Today we ventured out to explore some of the city and get our bearings.  It was a blast!  The pictures above are of Independence Square.  Beautiful, right?  We were there super early since we woke up so early this morning.  We were a bit surprised when we were looking around, there was no one else nearby, then all of a sudden…BAM!  There was a man in a gorilla costume.  Where the heck did he come from?  He insisted on taking our pictures and then asked for $10.  Ha!  Scammed on our first morning out.  Oh well, it’s all part of the experience.  We ended up only giving him $5 since he really wanted USD and that’s all we had on us.  Darn.  🙂  Well, at least we got a picture of the two of us together out of the deal.

After getting scammed we moved on to explore more of the city.  The first order of business was getting a cheap phone.  This next picture shows our great joy after making contact!  We felt human again after talking with a couple of people who were expecting to hear from us.  Yay!

I have to say, it feels really strange being in a foreign country without 15 or so teenagers tagging along.  I mean I feel weird enough being without my babies, but I’m not used to traveling abroad without a bunch of other people waiting for me to make a decision.  I keep feeling like we’re forgetting someone, but nope, it’s just the two of us. It’s so weird!

We saw some beautiful cathedrals that I had seen in so many other people’s pictures.  It felt surreal to actually be standing in those places myself!

 Next, we were off to meet with Vitaly, our friend from a Vineyard Church in North Carolina.  V is originally from here but has lived in the US for the past 12 years.  Jed’s been talking with him on the phone for months now, but we’d never actually met.  He flew in today to get ready for the National Vineyard Conference and agreed to meet us at the train station to help us buy train tickets.  God bless him!  When we got up to the ticket counter we ended up short on money.  Little did V know he’d not only be translating, but paying as well!  🙂

V and a pastor friend Eugene made a ton of phone calls right there on the street and hooked us up with friends from all the different towns we’ll be in.  We found out when we’re in Odessa next week the Odessa Vineyard church will be doing a few outreaches to the orphanages they work with, and we get to come along!  We are so excited about that!!!

It was great to meet V and Eugene face to face.  They made us feel very welcome and at home.  They were on their way to Kremenchuk, so we only had a few minutes together.  We look forward to spending more time with them later on this trip.  As we were leaving them one of the guys from the Kiev Vineyard called us and asked if we wanted to meet for coffee tonight.  He told us Eugene asked him to call.  🙂  What a guy!

Thanks, everyone for praying for us.  We are healthy and just taking it all in.  Tonight we will meet a guy for coffee, tomorrow we will meet with some Kiev Vineyard folk, and then Wednesday we are off to Zhitomir to visit Mission to Ukraine!

Kim here, coming to you from our cozy little hostel room.  Yes, we have arrived!  I’m a little…or a lot jet-lagged, but I want to try to stay awake for another hour or so, so I guess I’ll write.  (Jed pooped out on me and is already asleep.  Lame.)

Our hostel is nice and clean.  We share our 10-bed dorm room with some Polish guys and a Polish girl, and I’m not sure who else.  Picture it now, I’m sitting on a bunk, and right across the room are 3 men with laptops on their bunks, and one other bunk is completely covered with different varieties of alcohol.  This should be interesting!  🙂

Our flights today were perfectly uneventful.  Once we landed we changed our money, then decided to make our way to the hostel.  I had some printed directions from the website, but they were a tad vague.  Thanks to the kindness of strangers we navigated the subways and arrived in one piece at our destination.

My brain is fuzzy, so I’ll just leave you with some pictures of our journey thus far.  Sorry, I’m a little boring…but I can feel my brain turning to mush as I type.

Alright, I must sleep.  Tomorrow begins the real fun.

Night!

PS.  Jed’s snoring now.  Stinker.

Here’s where things can get sticky.  You’ve got this beautiful foster baby in your home and all you want to do is cuddle, squeeze, and love on this baby till all is made right.  You’ve filled out mountains of paperwork, you’ve made it through hours of training, you’ve told complete strangers every detail of your life,  and now you are finally getting to do what you actually signed up for- to take care of a child in need.

Then you get a phone call.

It’s time to set up visits.  Visits?  Oh, that’s right….this baby belongs to someone else.

