Jim: You've tuned into iWork4Him, the voice of collaboration for the faith and work movement.

Martha: And we are your hosts, Jim and Martha Brangenberg, and our mission is to transform the workplace of every Christian into a mission field. What does that look like in your workplace? Let's find out right now.

Jim: On iWork4Him, we've covered workplace stories of literally thousands of Christ followers from all over the world. We've covered people living out their faith as teachers, gym operators, lawn services, car sales, nurses, doctors, moms, dads, CEOs, and business owners. Several years back, we talked about the foster family and its challenges and the needs of the system in every state. But I don't think we ever covered the topic of being a foster parent as a job and as a calling.

All of us are called as followers of Jesus to take care of the widows and orphans of this world. We're not doing a great job in this. The foster system is full to overflowing and there's a desperate need for families to host these kids and adopt these eligible kids out of the system.

It's not an easy task. Just ask Abraham. He decided to foster his nephew Lot and look at all the trouble Lot got into. Did he ever say he regretted it? Nope, he didn't. Today we're going to dig deeper into this topic and hear from an expert and a practitioner about the call to foster. Cindy King joins us today from the Keystone State, where she's the coordinator for Cumberland County, Pennsylvania for the Keystone Family Alliance. Cindy King, welcome to iWork4Him.

Cindy King: Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here.

Martha: We're excited to have you, Cindy. And before we get into your job that we are talking about today, we want to hear your Jesus story.

Cindy King: I had the privilege of growing up in a home where I can't tell you the first time I heard about Jesus because I always heard about Jesus, but with that came a rich legacy of grandparents and great grandparents who not only loved and followed Jesus, but served in the same ways that he served. And I look at that as the beginning of why I do what I do. I particularly look at my grandparents who welcomed people into their home. People that didn't look like them, didn't believe like them, but just with open arms said, yep, we've got the room and the food and we'll feed you.

And so come on and go ahead and live here. And I look at my cousins, many of whom have also fostered and or adopted. And I think there's a reason for that because the legacy was set and it was modeled for us all of our lives. Of course, just like anyone else, we live in a broken world and so there were definitely times I needed to learn more about who this Jesus is, needed to learn that he's not sitting up there somewhere just waiting for me to mess up and zap me, and grow into better understanding of who he is.

But that's all part of the story of who I am and what I'm doing. My first job was as a teacher and a special ed teacher. And again, I think that came from just wanting to help those who maybe can't help themselves and being that person for them. And so those experiences that growing up in the home and the church and the school and the community that we're all connected, that made me who I am.

Jim: So how and why did you and your husband get into fostering? You just gave your grandparents as a great example, others, but what was the impetus that got you started?

Cindy King: All right. So my side of the story is that

Jim: Oh, so we should add your husband on. Is what you're saying?

Cindy King: We probably should have, but I can give you his story.

Jim: Oh, convenient!

 (laughter)

Cindy King: Then you can fact check with him later. But in middle school, one of my best friends, her family started to foster. And that's probably the first time I even heard of fostering and started to understand what it was. And I watched this family that had very little in the way of things open their homes and their lives to these kids that needed them.

And that spoke a lot to me, and I never forgot it. And I started reading everything I could find about foster care and adoption. And sometimes I wonder if maybe social work wouldn't have been the field that I would go into. In fact, in high school, back in the day when career forms were, they were paper pencil, and I took some kind of career assessment, and it came out saying I should be a social worker.

And I always had said I was going to be a teacher. So I went back and changed my answers so that it would come out for teacher. And I, and that was fine. I loved it. And I, that was definitely where God wanted me to be, but I think the skill and the desire to work with families and children was also there.

So I knew I was going to be a foster or adoptive parent. So here's where John, my husband, comes into play. When we were dating, I told him this, that I was certain I was going to foster someday. And he said, no, that was not in his plan. And so I thought if I just give him one of the books that I had read growing up, he would definitely see it my way and he would change his mind.

So to his credit, he agreed to read the book, a book about a family that had adopted, I don't know, about a dozen kids. All with physical handicaps and he read it and he still said, no, this wasn't for him. And so I look back at that and I wonder why neither one of us said then this relationship is not going to work out.

Because we did get married and my husband graduated from college with a degree in psychology and sociology, and there's not much you can do with that until you have your master's. So while he was working on his master's, what did he find? A job as a foster care case worker in inner city Philadelphia with medically fragile children during the 80s when, 90s, when the issue, the big issue was crack babies, cocaine babies born addicted to cocaine.

