A Peek Into a Foster Care Agency
By Emiley Shenk, LSW
Training Coordinator
Adriel Foster Care and Adoption
When people hear that I work for a private foster care agency, I am usually met with the following response:  “Wow, I could never do that.”  
That referring to foster parenting.  

Very often the perception of what foster care looks like is quite different from the reality.  Let’s delve further into what foster looks like and address some of those perceptions from an agency’s perspective.

Myth:  All kids that come into foster care are teenagers with major behavior problems.  
Reality:  Youth of all ages enter into foster care.  At Adriel, the average age of children in foster care is seven.  Quality foster homes are needed for children of all ages.  Likewise, the circumstances which bring youth into foster care are as varied as the children we serve.  Each child is unique and brings his or her own set of strengths as well as behavioral challenges.   Usually, the concerns which bring youth into foster care are not the fault of the child, but rather an inability of the parents to care for the child.  

Lay It Down
By: Adam Tracy
10.19.2015 
    I come to you today completely tired and ready to go back to bed. I didn’t sleep well last night. Many of you may know I struggle with sleep. Last night was a rough one. I didn’t get to sleep until 5:30am, then alarm, and the day starts at 6:00am. Luckily my awesome wife knows I have bad nights, and she got up and got the first set of kids off to school while letting me sleep until about 7:30am. I got a good two hours of sleep, so if I am all over the place in this blog, please forgive and try to look at the inner workings of my writing. 
    My brother spoke yesterday on “Eternal Hope”, and he did an amazing job explaining things. If you want to listen to that, you can get it off of the Family Christian Center website. They played a video of Francis Chan in the service. In this video Chan brought out this rope that seemed to never end. It stretched clear across this giant stage. He went on to explain how we need to imagine the rope represents our existence. In his hand was the end of the rope, and it had a two inch piece of duct tape wrapped around the tip. He went on to explain that if the rope represents our existence, then that little piece of tape represents our existence on this earth. Following the existence on this earth is millions of years in the rest of eternity spent somewhere. He went on to talk about how our decisions on this earth decide as to where we spend this eternity and how we spend it. This is what I want to delve into a little more.