In today's episode Leslie interviews Joe and Meghan Tucker about homeschooling and foster care. You'll be encouraged as they share their story in their heart to show Christ's love to those who so desperately need to see it. This is a great follow up to last week's episode, Hospitable Homeschooling, which is linked down below!

Leslie (00:00):

Hey there everybody. Welcome to the Homeschooling Family Podcast. Here we discuss just about everything that comes into play when you're a Christian homeschooling family. I'm Leslie nunnery, and on today's podcast, I'll be talking to Joe and Megan Tucker about homeschooling and foster care. You'll be encouraged as they share their story in their heart to show Christ's love to those who so desperately need to see it. This is really a great followup to "Hospitable Homeschooling", which we talked about last week. For God can use your willingness to open your home this way in such incredible ways. I guarantee you'll be encouraged as the Lord opens your eyes to the needs of others and how you can be part of meeting those needs and pointing them to Jesus. So let's dive right into our conversation with Joe and Megan.

Leslie (00:52):

Hey there everybody. And welcome back. This weekend, we are going to be looking at another [inaudible] that I think a lot of us have probably considered and prayed about that. But I'm not sure that enough of us have gotten over the hump of fear. So we're going to be talking to Joe and Megan who are foster parents, and I'm going to just let them introduce themselves to you here for a second. And then we're going to talk to them about their experience as foster parents and how that has affected their family life, their parenting, their homeschool, and I'm sure even more fingers that they see from this. So, Joe and Megan, thank you so much for joining us.

Joe (01:36):

Yeah, absolutely. It's our pleasure. Thanks for having us.

Leslie (01:39):

Well, you're very welcome. Can you guess just a little bit of insight into your family, you know, where are y'all from? How many children you have, how long have you homeschooled? That would be very interesting in this.

Megan (01:51):

Yeah, I am Megan Tucker and we live in the Nashville area. Um we have three boys, sixth grade, third grade and kindergarten. And we've been homeschooling for seven years now. Six or seven years. Yeah. And um,

Joe (02:05):

Yeah, I'm Joe and, uh, I also live in the Nashville area.

Leslie (02:10):

[laughs] That's so nice you live together! That's a beautiful thing.

Joe (02:14):

Yeah, we, um, we, uh, been married since 2004 and um, yeah, we, uh, homeschooling has been an incredible blessing to our family and um, and to our children,

Leslie (02:29):

How did the Lord first lay on your hearts or put in your minds the idea of fostering and then, you know, kind of where did that, that little spark of thought take you?

Joe (02:41):

We, like so many ways in my life. You know, you, you think that, uh, you know, your plan for things is one way and, uh, and then the Lord shows you otherwise. And that, that has been the case with us for, for foster care. We, we always thought that adoption was going to be part of our story. And adoption has a big place in our family. Meg's sister, she and her husband have four biological children and then five children that they have either adopted or fostering themselves. And because our children have, uh, have been around that. And we've been around that, that's kind of the road that we thought we were going to go down. And, um, we went through three or four different adoption scenarios through, uh, agencies internationally through private adoptions, internationally,

Megan (03:38):

Even were placed with children. We had a couple of placements. The doors kept closing.

Joe (03:44):

Yeah, the Lord just kept closing those doors. And, and we were heartbroken. We, we didn't understand what was happening and, um, because our hearts were set on that. And then,