And so a lot of interesting stories coming out of that, but that was the beginning of God changing his mind. And yeah, through there it wasn't long. It was just a couple years later that we started to foster.

Martha: So you both had some amazing, background experiences. Just this journey that God took you on. But when you started actually fostering, did you really realize what it was going to take personally and physically and spiritually to do this for your own family?

Cindy King: No, I was a teacher and John was working on his degree to be a counselor, and then he did, he was a pastor for many years as well. We thought we had the skills to do this. We thought our biological children are doing well. We didn't go out to eat very often, but when we did, they were the kids that the people in the booth next to us would come over and say, Oh, your children are so well behaved. We thought we had this parenting thing down. And then when some more difficult challenging behaviors came into our home, we realized that no, we were not prepared for this.

Jim: So how many kids and we're going to go deeper into this, of course, during the next segment. How many kids though have you and John fostered and how many did you end up adopting?

Cindy King: We have fostered off and on for about 30 years and we have had 30 children in and out of our home. Four of them have stayed and have been adopted.

Jim: That's fantastic. Yeah, because I saw a picture of your family on the Keystone site. It's a, you have kids everywhere. They're like flying everywhere. It's just, it's great. Love that. Wow. So let's just take a listen for a second. There are other areas in our life where we need to foster and adopt new ideas.

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Martha: So as we have this conversation, Cindy, it's so high level at this point. Seeing where God brought you guys hearts together and then now knowing that you have fostered 30 plus children and brought some permanently into your home. Let's talk for the listeners, is fostering, adopting, is it a calling or is it a biblical mandate? Help me sort that out.

Cindy King: That's a really good question. And I think the biblical mandate is that we are to care for orphans and widows but it doesn't say we're all called to bring foster children into our homes. And so I think that's the distinction that yes, we are all called to do something, but I think that it is a separate calling to bring children into our homes.

Martha: Wow. That was that is such a great perspective because we can, and this is where we're going to go in some future conversations that I hope our listeners are leaning in and going, okay, so this, we've seen the scripture to be there for the orphans and the widows, but what does that look like for each one of us individually?

And it may look different. And so how did you guys discern that? I just would love to, to hear for your own family.

Cindy King: How did we discern to foster? Okay, so it started when I was young, and then, coming into John, realizing, yeah, this is something we could do. So we started out doing some childcare for some of the children on his caseload.

And that was just an easy way to ease into it that. Okay they're not staying for a long time. It's a weekend or it's a day, we can do this, but then I think just both my heart was already there, but then his heart started to break too for the fact that this, there are so many children and there are so many needs.

And I will say that there was also a point of infertility there that also then for him was a, okay, so let's take the next step because maybe this is the way God has planned for us to grow our family. Then we ended up having five biological children as well,

Jim: I was gonna say, God back doored you a little bit.

 (laughter)

Cindy King: There wasn't a problem anymore.

Martha: Pause, put the pause.

Jim: All right, so you just mentioned something. So what is the state of the foster system countrywide?

Cindy King: Countrywide, everywhere, there are more children waiting for families than families waiting for children. And what does that mean? For each children and youth agency, it means that a child is removed from their home and they can't find a family for them. So caseworkers are sleeping in the offices with the children until a family can be found. Some of our counties and some of our agencies across the country, they're getting hotel rooms and the caseworkers spending the night or the week in the hotel room with the child.

Sadly, it often means that children are being placed out of county because they can't find a home in that county. And so they have to go to another county. That may not seem like a big deal, but it makes it more difficult to have visits with family members. It also means that families are split up more often. Siblings are split up because maybe they can find a family here that's willing to take one child, but they're not willing to take two.

Or they're not willing to take teenagers. And we've got a lot of older kids in the foster care system. And these are children's lives that we're messing with. Removing them is a trauma. Spending some nights in a hotel room is a trauma. Having to be separated from siblings is another trauma. Not being able to have visits because it's too far away. We're just, we're not serving children in the best ways that we can.

Jim: God's got you placed in the Keystone State, the state of Pennsylvania. What's the situation there? Is it any different? Is it worse? Is it better? What do you find there?