 I don’t know about you, but I think one of the last things I thought about when we signed up to become foster parents was the birth parents.  It wasn’t that I felt they didn’t matter, duh, they brought the child into this world.  I guess I just didn’t think much about our interactions with them, nor did I realize the major role they would play in our lives.  You simply can’t foster well and remove yourselves from the birth parents (unless there are safety concerns, but that’s another story altogether).  It just doesn’t work that way.  The birth parents are a critical piece of the fostering puzzle.

We’ve had many different scenarios with birth parents through our times of fostering.  We’ve had great times…and not so great times.  One birth parent became a true friend and remains a friend to this day.  I love her.  Even though we don’t see each other often she will always be special to us.  We shared a very vulnerable time together; she entrusted her baby to us and we loved her baby with the knowledge she would never truly be ours.  There was mutual respect there and a real love.  That was incredibly special and amazing.

I remember one time I went to the hospital to meet one of our foster babes with extremely high medical needs.  He had been hospitalized for several months and was due to be discharged later that week.  I had to go up to the hospital to meet with specialists to make sure we were clear on all the different things he would require at home, and to make sure we were up for it.  I was also going to meet the mommy.  I always feel a little nervous before first meeting the birth parents.  I don’t want the mommy to look at me as the bad guy- but how can she not?  Here I am, taking away her baby- a stand-in mommy.  Ugh.  It’s not a good feeling.  I remember going to the nurses station and saying who I was, and why I was there.  The nurse replied that the mom was waiting in the room and wanted the nurse to accompany me to the room.  “She’s very nervous to meet you.”

We entered the room and I saw the mommy cuddling her babe.  I saw the fear in her eyes and I melted.  Yes, she’d made some poor decisions.  Yes, she’d been selfish.  Yes, she was at fault.  I still melted.  We chatted, I asked her questions about her son.  I asked her what he liked and disliked.  I asked her how he went to sleep best and if he liked to be rocked.  Sure, I knew he’d spent most of his life in the hospital with nurses caring for him and not her.  Still I asked.  She was, after all, his mommy.  That meant something.

Some may disagree, but I’m convinced that very few parents actually want to harm their children.  Yes, there are some people that abuse with intent to harm.  I get that, and I’m not excusing that or talking about that.  I choose to believe though, that those are the minority.  Many of the birth parents I know of, and have encountered really do love their children, yet they are caught in a cycle that does not allow for them to act on that love in a healthy way.  Often that cycle is one of addiction.  Addiction is a horrible beast.  It takes over everything.  It becomes the most important thing.  It rules your life.  It makes you someone you are not.  Sometimes they are caught in a cycle of abuse and/or extreme dysfunction.  Their parents, their parents’ parents, and so on and so on have lived in such dysfunction that they honestly don’t know what anything close to “normal” is.  They have no clue what healthy relationships look like.  They have no idea about true love- true unselfish love that puts others first.  They have never had a good role model.  Honestly, when a person is raised up in a cycle of generations of abuse and dysfunction, what do we expect?

Most of you know we are nearing the end of the process of adopting our foster son.  It’s almost final!  We’ve never met his birth parents.  I know a lot about his birth mother’s story though, and I tell you what, if I was in her same situation, if I had the life she’s been given, I’m not so sure I would be much different.  From the very beginning she was almost doomed to fail.  All the odds were against her and she didn’t beat them.  She wasn’t that amazing success story of soaring above your situation.  She has done exactly what you would expect with the situations she’s been given.  Now sure, she’s made some pretty rotten decisions.  Sure, she’s responsible for how she’s responded to life.  I am not excusing her or saying she deserves to have her children with her.  I’m just saying, it’s pretty easy for me to point the finger and judge her for losing her son….but when I step back and think of the cycle she was born into it makes me pause, and I have a bit of a change of heart.

I hope I’m getting my point across here.  I’m not excusing poor behavior by any means!  We are all responsible for our actions, and all our actions have consequences.  It’s just my heart that we show compassion and love to the birth parents we encounter.  What an amazing chance we have to impact not just the life of a child, but the life of an entire family.  Our care and concern for the birth parents could be a catalyst for them to break out of their unhealthy cycle.  What if I am the only one who looks at that birth mom and really sees her.  She is loved.  She is a cherished creation, perfectly and wonderfully made.  She has a heavenly Father just waiting on pins and needles for her to turn to Him.  Boy, when I think about it that way it makes me excited about birth parents!  I remember months after that nervous hospital meeting I wrote about earlier we were able to go to the first birthday party of that sweet little boy.  He had been happily living at home with his parents for several months and we were invited to his party!  After we’d been at the party for a while this family member pipes up with “I don’t get it.  You guys are just so nice.  What’s up with you?”  Ha!  Now I hadn’t heard that one before!  Yet there we were in a room full of people we never would have met if we hadn’t reached out to those birth parents.  We didn’t just tolerate them because we had their son, we built a relationship with them.  They knew we loved them and we were able to truly impact them with the love of Jesus.  It was awesome.

