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'A Diligent Servant
in Foster Care': Gina loves to help her parents give individualized
attention
By Janette McConnell
 Kim and Travis
Parker have been devoted and effective foster parents with Alabama Baptist
Children's Homes partly due to the energetic, faithful involvement of their
10-year-old daughter Gina.
"Everybody in my family is adopted, except for my mom and dad," Gina
declares. She delights in helping her special needs sister Kimber and baby
brother Benjamin.
Gina's enthusiasm about giving individualized attention has carried over
into the help she gives to foster children in the Parker home.
"She's a giver and is always willing to give," Travis said. For example, in
the mornings when the Parkers have had babies as foster children, Gina has
seized every opportunity to help Kim feed breakfast.
Gina has been an extraordinary source of comfort to several foster children
in the Parker home. According to her parents, she has shown an unusual
ability to reassure the foster children that God is in control, regardless
of their life circumstances.
Gina became an especially close friend with one particular foster sister.
They played together, argued a little, but talked a lot.
 "It was hard
listening to her talk about her parents. She really missed her parents,"
Gina remembered. "I reminded her that one day God would bring her to the
right family, a very special family."
Gina cried for two or three days after that foster child and her brother
left. "I haven't heard from them since they left, but I know they're with
the family God chose just for them," Gina said. "When I think about the good
times we had, I'm not sad anymore."
Dancing in Gina's head are dreams of becoming a schoolteacher or a
beautician someday. She's getting more than her share of training nowadays,
however, for her greatest ambition - to become a foster mother for Alabama
Baptist Children's Homes. |
