*Note: May is National Foster Care Awareness Month. This review is in honor of foster families around the world.
Our Family Is Not a Tree by Laura Boonstra offers readers an important lesson in perspective. She invites us into a deeply vulnerable journey — one never intended for general consumption — until the brokenness and chaos of the world compelled her to write her family’s story. Her writing gives readers an ordinary perspective on profoundly moving stories.
Laura, her husband Phil, and two young boys said, “Yes.” Yes to opening their quaint, tidy home and lives to unpredictability, disruption, and sometimes lice! They said, “Yes!” to becoming a foster family to refugees. This book is a collection of stories about how being refugee foster parents changed them. They are no longer just a family of four; they have now swelled into various iterations of family and extended family.
Accepting God’s call can be frightening. Sometimes we believe the timing is wrong and make excuses not to listen. For some of us, all we feel is overwhelm–fear of what God’s call will require of us, our family, our friends, our time. The thought of someone misinterpreting our motivations can be paralyzing. Laura, too, describes these very relatable thoughts and challenges the reader with what she’s learned about God’s timing.
Laura shares how God prepared her and her family. Through Laura’s writing, we are shown how God not only equipped her family for the journey but also went ahead of them, preparing the way. And why wouldn’t God do this? Why wouldn’t God prepare the way for us? We are God’s hands and feet in this world. God is at work through us. The path may not always be predictable, smooth, or clearly marked, but God has gone ahead and will carry us through.
Through this book, Laura shares stories of others for whom God has gone ahead:
- the frightened parent sending their child with a stranger to safety in another country,
- the confused children held in detention centers,
- the angry boy who needed to run,
- the trembling child who protested their meals,
- the anxious siblings reuniting with their father, seeking asylum in a foreign land.
It is scary to obey God’s call. The timing may never feel right to us. But perhaps it’s not about our timing. God may be timing events to accommodate the lives being woven together and to join paths that need to connect. Laura and her family embody this kind of obedience to God’s call. She shows us that when we accept God’s timing, we are trusting God to give us perspective on something bigger.
The youngest Boonstra child shares this perspective most clearly for me:
Our little one was growing more comfortable in the church pew. Just as she picked up our family’s linguistic idiosyncrasies, she was also learning all of the liturgical patterns of the church. Every time she sneezed and someone said, “Bless you,” she would respond, “And keep you.”
Bless you and keep you.
And KEEP you.
To be blessed is a gift. It places us in a position to share God’s goodness with others. When God blesses you, God prepares you for the journey. When God keeps you, God sustains you in that journey—holding you, protecting you, carrying you forward.
- To the frightened parent who had to let their child go: the Lord keep you.
- To the confused children in detention centers: the Lord keep you.
- To the angry boy who needed to run: the Lord keep you.
- To the trembling child who could not eat: the Lord keep you.
- To the anxious father seeking asylum reunited with his children—after weeks, months, or years of separation: the Lord keep you.
Our Family Is Not a Tree is evidence of God who continues to go ahead in the journey. Laura continues to say, “Yes.” She doesn’t say yes in her timing, but in God’s timing. This book is an encouragement to those afraid to say, “Yes!” Her words open our eyes to truths unfolding in the world. These are stories of real children living real lives–children who have names and who have families. And it’s a book about an ordinary family that has grown in extraordinary ways.
In the end, Our Family Is Not a Tree is more than a collection of stories—it is a quiet invitation. It invites us to trust more deeply in God’s guidance. This is a book about perspective–remaining open to the unexpected ways God may be calling us. You may not be asked to open your home in the same way, but you will likely find yourself asking where you are being invited to say, “Yes!” And perhaps that is the lasting gift of this book: not just that it moves you, but as Laura would say, that it asks you to do the next right thing: to learn more about refugees, unaccompanied youth, families seeking asylum, and the courage to trust that God will both bless you and keep you.
2 Responses
Great article! Thanks Megan for sharing this.
Megan, you have captured Laura’s heart and life so well. Beautifully written! May we all say “yes” to the next right step as Laura has modeled for us.