by Katie Schuermann
In twenty-four years of marriage, I have never been pregnant. In that same amount of time, my husband and I have received at least a dozen private adoption queries from five different states, and not a single one has worked out in such a way as to make us parents. And in spite of our multiple foster parent training sessions completed through the states of Texas and Illinois, no child ever has been placed in our home by the government.
Which means, in twenty-four years of marriage, no one has ever said of me, “She has her hands full.”
But do you know what people can say of me? that is, if they are looking closely?
“She has her stairwell and kitchen full.”
For in a plot twist no one saw coming, God called my husband seven years ago to serve as pastor of University Lutheran Church in Champaign, Illinois. “UniLu,” as everyone in the community fondly call the congregation, is a campus ministry located just one block off the main quad of the University of Illinois, and it exists primarily to serve undergraduate and graduate students attending the University of Illinois.
This means that Michael and I are finally, joyfully foster parents, though not through state certification like we originally thought. Instead, the church equips us to take into our little family of two around sixty children every year, all of them grown-up and sojourning away from home. We get to shelter them, feed them, teach them, sing with them, play with them, love them, and try to assist their parents in raising them in the faith, all the while knowing that these foster children will not be staying with us, that in the end, it is good — best, even — when they return to the families from which they came.
One of these precious foster children said to me the other day, “I could never do what you do.”
She was referring to the fact that every year our family changes. Every semester, we welcome new students into the church and launch graduating students into the world.
As I reflected further upon her comment, I realized something remarkable about our little story of barrenness.
Michael and I are able to endure this kind of transient family life. In fact, we expect it. We thrive in it.
The primary reason for our endurance, I believe, is because God equips us to serve where He sends us and whom He sends us. He prepares specific good words for us to do, and He completes these specific good works in us. It’s that simple.
But something a little less simple and a little less obvious …
When I view our present vocation through the lens of our barren years, I see plainly that God has been training Michael and me for this kind of transient family life our entire marriage. Never have we ever been able to keep the children who come into our home. Always, we must return those we cradle to another’s arms. Every single child we meet and love and welcome into our hearts belongs to some other family. Every single child who loves us calls other people “Dad” and “Mom” and some other house “home.”
What I am trying to confess is that our barren marriage has served as the perfect training ground for being foster parents at UniLu. Welcoming student after student and then blessing each on his way is simply a continuation of the kind of love and care we have always known and shown to other people’s children in our barrenness.
To think that this strange vocation might have been God’s intention all along — “It is high; I cannot attain it” (Psalm 139)!
And here is what really blows my mind.
In making us foster parents to so many college-aged children, God is filling not only our hands but also our hearts and our prayers and our hours and our table and our stairwell and our kitchen.
Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine such a big, beautiful family, one so plainly created by a God.
All I know to do in response to God’s gift of family life is to thank Him for His abundant mercy and sing a psalm: “Blessed is the man and woman who fill their quiver with college students!”
