Dear brothers and sisters,

There are children in Forsyth County tonight who do not know what it means to feel safe. Some will sleep in a county office while a caseworker works the phone. Some will be handed to strangers carrying everything they own in a trash bag. Not one of them chose the circumstances that brought them there.

Scripture does not leave us unmoved. “A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation. God setteth the solitary in families” (Psalm 68:5–6). The God we worship gathers the lonely into homes — and from the beginning, He has chosen to do that work through His people.

This is not a new calling. When infants were left to die on the walls of ancient Rome, it was Christians who went out in the dark to gather them up and raise them as their own. “It is our care for the helpless, our practice of loving-kindness, that brands us in the eyes of many of our opponents,” wrote Tertullian. The watching world could not explain it. That was the point.

Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.

James 1:27 (KJV)

The need today is just as real, and just as near. Our county has children in foster care and not nearly enough families to receive them. The government can provide a bed, a building, a budget — but it cannot provide a mother’s voice or a father’s prayer. Love and belonging cannot be delivered in bulk. They are given person to person, family to family.

This is why the church cannot hand the work to someone else. We did not invent this burden — we received it from a Savior who had no place to lay His head, and who welcomed the very children others pushed away. Caring for vulnerable children is not a fringe ministry for a few; it is a mark of the faith we all confess.

Not every Christian is called to foster — but every Christian is called to care. Some of you will open your homes as foster or adoptive parents. Others will offer respite so a weary family can rest. Others will cook a meal, give a ride, give financially, or simply stand beside a foster family and promise they are not alone. “Look not every man on his own things, but every man also on the things of others” (Philippians 2:4). When a church decides that no family will carry this alone, families step forward who never would have dared by themselves.

So I am asking you to take one step. Ask the Lord what part He would have you play. Come and learn. And let us, together, make Forsyth County a place where no child waits alone.

In Christ,
Foster With Us