Hello, and welcome to Catechance's Live. I'm Psych Hill at your host. So happy to be back with you on this Monday afternoon. Maybe it's a Monday evening where you are even a Tuesday morning.

And as we always say wherever you are, we're just glad you're here with us. Thank you so much for spending the time with us.

Oh, it's always so nice to get back here on a Monday, but boy, do we have a show for you today? Steve Ray, I mean, it's pretty hard to be Steve Ray.

The very popular Steve Ray will be here with the second hour. And we're going to talk about the mother of God, who is Mary?

And we'll get the Steve Ray take on that, which is always fun to get. So that'll be second hour. This first hour, you know, we have a month and a day and a week for just about everything now is mostly for the greeting card companies to sell things.

But May is a special month, and it's one worth paying attention to. It's national foster care month. And this is something that maybe we should talk a bit more about as Catholic people, as Christian people.

About what we can do to help children in dire situations. Now, one of the things you can do certainly is foster a child, but it's not the only thing that you can do as far as helping children in the foster care situation.

So this hour, we have a wonderful guest here with us. I've gotten to speak with her before on another ministry that she founded called Springs in the desert. That's a Catholic ministry devoted to helping women and couples struggling with infertility to process and move beyond their grief and find the fruitfulness God's plan for their marriage.

But in that ministry and the course of that ministry, the Springs in the desert ministry, she also co-founded with her husband Springs of love, which is a ministry meant to encourage educated and equipped Catholics to discern and live out the call to foster and adopt our guest this hour Kimberly Hankel. Hi, Dr. Hankel.

Hello, I'm so happy to be here.

I'm well, we're so happy to have you and this is something, you know, sometimes you just kick yourself and go, well, we should have been talking about this for years, but when we got to know you, that we have the opportunity to talk about it. So maybe give us a little bit of your story, how you ended up both founding a ministry for folks who are struggling with infertility and then founding a ministry to help people move into the foster care and adoption world.

Yes, well, is really, you know, how God uses our struggles to bring about good in the world. So my husband and I had graduated from the John Paul II Institute for studies on marriage and family and we're hoping to have a very large family and just found after several years, we were just not getting pregnant at all.

It was very discouraging feeling very isolated in our struggle and where I was very blessed to run into an old friend from grad school and co shoot and she and I both talked about our mutual just struggles with infertility and how just such a lack of support in the church, nobody was really talking about it.

We decided to, I mean, it was sort of like God called us to this. We were not trying to set out to start a ministry. We ended up somebody asked us to write an academic article about the topic and in the end of that, we ended up feeling like this is God is calling us to start this ministry. So we started springs and the desert and and that's been just such a gift and so amazing.

My husband and I continued in our struggle and really just praying about and looking for the fruitfulness that God was calling us to, as we say, we started becoming open. Well, we were open to adopting and just looking at adoption. It just felt, you know, it was just the expense of it and it was just it seemed very overwhelming to me.

We looked at some agencies and the doors were just shutting and I said, you know, why don't we look into fostering. I had heard about foster to adopt where you can actually sign up to foster with the expectation of the hope, the desire to adopt and so they kind of match you with children that are possibly going to be able to be adopted.

Not always, you know, that's not always going to happen, but so we started pursuing that avenue and just we're blown away at the need just absolutely blown away.

There's over 400,000 children in foster care and we had no idea, just no idea. And here, you know, I had been working for I worked for a pro life organization.

My husband's, you know, always been very committed to helping in the pro life arena and we were just so surprised, you know, why haven't we heard anything about this, you know, in the Catholic church, we really hadn't heard much.

You know, the Catholic charities in our areas weren't doing adoptions anymore and, you know, we just were like, okay, but why are we not hearing anything about this.

So anyway, we started on our journey. We ended up fostering and we're very blessed to adopt our little son Anthony and then soon after we were able to adopt to twin girls who were just about to enter the foster care system and we were able to adopt them just before that.

And then when the triplets because they're only five months apart, so suddenly we had three babies when they were four years old, we were able to foster our little John Paul and we did not know again if if that would end up for, you know, as adopting.

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