Our family’s story of a false CPS report, public-school hostility, and the cost to a foster child.
There is a kind of suffering that belongs to life in a fallen world. It is unavoidable. This world is broken by sin, and because of that, painful things happen—even to good people. Sometimes that suffering comes simply because the world is not as it should be. Often, it also comes through our own sinful choices and foolishness and how it affects others.
But there is another kind of suffering. This is the suffering bound up with God’s purposes—purposes we often cannot see clearly in the moment, but which will one day be revealed in glory. Scripture teaches us to distinguish between these two kinds of suffering. The Apostle Paul, though beaten, shipwrecked, and afflicted in countless ways, called his sufferings “light momentary affliction” compared with the eternal weight of glory being prepared for him (2 Corinthians 4:17). He says we are jars of clay, cracked and fragile, so that the surpassing power of God may be seen in us–through the cracks, so-to-speak (2 Corinthians 4:7–9).
In our case, these two kinds of suffering collided. And a little girl we loved got caught in the middle of it.
Her name was Nova.
Nova’s Story
She was our foster daughter for six months. She came to us when she was only two-and-a-half years old, and from the very beginning, we loved her. She entered our home as a tiny child who had already seen too much of this world’s brokenness. And what should have been simple and ordinary for any little girl—feeling safe, taking consistency for granted, loving with warmth, and craving affection— none of these things had been given to her as it should have been.
Overnight, Nova went from a life of neglect and instability to a home full of people who were happy and glad to receive her. She had a mommy, a daddy, three brothers, two sisters, and a house full of life. We live on a little patch of land with chickens, goats, dogs, cats, a pond behind the house, and even a very friendly turkey who somehow thinks she belongs in everyone’s lap. And so to a casual observer, it probably seemed like Nova had won the lottery. Could there be a better place for a child to thrive?
But love does not erase pain in a single day.
Children who have been neglected do not always know what to do with safety when they first find it. Even when they are welcomed into a peaceful home, part of them still braces for disappointment. A child who has lived through neglect, abuse and instability often carries fear that she cannot explain. She may pull close one moment and shrink back the next. She may resist comfort, test boundaries, or seem unsettled by ordinary routines. Not because she is bad, but because she has learned, in her own little way, how to survive a hard world.
That was part of Nova’s story.
For her, this was the first kind of suffering I spoke of earlier—the kind that comes from living in a fallen world. She had done nothing to deserve what happened to her. She was not reaping the consequences of her own choices. She was just a little girl caught in the wreckage of other people’s sin, and like so many children in foster care, she bore wounds she could not yet put into words.
So we loved her patiently.
We gave her structure, warmth, and consistency. We fed her, comforted her, and welcomed her into the rhythms of our home. We tried to show her, day after day, that she was safe. And the routines of life helped with this. There were animals to feed, siblings to play with, meals around the table, bedtime routines, church on Sundays, and a family that was learning to love her not as a project, but as our daughter in every way that mattered to the heart.
Of course, Nova’s situation was made even harder by her medical needs. She had Type 1 diabetes, which meant daily insulin injections, careful meals, and constant attention. She was carrying more than any little child should have to carry. But even in that, we saw her courage, her sweetness, and the way she was beginning to settle into the life we shared.
And little by little, she began to flourish.
She loved the animals. She especially loved that turkey I mentioned, who grew to love Nova’s generous hugs (you’ve never seen anything so hilarious). She loved being part of a noisy, active household. She loved church too. She was learning hymns and little Christian phrases. One of my favorite memories is how she would try to say, “I forgive you,” but instead would often say, “I forgot,” which, in its own way, was both adorable and profoundly theological.
Most of all, she was beginning to trust.
That kind of trust does not grow all at once. It grows slowly, through hundreds of ordinary acts of love: being held when upset, fed when hungry, spoken to gently, tucked into bed, welcomed each morning, and cared for through every difficulty.
And after six months, it was beginning to look more and more like we might be able to adopt her. We were praying about this. We were hoping for it.
And then everything changed.
Do Not Be Surprised When Faithfulness Is Opposed
Up to this point, the suffering we had known with Nova was the ordinary kind that comes from living in a broken world. She had already been wounded by the sins of others, and we were trying to love her through the wreckage. But what came next was something else entirely. This was not merely sorrow or pain. It was injustice. Not merely hardship, but false accusation and slander.
Our family was thrown into a storm we did not create, and because Nova’s placement was still legally fragile, she bore the heaviest cost.
Here is some of the backstory:
I have spent much of my ministry serving in congregations with Lutheran schools, and at my current church we have had the joy of building one from the ground up. God has blessed that work abundantly.
