“When I tuck L* in at night, every time I pray that regardless of where she ends up, she would grow up to know and love Jesus,” Jon Moneta says about his foster daughter. “Whether that’s in our home, her mom’s, or in someone else’s, I pray that God will protect and bless her.”

“And I pray that if it’s his will, that we would be able to keep her. And if it’s not, then help us to grow in that too.”

Jon and Lexie Moneta know what it is to have their faith grown in adversity. For three years, from late 2015 to early 2018, Jon battled cancer, and their cancer story and foster care story are bound up together. 

“If we hadn’t gone through cancer, we wouldn’t have L and M in our lives right now,” Lexie says. That road from cancer to foster care wasn’t a straight line. Aggressive treatment for non-Hodgkin lymphoma results in infertility for male patients, and although Jon and Lexie knew that invitro fertilization (IVF) would be their only way to have a biological child, the price tag attached was beyond the means of a young couple just getting started. Adoption, which they had always planned to do to grow their family, cost even more and had (parental) age restrictions. They didn’t want to wait another 5 or 6 years to start a family.

“We know that God is going to bless us with a biological child. He’s pretty much flat-out told us that,” Jon says. “But in the meantime, I felt like God was calling us to foster. I brought it up to Lexie and she said no way. So I prayed about it: ‘God, if this is your will, you’re going to have to make it happen.’ Two or three months later, Lexie came back and said okay.”

“When Jon first brought it up,” Lexie says, “my logic was this: We already went through hard stuff in our life; I don’t want to have to go through even more. But then there was, literally, a wake-up call. I woke up one morning and knew. We have food. We have a house. Let’s bless others using what God has provided for us and give it to them. It was like fostering was something we needed to do. Not had to do. Needed to do. It’s the next challenge God had for us.”

Jon says, “Especially after the second time I was diagnosed - with a different cancer - I would be like, ‘God, I don’t get it. Why?’ There was a verse that kept coming to mind and coming up, James 1:2-4 (see next page). And as we went through the cancer and saw so many prayers answered, I thought I understood the why. Some of it. But now I’m seeing that the why is so much bigger than I thought.”

“Before, I thought I had the Christian life down. But my relationship with God got deeper and more mature through that process. There was a change in my character that allows me to...”

Lexie chimes in, “Not only love on the kids but love the biological family.” 

“Cancer showed me how helpless I am apart from God,” Jon says. “Seeing our own need for God helps us to understand and love parents in the system. It’s easy to point out specific wrongs in these parents who lose custody of their kids, but what about the subtle, evil desires in my heart that put me in the same category without Jesus?” 

“It’s easy to stereotype someone and decide against them, but when you serve them, you see people need God just like you do. That’s humbling. We might not know the whole story, but we know they need the same God we do.”

“You don’t have to have a relationship with the bio family,” Lexi explains. “Actually it’s not really encouraged, but when we got into this, we decided we needed to do that if possible. These parents often don’t know any better. They grew up in a harsh way too. L’s mom doesn’t have a support system, and we want her to have that. We’re hoping there is an outlet for us to share Jesus with her. We pray all the time that if it’s God’s will for L to go back to her mom, then use us to help her so that L can continue growing up to know the Lord.”

“Part of the challenge too is hoping for the best for the kids while not secretly hoping the parent will fail,” Jon says while settling a smiling baby M into the curve of his arm. “It’s easy to say we could do better. We can raise them better. We can love them better. God opened my eyes to how wrong and selfish that was.”

“Another thing that makes fostering hard is that you have no control. So you have to trust God.”

“You’re taking care of the child,” Lexie says, “but you don’t get a say in what happens, no one asks your opinion or says, ‘Tell us about this child.’ You’re the one the child is holding onto tightly when it’s time for a parent visit while they scream because they don’t want to go. You’re the one who picks them up after the visit and they’re a hot mess of emotion.”

“From the world’s standpoint, you have to put your faith in the system: case managers, judges, lawyers,” Jon says. “But that’s not where our hope is. God is in control of the entire process regardless of whether it works out exactly how we want it to or not.”

“I think that turns a lot of people away from fostering,” Lexie says. “You get attached to the kids. You need to. They can’t be put in a home and you’re being standoffish because you don’t know if you’re going to keep them forever. I’d rather have them receive all the love, and if they leave, I can recover from the broken heart. You have to be selfless in that respect. Love them knowing you have no say in what comes next.”

“I feel like it’s that way in life, too. It’s not just foster care. ‘Well, I didn’t want cancer.’ No one does, but it happened anyway.”

“That’s one of the lies of the world,” Jon says, “that you have control over any of this. Sometimes you don’t realize it until God shows you; you might think you have control over something, but you don’t. Only he does.”

It’s likely no coincidence that a few verses away from Jon’s favorite verses about adversity –  in the very same chapter, in fact - are these words: “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world,” (James 1:27).

“Fostering is not easy,” Lexie says. She is wiping baby M’s face while holding a bottle between her knees. Her eye is also on the clock. They’ll need to leave soon to pick up L from a parent visit. She’ll be grumpy after the visit, Lexie predicts, and more prone to the outbursts and wild behavior that characterized their first few months with her. The afternoon is likely to be a tough one. 

“Few things in life are easy,” she continues. “Just because it’s not easy doesn’t mean you decide not to do it. But what makes it worthwhile is that you’re taking in an orphan, a child cut off from his family, and you have a chance to show them God’s Word and his love. That’s transformational.” 

“You experience change in your own heart and see it in their hearts,” Jon adds. “A scared child who hates to be touched and held because she hasn’t known affection becomes the one who comes to you for a hug. Even though fostering is an emotional roller coaster, there is joy even among the hard things.”

*To protect the anonymity of the Moneta’s foster children, we are using their first initials and not showing their faces.

The Moneta’s welcome questions from those thinking about fostering or wondering how to support fostering families. Contact them at schatzar@gmail.com or jonmoneta@gmail.com.