Out of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, on the trail of the lonesome pine, comes Karen Edmonds with her uplifting testimony of the joys and tribulations of foster care and adoption. From mountain-top experiences to valley-deep desperation, Karen shares with you her family’s challenges and heartaches as they nurture children who need a family.
Her saga, and it is a saga, is brutal in its honesty and compassionate in its telling of fostering and adopting children. The reader is left with this question. Who would want to take on these responsibilities, not only financial but also emotional and life altering? Only the courageous ones with a calling to help children left alone to face the world.
The children God brought her family try their souls, their patience, and their faith. The parents and grandparents God brought these children shower love and stability on them often only to be met with rage and ungrateful hearts. But other times, smiling faces filled with love greet these adults who want to understand how their children’s lives before joining their families have shaped their present ones.
Can love and good intentions conquer these obstacles? Karen answers yes. Maybe not conquer them all at once but lead the way until the children become adults. And what about other family members?
Karen describes her experience with a foster child her parents brought into the home when she was 11. As an only child, Karen had dreamed of the fun she would have with the girls her parents fostered. Two sisters came to live with them. Eventually, one was moved to another home while the other sister remained. Fun, however, faded from the scene as the remaining child caused trouble for Karen even after she had grown up, married, and had children of her own. The reader experiences with Karen that valley-deep frustration, anger, and futility of coping with this woman who emotionally and financially terrorized Karen’s mother and aunt.
And how did Karen cope? Her faith saw her through. She quotes the scriptures that comforted her during this dark time. Vivid descriptions of the doubts that crept into her soul and her angry, pleading prayers draw you close to Karen. You’ve been in similar places. Who hasn’t?
Karen’s journey continues when two of her three children decide to adopt. She and her husband lovingly embrace their adopted grandchildren who are from diverse cultures. Although these adoptions bring joy both to parents and children, complications arise that Karen, her husband and their children’s families must unravel. Integration into a stable family, into new cultures, and coping with the children’s backgrounds set them on a journey that tests relationships and long-held beliefs.
Karen describes it best in this excerpt from her poem that introduces the book. Is it the children speaking or the parents or both?:
“I’m mad, I’m scared
I don’t have the words
Why, WHY? Who am I?
It’s not fair.
“I want… I want…
What others have.
To feel peace and to be happy
And not lost.
The Children God Brought Us (you can find it on Amazon https://a.co/d/0dmwoRck ) will uplift you as no sermon or prayer group can. It is an honest, sometimes heartbreaking story of Karen’s life with her foster sisters. It is a loving embrace of her own children’s desire to adopt children across cultural divides and her journey with them.
Parents of foster children, parents of adopted children, parents of biological children will all be inspired by Karen’s story that can be read as a loving “How To Raise a Child” book. Not only does she present a sibling’s perspective and a grandparent’s perspective, but she also makes the reader see how children must feel if taken from one environment to another and the challenges they face.
Your challenge is to read Karen’s book and learn how faith and love has sustained her and her family and The Children God Brought Them.