Yet, as the school has grown, so also has resentment in parts of the community. There have always been those who look at Christian education with suspicion and hostility, as though the existence of our school were somehow an act of theft against the public school system. It’s sounds ridiculous, I know. And mostly, the absurdity and hostility stayed in the background. We in turn, kept serving and rejoicing in what God was doing through our church and school.
Now to be clear, my wife and I have never been anti-public school. In fact, four of our children attend public school, including our special-needs, seven-year-old son, and we have been deeply grateful for the teachers, staff, and specialists who have cared for him. We thank God often for this blessing.
Which is why what happened next felt so vicious.
We learned that someone connected to the public school administration—not the teachers or specialists who actually cared for our children—filed a false CPS report against us.
Why?
Petty hatred for the fact that we were supporters of Christian education.
They accused my wife and me of supplying drugs to our children. Seriously! They accused us of neglect. They claimed we were allowing our special-needs son to harm Nova. It was absurd. It was slander. And in an instant, our world was thrown into chaos.
CPS opened investigations. Our children were pulled into interviews. We had to answer horrifying allegations before both child services and law enforcement. Of course, the charges were quickly dismissed, in part because CPS already knew our family through our two previous foster adoptions. And in short, CPS recognized the claims for what they were–ridiculous. But by then the damage was done.
Because Nova’s case was still legally unsettled, the false allegations and the investigation triggered her automatic removal from our home.
A lie was told. The lie was dismissed. And yet the child was still taken.
That is the part I still struggle to say without anger.
At first we were told the investigation could take weeks. We could not bear the thought of Nova being shuffled from one temporary home to another while strangers sorted through accusations they already knew were false. So we made the agonizing decision to ask that, if possible, she be placed directly with another adoptive family to spare her even more instability.
It broke us.
We were already reeling from the betrayal, the accusations, the interviews, the sick feeling of watching our biological and adopted children carry stress no child should have to carry. But then we had to prepare to lose Nova too.
And when the moment came, what could we even say? How do you explain to a little girl that the people she trusts are about to disappear from her life forever because adults in positions of authority told lies?
We told her only that she was going for a ride with some ladies (the CPS agents).
She thought she was coming home.
I feel her hugging my leg one last time, looking up at me, and saying, “I love you, Daddy. See you soon.”
That was the last time I saw her.
I cannot begin to imagine what she thought that night—dropped into a strange home, cut off from Mommy and Daddy, from her brothers and sisters, from the dogs, the cats, the chickens, the goats, even the turkey that loved her hugs. She was old enough to feel the loss, but too young to understand the betrayal.
That is what makes this so hard to forgive: whoever did this did not merely make life difficult for us. They tore a little girl away from the only family she knew, and they did it on the strength of a lie. They did it because of petty hatred for a Christian school where I am pastor and my wife teaches.
So how does anyone survive suffering like this?
Respond Like Christ: With Truth, Restraint, and Trust
What kept returning to me was a line from Peter’s letter, one I could not set aside no matter how restless my mind became: “When He was reviled, He did not revile in return” (1 Peter 2:23). I wrestled with this because if I am honest, “reviling in return” was EXACTLY what I wanted to do.
Something dangerous stirs in you when the people you love are harmed. It is immediate, hot, almost instinctive. When people lie about your family, when your child is wounded, when you watch injustice unfold and feel like your hands are tied, everything in you wants to push back. You want to answer with words that hurt. You want to pull hidden things into the light. You want those who caused the pain to feel some measure of it themselves.
That was the struggle living inside me—inside us.
What happened to Nova, and to our family with her, should never have happened. But because it happened in a public school, there was an added sting. Because public schools are supported by ordinary families, entrusted with ordinary children, and they should be places where families are served, not targeted. And Christian families should not be punished by schools for holding Christian convictions. That felt plain to us then, and it feels plain to me now.
And yet, for all that clarity, we kept meeting another truth, one I did not always want to accept. What was this other truth?
We were not free to respond in whatever way our anger wanted.
That was hard for me—harder than I expected.
A Faithful Response
It would be easier if all faith ever required of us was silence in the face of injustice. Silence is at least straightforward. But what we were being called to was less clean and more costly: to tell the truth without being consumed by the need to wound and attack.