I feel like I rambled tonight.  🙂  If you take one thing away from this post, take this: please see the birth parents.  Really and truly see them.  Look past the immediate circumstances and see the cycle they are caught in.  Then look to see how Jesus sees them, and treat them accordingly.  Who knows?  You may be impacting an entire family for eternity.

Dread.  Let’s be honest.  Taking care of babies is not easy.  I’m a nurse, so we take “medically fragile” babies.  That could mean a baby that is born addicted to drugs, it could mean a preemie who doesn’t feed well.  It could mean a baby with a head injury…you get the picture.  I’ll be perfectly transparent here and say I have often left a hospital with a baby, got in the car, and thought “What have we done?  How are we going to do this?  We are gluttons for punishment.”  Apparently dread isn’t the emotion that wins out….because we keep on taking those babies!  🙂 

Determination.  I’m excited by the challenge.  I like doing things that look difficult and succeeding.  I like puzzles.  I like figuring out what makes a baby tick.  It’s the competitor in me I guess.  “Gosh darn it I WILL get you to gain weight or I’ll die trying!”  I like taking a broken, tiny, helpless baby and seeing him or her transform before our very eyes into a smiling, chubby, babbling little person.  There’s no feeling like it.  I’m a fixer, Jed’s a shepherd- so I tackle the practical, medical side of things and Jed provides the heavy dose of lovin’ with a cherry on top.


When we got the call to take baby #1, whom we’ll call Baby Y, months earlier than we had planned and left the hospital with her we felt all of those emotions.  I remember sitting in the back seat of the car with her while Jed drove- just like we did with each of our biological kids.  I also remember she screamed the WHOLE WAY HOME.  Ha!  Any sense of heroism or romanticism flew out the window about 20 miles down the freeway. 


I’ve heard from many different foster parents that your first placement (foster child) is special.  I’ll have to agree.  Baby Y holds a very special place in our hearts, as do each of our babes.  But there is just something extra special about your first.  We learned with Baby Y what it feels like to love a baby so much it hurts, and at the same time know deep down she belongs to someone else.  Her beautiful cheeks, her smell, everything about her will forever be imprinted in my mind.  She was our first love.   

That foster babe love is a hard thing to describe.  The number one line I’ve heard from others when they hear we’re foster parents is “I could never do that.  I could never give them back.  That would be so hard.”  Let me tell you something.  It IS so hard.  It is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.  But that’s what these babies, these children need.  They need someone who will love them till it hurts and keep on loving, all the while KNOWING that you have to give them back.  Are you kidding me?  Of course, it hurts when they leave.  To me, at different times it has felt like a death.  Most of the time we know we will never see that child again.  Like Baby G, one of our boys.  We had him for the first 4 months of his life.  We picked him up straight from the hospital.  We swaddled him and walked him at night while he shook from withdrawals.  We were there to see his first smile, to give him his first “at-home” bath.  We were his world, and he was our sweet little boy, and then “poof” he was out of our lives and we’ve never heard about him again.  I know he will probably never know about us, but we will never forget him.  He is a part of our story forever.  So, yes, we mourn when they leave.  We cry, we talk, we cry some more.  We find a teeny stray sock in the wash and we cry some more.  We have pity parties and watch sad movies alone in the dark on the couch (okay, so yes, I did that once….not a moment I’m proud of…anyway….)  I always think somehow it should be easier because we always know it’s coming.  But it’s never easier, not if you’ve loved them right.  

But,

    

Think back to spring break of 1993.  What were you doing?  I can tell you exactly what I was doing.  I was in Chihuahua. Mexico on my very first mission trip.  I was the youngest of the group, but just made the age deadline and there was no way I was going to miss that trip.  I honestly don’t remember much about that time, except the enormous amount of Noxzema I had to apply to my face to get all that mime makeup off my face.  (Oh Teen Mania!) I may not remember much in the way of specific encounters and experiences, but I do remember that it changed the course of my life.  I saw the world was bigger than my small town, and my worries over entering high school were nothing compared to the trials others around the world were surviving through every day.

