Ever since I arrived to Honduras my biggest prayer was for God to use me as He saw fit, that I would trust Him no matter the circumstance, and He would continue to break my heart in the best way for His children. This has not been easy as 2016 was one of the most challenging yet rewarding years I have come to face.This past year I watched kids come into the crisis care center and then be sent back to the abuse they were so desperately trying to escape. I held children whose parents had been killed right in front of them. I wept with teenagers as they shared their story and started to come to a place of healing. I rocked abandoned babies to sleep as I rested in the fact that they are now safe.I wrestled with the reality of being a foster mom to four girls...
21 June, 2017
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This morning, as I was reviewing all the learning objectives we've covered over the past 10 weeks in language school, I came across a powerful memory from a few weeks ago when Marta wrote the day’s objective at the top of the whiteboard and then sat down across from me. Objecto: Expresar deseos que teníaExpress wishes or desires that you've had I sat there staring at the whiteboard with hopes and dreams swirling around in my heart and mind, while Marta made a list of verbs. When she finished, the two of us got busy turning that list of verbs into conversation. I’m pretty sure I cried when I realized I could actually carry on a conversation in Spanish about these hopes and dreams that God has given us. Desear (to wish)… Esperar (to hope)...
11 April, 2017
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Foster care is the most simultaneously amazing and beautiful and agonizing and heart-breaking thing. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It’s caused far more heartbreak than I’ve ever known. Yet I wouldn’t take back a minute of it.
My two babies have supposedly started the process of abandonment. This is good. This is a step towards adoption. This is what we want. But it brings me closer to the heart-breaking reality that our time is limited.
One day when I was really struggling, I was talking to our director and she made what I feel is a very accurate comparison. Foster care is like having terminally ill children. No my children aren’t dying and I don’t mean to downplay how horrible it would be to have a terminally ill child, but I believe many of the feelings present are the same. You never know how much longer you have your child....
11 March, 2017
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One of the things we considered when we first started talking about living in Honduras was whether or not we could meet our son Wyatt’s needs if we made the move. Wyatt is deaf. When he became a Robinson in 2013, he was almost 3 and had virtually no language at all. We had a lot of support in our area when Wyatt was younger through an early intervention program in our county. We started learning ASL right away but language development in all of us has been so slow. Wyatt with his language teacher (and our dear friend) JulieRural Georgia doesn’t offer much in the way of community and resources for school-aged children who are deaf, though, and Wyatt is 6 now. We were at a point where we had to do something to improve Wyatt’s access to language, and fast, and up and moving to Central America wasn’t among the...
24 February, 2017
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I watched her as she carefully walked through the front door, making sure her hair covered her face just enough so no one would notice her black eye and the cuts all over her face.Child services brought her inside, she sat quietly on the sofa as I signed the papers and asked DINAF how long she would be staying. I ever so slightly peeked my head around the corner of the kitchen wall to see what she was doing. I began to see tears fall down her face; I could tell she was in an immense amount of pain.DINAF had informed me that her mother beat her and cut her with a knife. She had stitches from a gash on her wrist, cuts, bruises, and other marks all over her body from what her mother had done to her. My eyes began to fill with tears as I slowly applied...
17 February, 2017
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The other day as one of my girls was having a visit with her bio mom, I was hit with another heart-breaking truth of foster care. I can never make it right.
Even if one day I am fortunate enough to be able to adopt her, that doesn’t make her past and the brokenness of her situation go away. I will never be her bio mom. I like to think that blood doesn’t matter, that it’s all about the love, care, and presence given. But that’s not true. They both matter. I will never be able to share the same things and have the same connection with her as her bio mom. I can never change her past. She’s three years old and I struggle to explain to her how she has two moms. My heart breaks again as I think, “How will I explain to her that her mother didn’t want her? That...
12 February, 2017
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If you have one of these...
10 February, 2017
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Dear Reader,I feel it is so important that you know and hear the full story of Centro de Paso and my new house with the 4 little girls who had no where else to go. So with that being said, here it is…Before I moved to Honduras I had said “yes” to Matt and Marianne, but most importantly I had said “yes” to God. I would help start and fund Centro de Paso, the crisis care center. This home is for children who have been severely mistreated or are in a crisis situation. We work with and only take children through DINAF (Honduran Child Services). DINAF had been asking Matt and Marianne for quite some time to start up a Crisis Care Center. We knew this was something God was calling us to do, so I moved down in January of 2016 to start up this program. God provided everything I...
09 February, 2017
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We’re loving all the “firsts” that the past two weeks have brought our way. We've been busy setting up house, buyings groceries and SIM cards, and setting up Honduran phone numbers. Our grocery store is quite the change from the Piggly Wiggly in Manchester, GA.The grocery store even has an aisle labeled "gourmet products. This is where they shelve the Spam!!At first we were excited to see the real maple syrup that we buy in the States on the shelf here in Honduras. Then we saw the $24 price tag and abandoned our high syrup standards in favor of the cheap stuff on the bottom shelf. After our first checkout at our little Wal-mart owned market, Dean and our friend Jaden stopped to process the whole experience. My receipt reminded me of home. Two weeks in, Dean has mastered the meat counter. IN SPANISH, EVEN! Here, he's ordering 15 leg quarters...
02 February, 2017
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