care for them... and every child taught us how to love like Jesus loved.

Our own children learned that they're not the only fish in the sea and that mommy and daddy can love and care for other children; even those we've never previously met! I found that our children looked forward to having new friends come stay with us - and it was a blessing for me to talk with the placing mamas and assure them their children were being well cared for.

I encourage anyone who has ever considered caring for families in need to check out the Safe Families program! There is currently a tremendous need for more hosting families... as Illinois loses more and more control of their fiscal responsibility, DCFS is forced to resort to foster-care for children who only need respite or other social services. Families are being broken up unnecessarily and it is heart breaking to have to turn people away because there aren't families to take in their children.

We have a friend who recently took an Uber cab... in witnessing to the cab driver, our friend discovered that the driver was Buddhist. He stated he used to be a Christian; but left the faith because "Christians segregate their churches, and no body loves."

This should not be the way the world views the Church! We need to be the first ones to step in and help those in need - especially in our own neighborhoods and surrounding communities. 

Honestly; we can tell our children to be the hands and feet of Jesus, or we can show them what that looks like. Together as a family, we learned the joy of serving with Safe Families!