Free to serve: why we need a homestudy

So many things have come together in my life lately. I'm reading a book about spiritual disciplines and he talks about how we think freedom is the ability to do whatever we want, whenever we want, however we want. But the bible defines freedom much differently. If Christ hadn't died, we would not be free from sin. Freedom is something that is earned with a price. He says that spiritual disciplines are the price of godliness, in that we need the disciplines to attain godliness.

This got me thinking about taking care of orphans and families in need. Without a home study, I am not free to foster or adopt. It is a process that takes months with many hours of work to complete, but it is the path to being free to care for children. All that to say, we turned in our application this week! We got a call from our worker and she is going to stop by next week to meet us, go over paperwork and answer questions. It feels like we're really getting started now and I do have a sense of freedom about it. God says to, "Defend the weak and the fatherless; uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed." (Psalm 82:3) and before this I felt like there was so little I could do. I'm mean look around you! This world is crazy and horrible things happen to weak ones every day. I'm sure there is a lot I could do, but I just didn't know what. It feels very freeing to have this command and now also see the way God wants us to obey it.

We have an elder at our church who says if you don't have a passport you are sinning, because God calls us to go to all nations and tell them about Jesus, but you can't do that without a passport! Now, he may be exaggerating a bit by calling it a sin to not have a passport, but this same ethic applies to home studies. If you don't have a home study, you can't take in a child if God should call you to do so. We want to be as free to serve Christ in whatever capacity he calls us as we can. Side note: we also turned in our applications for passports this week! And it sure is crazy expensive to be able to leave this country. But I'm glad we did it as we have a couple mission opportunities on the horizon...we shall see!