How Two Little Girls Saved Me From a Midlife Crisis

I’ll be honest: before foster care, I was drifting toward a midlife crisis, and I didn’t even know it. Not the cliché kind: I wasn’t going to be buying a sports car or starting some weird new hobby; I didn’t have a sudden desire to get a tattoo. Mine was quieter.

I was starting to believe my hobbies, my comfort, and my schedule were the most important things in my life. And look, there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a hobby. But something in my heart was shifting. My world was getting smaller because my world was starting to get all wrapped up around me, and I didn’t see it happening. My mom used to always say, “Any person wrapped up in themselves makes for a pretty small package.” She was right.

Then two little girls stepped into our home, and everything that once felt “big” suddenly felt embarrassingly small. The things I stressed about didn’t matter. The things I thought were important weren’t. God used those girls to pull me back to Himself and His purposes, reminding me that life is much bigger than my comfort, my plans, or my routines.

In a culture that’s all about “me time,” foster care and adoption pull you into showing up for someone else.

Foster care challenged me in ways I didn’t expect. It exposed areas of my life that needed to grow, stretch, and surrender. And if you let it, foster care and adoption will challenge you, too, right where God wants to shape you most.

Let It Challenge Your Comfort

Foster care forces you out of predictable routines and controlled environments. It stretches your time, your energy, and your convenience, and that’s not a bad thing. When the needs of a vulnerable child interrupt your schedule, it reminds you that the Christian life was never meant to be built around comfort.

Growth happens when we let God interrupt us.

Let It Challenge Your Priorities

Children in crisis have a way of cutting through the noise. Suddenly, things that once felt important: preferences, hobbies, and minor frustrations move down the list. Foster care pulls you back to what actually matters: people, presence, and purpose. It helps recalibrate your heart around eternal things rather than temporary ones.

Let It Challenge Your Capacity to Love

Kids who have been hurt don’t always respond to love in predictable ways. Their behavior may challenge your patience, energy, and compassion. But this is where God does deep work in your heart. Over time, He enlarges your capacity to love like He loves: consistently, sacrificially, and without conditions.

Let It Challenge Your View of the Gospel

We talk about adoption as a theological concept, but foster care forces us to live it. When you welcome a child who has nothing to offer you but need, you experience grace differently. The gospel becomes more real when you act out the same movement God made toward you.

Let It Challenge Your Expectations of Family

Most of us default to thinking of family as a neat, predictable, biological unit. Foster care expands that vision. It teaches us that family is something you build, not just something you’re born into. God’s definition of family has always included the broken, the displaced, the outsider; that’s where His love shines the brightest.

Let It Challenge Your Fear

Most people hesitate to foster or adopt because of fear: fear of attachment, of heartbreak, of inadequacy, of the unknown. Yet the gospel repeatedly calls us to move toward the hurting, not away. Allowing foster care to challenge your fear is a way of surrendering that fear back to God and trusting Him to supply what you lack. Fear shrinks when obedience grows.

A Final Word

Foster care changed my life long before it changed theirs. God used two little girls to pull me out of a small, self-centered drift and back into a bigger, gospel-shaped life. And He can use foster care and adoption to challenge you too, not just to love children in need, but to become more like Christ in the process.