Cindy King: It's pretty much the same. The other issue that we have here in Pennsylvania, which is somewhat pretty much countrywide as well, but we have the issue of caseworker turnover. And so when we have caseworker turnover, that directly impacts the child. If a child has one caseworker throughout their entire time in foster care, they have a over 70 percent chance of achieving permanency, either going back home or being adopted or going to live with a family member.

If they have even one caseworker change, that goes down to less than 20 percent. So that is a huge difference. So we have to be able to support our caseworkers. We have counties that are, they're supposed to have about 30 caseworkers and they have less than 10. It's that bad in some of our counties.

Jim: That's because they have to make them sleep in hotels with foster kids. That wasn't part of the job description, I'm sure.

Cindy King: Exactly. Yeah. And what they see day in and day out there on the front lines, sometimes their lives are threatened and they have a position where nobody wants to see them show up at their door. So it's not like it's a friendly face at the door. And so that's not easy. When there's so much turnover, they're overworked. They're burning out. There's such a thing as secondary trauma. They can suffer from that as well because of everything that they're having to face and watch and deal with. So yeah, it's not an easy place for them to be in.

Martha: I love having this conversation with you, even though it's a hard conversation, Cindy, because number one, you are living in the midst of it. You have such great knowledge and wisdom and you you tell such a compelling picture, you show a compelling picture to people as far as the reality of it.

And so that's on one side of it. You've got the caseworker issue. So what about the foster system itself and just the struggle to even find families that want to foster? Let's talk about that for a minute.

Jim: Why? Why are they struggling?

Cindy King: Yeah, so a local news station just did a segment on this because they found out that, yeah, this is a problem and actually it's a problem that's gotten worse.

It's not like it, it's been the same problem over time. And so we talked about what could some of those reasons be. I think just the fact that trauma is so much more well known now, and so people are more aware of what kind of behaviors you might find in your home that, that deters them. Part of it is just foster parent burnout.

And so we can't keep our foster parents. And that's a struggle because if you can keep them, then you don't have to keep training them. There'll be natural turnover, but when you're losing them more than the natural turnover, then you have to keep finding them and training them. Honestly, I think as Christians, I think part of the issue is that we've lost that passion for living like Jesus did and going toward the brokenness and the messiness and being willing to step into that place.

And this is a messy, broken place. We are used to nice, comfortable lives here in the United States, and you have to be willing to step out of that to be willing to step into fostering. And so some of it, I think, is just that we've lost our calling. We've lost what we've been told to do. And so it's harder to get people to do it.

Jim: And having all of our kids involved in the foster system, having we've been involved in the foster system, it is exhausting. It is challenging and bringing kids from somebody else's family into your household. is a challenge. It is also rewarding. 30, how many years, 31 years later. It's rewarding.

We've, we adopted one of our foster kids. Another one's still doing phenomenal. Never needed to adopt her. She was able to blossom outside of the system and just we're still very well connected. I'm amazed though at how hard it is. It really is.

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So Cindy, you mentioned that it's really maybe a calling to have people come into your home because it's so different. But is fostering a vocation, is adopting a vocation?

Cindy King: Now you brought up a controversial word, vocation.

Jim: Yes, I did.

Cindy King: Everybody has a different definition of vocation. So I think if you're looking at vocation as not a career, but as your calling, but more than your calling, as the person you are called to be, then I think that we are all called to model our lives after Christ. That's going to look differently for each one of us. So yes, fostering can be somebody's vocation, but they could also have other vocations as well. You can foster and also be a teacher. You can foster and also be an engineer. It's not its own vocation.

Martha: It's interesting that you say it that way because honestly, we are all called to be bivocational, in a sense. We reference pastors and say if your pastor also has a job, he's considered bivocational, but at the same time, aren't we all called to that? That's what you just said.

God gives us a calling, and sometimes our job fulfills that calling because of how he's gifted us, but sometimes our job for a season is truly just a paycheck. Our calling might be something in addition that we are doing on the side or, and that may be the fostering or adopting because it's choosing something else to be invited into your life.

And I love that. And I think it's a good challenge for each one of us to say, what am I doing right now in that aspect? So how have you seen God's hand in this whole process for your family?

Cindy King: It goes along with that question of vocation and that the person we are to be is to live a life that's modeled after the life of Christ, but also to be growing in holiness, like Christ.

And what better way to grow in holiness than to be in a place where your only choice is to be on your knees asking for wisdom and guidance and grace and love to be able to pass on to a child that may be acting out in the most unloving ways. And I know Gary Thomas has written a book about marriage where he says that something like this, marriage is not to make us happy, it's to make us holy.

