Article from Bobby & Steve's Auto World Pegasus

By: Andrea Van Hofwegen
Grill Captain

What a quarter! Never have I gone through anything like this before. Two days after the Christmas Party I was leading our leadership meeting. I had a phone call with five minutes left to go. I made the choice to take it. It was my husband telling me that our daughter, Sri, was giving us custody of her two children. I was absolutely stunned beyond words. I couldn’t even finish the meeting.

We are now a part of a statistic that says over 70,000 children in Minnesota are cared for by their relatives. This is called Kinship Care.

At first, I thought I couldn’t be that difficult. They had been living with us and Mom for the past seven months. That couldn’t have been further from the truth. It has been harder than I ever could have imagined. The first few weeks are a sleep exhausted blur as we attempted to settle our one year old grandson, Matthew and two year old granddaughter, Vivian, into our household that includes four year old Gianna.

Not much of my parenting experience or leadership experience prepared me for the trials and tribulations of these early days. Don Brown (the E-85 man) wondered how we were surviving. The answer is God. In the first few weeks, we struggled mightily with finances and how to feed two extra mouths and add the daycare for two more children. We prayed. God provided. A Bobby and Steve’s Auto World team member came to our house with enough food for a week. A family friend sent us a check that covered what we were short on our mortgage! God is sooo good. Then we were able to get help to provide for the children.

Next, came providing for the childrens’ emotional and physical well being at a steep expense of our own sleep and emotional stability. God placed a resource called Comfort from Meditations (see http://esterstrail.blogspot.com for more information) in my hands. This has brought peace during the storm. In September 2010 at Zac and Tara’s wedding, Dan Richard’s wife, Patti suggested a book, “Parenting w/ Love and Logic” that has brought sanity back to us. God placed a fine lady from an internet site called www.momslikeme.com in my life that referred us to a Christian Recovery Center to work with Vivian’s emotional distress.

Whenever I felt I was too overwhelmed or too tired to go on, God provided the answer. There is a saying, “When the going gets tough, the tough get going.” The truth is that even the strongest, youngest and fittest among us can get too weary or too burdened to go on. When we reach this point (as I have) and we turn to God in trust and faith and lean on Him, He will renew our strength. The biggest lesson I had to learn was that God will give me enough strength for today and not to worry about tomorrow’s issues, because tomorrow He will met my needs again.

This has been a humbling journey and a big Thank you to all who prayed for us, gave us provisions and gave us great counsel and the resources that we have needed to get through the early days of kinship care. The situation is easier than it was, however it is still challenging and I will trust God to bear us through, because we can do all things through Christ, who strengthens us!