 After that trip, I was hooked.  I proceeded to go on missions every single summer through high school and then through college.  One thing you see a lot of when you do any kind of short-term missions is orphans.  My heart broke for them.  I had forever dreamed of being a mommy anyway, so the plight of the orphan has always hit me right in the center of my gut.  I decided straight out of high school that I knew exactly what I was to do with my life.  I was to become a nurse so I could care for orphans.  BAM.  There you have it!  The goal was set, my application was accepted for nursing school, and I was off to the races!

Fast forward a few years and I’m back in my home town working at the local hospital as an RN and married to the fabulous, amazing, unbeatable Jed.  Okay, I know it’s Valentine’s Day and I may be gushing a bit, but seriously.  Jed is THE BEST.  If you haven’t met him you’ll just have to take my word for it, and if you do know him I dare you to argue with me.  🙂

Jed and Havalah.  One of Jed’s infamous self-portraits 🙂

 Anyway, it’s 2004, Jed and I have been married for a bit and we both know our desire is to live overseas.  We both have a heart for orphans and we are just eagerly awaiting our chance to get the heck outta’ dodge.  We wait…

and wait

 and wait.

We have two squeezable kiddos of our own and pray.  We look for the opportunity, we pray for God’s will and no matter what we do we always get the same answer.  “Stay put”.

“Huh??  What was that God?  I’m pretty sure we didn’t hear you right because we really want to love on some orphans and we know you feel pretty strongly about them…so what’s the holdup??”

Nope. That’s a negative.  He definitely wanted us to stay put.  So sadly, we put our dreams about orphan care on the shelf until later.  Then I happened to have a chat with a friend at a party and I moaned and groaned to her about our hearts, and being stuck in the US.  She then piped up with the words that forever changed our lives.

“You know, foster kids are America’s orphans.  Have you ever thought of fostering?”

What the???  Why no, we had not even considered that!  I mean no one else we knew fostered, it just didn’t occur to us.  Here was one of our answers as to why God had us remain here in the States.  Not so we would just hang our dreams up on a shelf- no, the fulfillment of those dreams was just going to look a lot different than we had imagined.

We were about to embark on one of the most difficult and wonderful journeys of our lives; one that we are still on today, and one that I don’t regret for a single second.

We contacted the State immediately, attended training, filled out massive amounts of paperwork, locked up any medications, picked up some fire extinguishers, installed smoke detectors, passed our home study- and lo and behold- we were foster parents!!  The process was long, but not excruciating.  Ezra, our second, was only 18 months old and we had told our certifier we weren’t going to take any babies until he turned 2, so we figured we had some time to get things ready for whoever our “new arrival” would be.

We should have known not to get too comfy, because 2 weeks later I got a phone call from the state.  “We have a baby who was just born and is in the NICU.  We feel we definitely need a home with a nurse.  Do you really want to wait, or do you think you could take one a little early?”

Deep breath.  Oh boy.  Are we really doing this?  Heck yes, we are!

Let the games begin!!

 To be continued…

 P.S.  We plan to cover several different topics concerning foster care in the next couple of weeks, so if there is something in particular you are wondering about please feel free to leave a question in the comments or you can email us at johnson commune @ gmail dot com (no spaces).   

Oh my goodness this has been an AMAZING week!!!  God is showing us again that we are heading in the right direction and He’s got it all under control.  I’m amazed by Him.

Back up to August when we first decided to head to Eastern Europe for a “scoping it out” trip, we decided that the best time for Jed to take time off work would be in April.  April became our aim.  
Our local church here is a Vineyard Church, so we thought it would be cool to see if there were any Vineyard churches where we are heading.  We googled it, and low and behold there are 5!  We saw that there is a Vineyard church here in the US on the East Coast that has a partnership with those churches overseas to help shepherd them and send mission teams and such.  Cool!  We contacted a man named Vitaly, the church leader on the East Coast who is in charge of the partnership, and found that he’s a native of the EE country and has lived in the States for 12 years.  Jed and Vitaly have been playing phone tag and email tag off and on since September! Jed wanted to find out from him if any of the churches there are doing orphan care and if there’s any church, in particular, we should try to visit.  


