meeting you right where you are on your foster care journey this is the forgotten podcast i truly believe

that we were in the moment supposed to raise these kids love them experience life with them to prepare them

for this next family that would come along. And I just, again, I think

it's just God's way of working and he knows what's best. So I will let him make that decision.

Hello and welcome back to the Forgotten podcast. I am your host, Jamie Cave, and I am so very glad you are here with me today.

If you're part of the foster care community, passionate about serving or simply interested in

learning more, I'm just, I'm so happy you're here. We are talking about a tough topic in today's

episode. It has to do with the word no. No can make us uncomfortable,

especially in this world where we're all about saying yes to God and stepping up to the plate.

But how do we know when it's time to say no? In this episode, AJ and Katrina Novachik openly

share about the hard times in their lives when they've had to say no.

They talk about God's important role every step of the way, why there is no formula for making a decision in foster care, and how we can all get better at surrendering control.

I hope this episode supports you and challenges you along your journey.

All right, let's get right to it.

Here's my conversation with AJ and Katrina Novachik.

Well, AJ and Katrina, it is really, really good to have you on the show today. It is really always special for me to be able to interview both a husband and a wife. And I'm excited to hear from both of you. So let's talk first about your journey to foster care. But I want to ask you at this angle, was this something you dreamed of when you guys were first young and in love

and getting together? Yeah. So from childhood, I do vaguely remember one family who had fostered,

and that was my only experience with foster care. And it never really crossed my mind that this could be something

we would would eventually do. It probably wasn't until I graduated, so we got married in college,

and then after graduation, I started working at a residential treatment facility. And after getting

to know some of these girls that I was working with,

it became very clear that these girls had been placed in numerous foster homes that were not safe,

...