I think the same thing is true of parenting, but especially of foster parenting. There are many days that joy was hard to find, but I look at this journey as one that has definitely brought me deeper in my relationship with Christ and has forced me to see those sin issues in my life and to work on them, because if I'm not working on myself and my struggles, then I can't help my children.

Dr. Karen Purvis is somebody who's done a lot of research in trauma informed care. And she says, we can't take our Children to a place of healing that we have not been to ourselves. And so that has been huge for me.

Jim: So talk to our audience. They're curious. They're going, okay, why should they consider becoming a foster parent?

Cindy King: Because it's so needed and it is so rewarding. I will add, you have to change your definition of success. Success is not that by age 18, this child is going to have it all together and say, thank you for bringing me into your home and thank you for leading me in this direction and thank you for all you've done and yes, now I'm going to follow Christ and I'm going to give my life over and I'm going to change all of my ways. It can take longer than that, but we do it because we are called to do it.

And I, when people always say, and especially when all nine children were still at home, we had a family band, they all played string instruments. We would pile them all into the 15 passenger van. We'd drive from here to there and we'd get out and people would ask, is this a daycare? Is it a youth group or are you on a missions trip?

And we would explain how our family came to be. And inevitably somebody would say, I could never do what you do. And I've had different responses to that through the years. And I think my response now is why not? We're not all called to do it, but I do think for some people, that's an excuse to not do it. I could never do that. It's just too easy to put it there. Or I could never say goodbye. I could never, whatever. I could never do that to the other children in my home or whatever the excuse is. But I think we have to lay that all down before the Lord and find out if they are just excuses or if maybe the response is okay, not fostering, but what are you going to do to serve vulnerable people?

Jim: And in a couple of weeks, we're going to have a podcast talking about what can you do to wrap yourself around some of those foster parents who say, I may not know how to do it, maybe I really can't do it, but I'm going to try? But they're going to need your help.

And we're going to talk about that in a couple of weeks, we're going to talk about wraparound grandparenting. Cindy, before we go, any final thoughts that you'd like to share just out of your open heart with everybody about fostering as a vocation, fostering as your job, and being involved in the foster system?

Cindy King: It is so rewarding to be able to look at a child, a teen, an adult and say you are loved, you are valuable, you are precious, you are important. We know from research that all it takes to help a child heal from past trauma is one caring adult that just keeps showing up and loves as unconditionally as is humanly possible.

 Any one of us can be that one caring adult for somebody, whether it's a foster child or somebody in your workplace or somebody at church or somebody in your neighborhood. What would it look like if every believer showed up for one other person? And so that would be what I would leave with everybody, whether it's fostering or not, we can all be that one caring person.

Martha: So beautiful. So tell people quickly how they can get ahold of you and learn more about Keystone Family Alliance.

Cindy King: So my email is cindy, C I N D Y at keyfam, K E Y F A M dot org. Also our website, keyfam dot org. As Jim was saying, there is a picture of my family on there, although it's not everybody because it's hard to get everybody in the same place at the same time when there's now in laws and grandkids.

But definitely check it out on that website. You can see which counties we are in. Keystone Family Alliance is county based. And so there's a coordinator in 18 counties now with the goal of eventually being in all 67 counties. But if there's a coordinator in your county, definitely try to connect and find out where you can serve.

We are the bridge between the needs of the child welfare system and the local church. So we find out what the needs are. Then we go back to the local church and we say, we are the ones who were given the mandate to do this from the Old Testament, from the time when there was a plan in place. When you harvest your field, don't go back over it a second time. Leave some, because there are people who are going to need it, and so from the beginning, this was our job to do, and we weren't doing a good job of it. We, and I say, we, the church, the big C church said to the government, Hey, could you help us out?

And then we let them take it over. And the government does not make a very good parent. So we at Keystone family alliance are trying to do what we can to let the church know that we have to come back and take our rightful place in this issue and we need to stand up for the kids and for the families and we need to be there for them and support them and encourage them.

Jim: Cindy King, thanks so much for being on iWork4Him today. We look forward to getting back with you in a couple weeks to talk about wraparound grandparenting. But thank you, Cindy King.

You've been listening to iWork4Him with your host Jim and Martha Brangenberg. We're Christ followers. Our workplaces our mission field, but ultimately iWork4Him!