And this is where 1 Peter 2:23 kept coming back to me. I kept thinking of Christ—not in the abstract, but as the One who was lied about, cornered, misunderstood, publicly shamed. Jesus did not answer falsehood with falsehood. He did not manipulate circumstances. He spoke the truth and entrusted Himself to the Father will. That did not make suffering feel easy for Him and it doesn’t make it easy for us. It does not remove humiliation, pain or fear. But it does give our suffering some contour and shape. Looking to Christ in our suffering keeps suffering from collapsing into chaos. He shows us there is a way to endure wrong without being shaped by the wrong done to us.
I needed that! Because a phrase like “turn the other cheek” sounds nobler on the page than it does in a crisis. When Jesus taught this to His disciples, He certainly didn’t mean to imply evil is acceptable or should be ignored. He didn’t intend for a parent to just stand by while a child is harmed. Nor did He mean for lies to go unanswered simply to preserve the appearance of peace. When Christ spoke in this proverbial way, He was not giving us a cop-out from parsing the difficult tension between revenge and righteousness and between retaliation and protection.
There is nothing unchristian about speaking the truth plainly. Christians can seek help. We can use lawful means and attorneys. We can pursue accountability. We can refuse to cooperate with falsehood. But what are we NOT permitted to do? We must not let hatred shape our response. We must not let rage take the wheel. We cannot answer sin with more sin and then, in self-righteous zeal, baptize our behavior and call it courage.
All true. But let me assure you, these distinctions sound noble in retrospect. None of it feels noble when you are in the middle of it. It’s just exhausting.
And one thing is for sure: when drama fills our lives during conflict, lies spread quickly—it’s disorienting. Lies travel at light speed, slipping from mouth to mouth, from inbox to inbox, and from suspicion to settled opinion before you have even have a chance to understand what is happening. Lies always arrive before you do. Lies introduce you before you can speak for yourself. Truth, by contrast, seems to walk with a limp. It always comes later, takes longer, and requires effort. And by the time it catches up, the damage has already been done.
These are the moments that test a Christian’s integrity.
A line from the Psalms became precious to me: “May integrity and uprightness preserve me, for I wait for You.” I returned to it again and again, not because waiting was easy, but because the psalmist here gives an honest description of faithful endurance. The accusations were false and there was no wisdom in letting ourselves be driven frantic by every rumor, every whispered conversation, every closed-door conclusion we could neither reach nor control. All we could do was tell the truth when given the chance, and then we had to wait on the Lord to do the rest.
I do not say that lightly. We are still considering our legal options. Waiting can feel like weakness when your child has been hurt. It can feel passive, even negligent. But there is a kind of waiting that is not passivity at all. There is a waiting that is active, disciplined, prayerful—a refusal to let bitterness become your master. And sometimes, I think, this is one of the fiercest forms of spiritual warfare there is.
Bitterness is not your friend when you’re weighing your options. All it wants is vengeance.
But there remains this narrow place a Christian must walk: to act confidently and faithfully without handing the heart over to vengeance, even when vengeance wants to reach into your prayers, taint your conversations, and permeate your sleep.
And it’s there—in the tension, the weariness, that painful effort not to lose ourselves—that the comfort of Christ has become something more. In all my 17 years of being a pastor, never have I felt more strongly that Jesus is much more than a mere example for those who suffer unjustly. He is, more importantly, the SAVIOR of those who suffer unjustly.
He knows, from within human flesh, what it is like to be lied about, misrepresented, mocked, and condemned. And He entered fully into this kind of sorrow. Not just to leave us a pattern, but to redeem us—by His holy, precious blood and by His innocent suffering and death.
And I can honestly say, that this truth has mattered more to me in all this mess than I can fully say, because when pain becomes personal, you do not need distant religious language or a blueprint guide. What you truly need is to know you are not walking a road your Lord has never walked. You need to know that He understands not only injustice in general, but this kind of injustice—your injustice—the kind that wakes you in the night, tightens your chest, and tempts you to become someone harsher than you were before.
So this hard chapter of our story did not leave me with a simple lesson. It did not end in a tidy slogan like “stay quiet” or “fight back.” It left us with something narrower, humbler, and harder won:
Tell the truth.
Protect your family.
Use the means God has placed before you.
Love your enemies.
Keep your conscience clean.
And leave room for God to judge rightly.
This is not cowardice. It’s not really courage, either. It is not surrender nor weakness disguised as piety.
It is the difficult path of trying to live as a Christian while still feeling the bite of very human wounds and scars that won’t easily fade.
And if Christ can be seen in us anywhere in this story, I hope it is not only in the arguments we made or the truths we insisted on, but in the way we tried—haltingly, imperfectly, sometimes through tears—to endure what was done without letting it finally make us into its likeness.
And if you have struggled in this way, I’d love to hear your story.
Reach out or comment.
O Lord, open my lips... 