The Banker Family
Our foster story started almost two years ago. After we had our son, Benaiah, we felt the Lord put a desire of fostering to adopt on our hearts. We started the long process of learning how to be patient and content right where we were while the Lord worked in us and through us to prepare us to love those precious children of God. He wasn’t just shaping and molding our hearts, but our families and those close to us as well. We all needed the time to prepare to love them. It was difficult to lay our desires down and let the Lord lead because we wanted that precious baby or child right then.
For a year we searched for the perfect organization for our family. We desired a Christian based organization that would provide us the support network that would rally around us and that also gave us the opportunity to love the parents of the children as well. We didn’t want to just focus on the kids because parents need to be built up and encouraged to be the best parents they can be. After the disappointments of not meeting the age requirements to the organization we found and the internal structure changes in another organization caused things to come to a halt. It took us being content where the Lord had us for the amazing door to open with our organization, Safe Families For Children. It moved SO FAST from there. We completed the application, background checks, fingerprinting, interview, and a home visit within two weeks and had our first baby 5 days after approval.
Our precious Kyrie was 3 months when we started “hosting” him and our relationship with his mom and dad blossomed right along with our love for him. We struggled with understanding the “whys” behind things and with wanting to help with whatever resources we had that they did not. It took months with continuous learning to find our happy balance between loving them well and enabling unhealthy behaviors. It’s heart breaking, frustrating, emotionally taxing, but absolutely amazing and glorifying to God all in one. God worked on us, through us, and continues to do just that. We were not put in this place with this desire on our hearts to judge them or fix them. We are here to rally around them and love those kiddos with every inch of our beings showing God’s love, grace, and mercy. We do not want to be the quick fix; we want to be the permanent mark on a family we may never have met otherwise. We want to grieve with them and hope with them.
We want to raise Benaiah and our future children with an understanding of what it means to live by faith regardless of the fears we encounter along the way. Francis Chan said it best, but to summarize: Our mission with the Lord doesn’t end or pause when you get married, have young kids, or after your kids grow older. It’s about going out into the harvest and being a worker. It’s about being vulnerable and allowing God to use you in unexpected ways to further His Kingdom. We want to be missionaries here in our city ready to be blown away by the Lord’s work with one “host” baby at a time.
- Savannah Banker