Well, time passed and we were never able to really connect with Vitaly.  So, we booked our tickets and decided to just find those churches on our own once we arrived.  We knew of one particular city that looked like it had a thriving Vineyard church, so we planned to make that the last stop of our trip.  Fingers crossed someone there speaks a bit of English, right?  🙂  We already had our appointments set with orphan care organizations, so it wasn’t imperative that we find the church, but it would be pretty cool.  


This is where things get GOOD.  On Thursday Jed gets a call from Guess Who?  Vitaly!  They talked for a while and totally connected.  I love that about the Body of Christ.  Strangers are instantly brothers when they share a common heart and passion.  Vitaly shared his heart about the local church in EE taking ownership of the orphan issues.  He shared that mission teams are great and do amazing work, but if the local church doesn’t buy in the work doesn’t continue.  We totally agree!  Jed and I are local church people all the way.  We understand that we can bring our gifts and talents, but until it’s culturally relevant it’s only partially effective in making a long-lasting difference. 
So, Vitaly asks what dates we will be in EE, and guess what??  He arrives there the exact same day as us!  SHUT UP!!!!  Yep, he’ll be visiting from the US because starting the last day we are in county they are having a nationwide Vineyard conference -get this- in the exact town where we planned to be for the end of our trip! 
WAHOOOOOOOO!!!  God amazes me.  Apparently, all the churches there have orphan care as their main outreach as well.  Sweet.


I contacted our travel agent right away to find out if we could change our departure date so we’d be able to be at the conference.  She said yes, there is availability, but it will cost about $640.00 to change our tickets.  Ummmmm never mind.  Jed says if God wants us there, He’ll let us know.  What’s $640.00 to Him when He’s provided so faithfully for the rest of the expenses for this trip?  


Then yesterday I got a text from a wonderful friend: “Change your tickets, I’m going to fundraise for the extra money, oh and if I can’t raise it all I’ll cover the rest myself”.  Bingo!  We have such a wonderful group of friends around us.  God comes through once again.  Seriously, how many signs and reminders do we need to show us that He is up to something big?  Just when I was starting to panic “What are we doing?  We don’t even know anyone in EE!  I don’t speak Russian!  We are really leaving our kids for over 2 weeks while we fly across the world to ‘check things out?’  We are nuts!”  Just then, God kicks in with awesome acts of faithfulness.  


He’s just plain good.  There’s no ifs ands or buts about it. 

Yesterday we got some adoption news!  We hadn’t heard any news in months.  I was starting to imagine our paperwork was actually lost in the abyss of the state offices.  We got word that we have an Adoption Coordinator assigned to our case now.  I have no idea what an Adoption Coordinator does, but hey, it’s more news than I had last week…so I’ll take it!  Supposedly once they process those forms everything moves really quickly.  I really really hope so!

Here’s a sneak peek of the cuteness.  He loves all things chicken.  The Little Red Hen, the real hens in our backyard, toy chickens, and yes- chicken as food. 🙂

 He decided his toys needed to take a swim…

We also have good news about our April trip!  We were finally able to make contact with a couple that we most wanted to meet with in Ukraine.  This is the couple whose work initially drew us to want to save up all our pennies to fly across the world.  From what I know about them it seems they are doing exactly the type of work that we are passionate about.  Even if we couldn’t make contact with them we were still making plans to go and meet with others, and we were happy about that, but the blessing of being able to meet with these specific people just about triples our excitement about this trip.  WAHOOOOOOO!!

I’m slowly and steadily making a bit of progress on language learning.  OH MY WORD.  Why can’t they speak Spanish where we’re going????  My brain feels a bit foggy with doing Spanish studies with the kids in the morning for their class, and then doing my language study in the afternoon…I just know when we get there I’m going to be thinking in Spanish…or Albanian.  Ha!  My in-laws live in Kosova, so they speak Albanian there.  It’s not like I’m fabulous at Albanian (not even semi-fab), but you know how international travel goes,  your brain reverts to the last non-English language you learned.  But, it’s not like we have a translator meeting us at the airport, so I better get my rear in gear!!  I’ve been pretty faithful in my studies since the new year started, so Lord, please bless my efforts…HELP!!!!

On a less scary note, here’s some cuteness to sum up January.

Ez and Mommy had a date night

Mildly freaking out here.  

Yep, we are officially going to Eastern Europe.  We aren’t just talking about going, we forked out the cash and have 2 non-refundable tickets to show for it. 

The version from The Message is pretty cool too:

So, this is our act of thinking big, stepping out and not holding back.  Should be (already has been) and exciting ride!!!