If you follow me on social media you may have spotted something a little off about my sharing practices. If you pay attention you might have noticed that something always seems to be missing when I post a picture of my family.
My child’s face.
Like the “no one should ever see your face” member of Conan’s Dudez-A-Plenti boy band, my child’s face always seems to be missing from pictures. There are plenty of pictures of legs and arms and even the back of her head. But her face is always lost in the shadows like an anonymous news source or under a hat like a celebrity avoiding the paparazzi. Either way, it’s always missing. (If you haven’t noticed, go ahead and check, I’ll wait.________________ See?)
Before you jump to any conclusions about her beauty being the reason, don’t worry, she is the cutest baby ever. And she’s not shy, so that’s not the reason. She’s beautiful and she loves to cheese for the camera. In fact, she smiles more than any baby I’ve ever seen (and I’ve been around a ton of babies). She has every reason to have her picture taken.
But the reason I don’t post pictures of my baby’s face is because she is still a foster baby so we aren’t allowed to. The government doesn’t want people sharing too much about the children in the system, which is understandable. The children should always be protected. But that means foster care is often lost in the darkness of the unknown or misunderstood. And it also means that while everyone else is sharing posts about how amazing their son or daughter looks and how cute their smile is for maximum social media likability, I’m posting unrecognizable daddy and baby pics.
Yet I continue to post.
I do so because I want to change the public perception of foster children. It’s the same reason I like to tell our story. And it’s the same reason I go out of my way to tell people our daughter is a foster child (before my wife adds that we are trying to adopt her). I don’t want to just save a child’s life. I want to do that, yes, but I also want to do more than that. I want to change the way an entire generation thinks about foster kids and adoption. I want to change the system.
I’m hoping one day my daughter will want to join me. That she will want to tell her story.
I want to use our story as a weapon to change people’s perception. I want to use our stories to help change the system. I want to inform people and blaze a path and open doors for other people to walk through.
That is the choice each of us has with the story we have been given.
All of us have a past. And none of us has a perfect past. So everyone has a story.
Every story can be used as a weapon against you or as a weapon of change. It all depends on how you wield that weapon. Too many of us let our past be used as a weapon against us. We hide it or deny it or try to change it. But we don’t have to do that. We can use it as a weapon of change or a weapon of encouragement instead of a weapon we ourselves are wounded with.
Each of us has a story to tell. One day we can all look back like Joseph and say, “what you meant for evil, God meant for good.” We each have the opportunity to take our story and plant it like a flag that others can walk past and know someone else has traveled that way before. Each of us can take our story and make it a guidepost to point others the correct direction. And each of us has the opportunity to take our story and make it a weapon to help clear the weeds and undergrowth that clog the path.
That’s what I want to do. That’s what I want my family to do. I want our story to blaze a trail through the forest for others to be able to walk.
You see, sometimes a picture with an indistinguishable face is just poor quality photography. And sometimes it’s a whole lot more than that.
