Today I want to bring you to look at a system that is doing a job beyond what it was designed to do, it is doing what families and churches were originally designed to do. Today we will look at the fails of the foster system, now there are a few who come out okay, but not many. Most enter alone, live alone, survive alone and are aged out alone, and all the alone is crippling and not their choice. Moved, changing schools, changing foster parents, changing towns, friends, and it just becomes hard so alone is the safer answer. But it also has a deeper result, the streets.
Simply Alone, Completely, Utterly Alone
Billy Bob said someone just talked to you about the Foster care system, but I have to tell you how alone I am and what is going right now. I was in foster care for about thirteen years. I have no family to take me in when mom was killed by my dad and he went to jail, alone. Bounced from home to home, stuff thrown in trash bags, like it is not important, I hate trash bags. Somehow, we are supposed to emerge from this brokenness okay, whole and not so alone, how?
Absolutely Left Open Neglected & Empty, to me that is what Alone means, and as a foster kid there is no better way to say it, especially when you don’t get one of the good homes. It is hard to keep your head down, chin up, heart hidden, and shoulders square and keep moving all the time, but that is survival.
So I am a foster kid, with no living family, the new kid at every school I get thrown to, the one who never quite fits in, I have no stories to tell of my home and my family and my siblings, I just am alone and have no one and was bullied. The stuff I saw, even my mom tried to protect me, but she couldn’t now I have all those memories to deal with, but no to help me and I when I turned 18 I realized just how mean the world was and just dangerously alone I truly am.
You folks just see a ‘lazy bum’ on the street corner and will see nothing other that when you drive by in you car, with fast food lunches and drinks listening to the radio in total comfort. But, what if you actually saw me for who I am, my life truly stopped at age five when my mom died and the system came and took me away and put me into a house and with people I did not know. I am still that little girl all alone with a family that just disappeared, not the bum you see on the street corner.
But you folks have been very well taught that homeless people can fix this thing all by themselves, how can we when there are no tools or help or open doors of opportunity given to us, especially for one whose emotional growth stopped around age 5.
Broken, alone and cold stone sober, there is no help, I landed on the streets right out of foster care, barely got my GED, but no job skills, no place to lay my head and now how do I get a job and what do I do for food and shelter? Thankfully Billy Bob has been showing me the sate places to get food and water and some shelter without funning into the police, it ain’t easy out here, but this alone thing is needed to live and get by on the streets.
So now the question I have to ask is this, I am alone, have been for years, so do I fight the greatest fight of my life to get off the streets or do I surrender to the end game of being alone and slide into the abyss of homelessness to never be seen off the streets ever again?
See, I have no motivation to fight, no one in my corner, so why fight that hard, the cards are stacked against me and for remaining alone and sooner rather then later vanishing on the streets. Alone, it would have been better if I had left with my mom all those years ago, at least then I would not have been alone.
Will You Continue To Allow Me to be so Completely Alone
OR
Will You Simply Take a Risk and Become a Friend
