Patti and Bruce, feeling a tug from Jesus, welcomed a four-year-old foster child into their home. Originally the child welfare organization told them Jonathan would be staying with them and their four other children for about a month. Five months later, after a couple of attempts to place him back with his mother, he’s still living with Patti and Bruce.
The process has been messy and complicated. This little boy is sweet, charming, and winsome at times, but angry and confused at other times. So sometimes he cuddles and hugs, but other times he acts out: yelling, scratching, hitting, and even biting.
My friends have loved this child, even as he tries their patience, even as they sometimes despair over the difficulties his birth family faces: poverty, illness, and so on. When they tuck him in at night, they ask him, “Jonathan, when God looks at you, what does he say?” And they have taught him to answer, “He says, ‘I sure do love that little boy!’”
When Jonathan first came to them he did not know the answer to the question. In fact, in his little four-year-old heart, perhaps Jonathan’s circumstances caused him to assume that if God even looked at him at all, God would have said “there’s a bad boy, so bad his mommy had to send him away.” But that is not true. And so Patti and Bruce have taught Jonathan to replace the lies with the truth. And the truth is, God sure does love that little boy.”
–Keri Wyatt Kent, Deeply Loved: 40 Ways in 40 Days to Experience the Heart of Jesus (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2012), pp.1-2, quoted by yours truly in the Sunday sermon