The Foster Child Whose Room Was Already Painted

When Marcus Davis was eleven years old, he had been through six placements in the Kansas City foster system. He had learned to keep his shoes by the bed and his expectations low. So when his caseworker told him a couple in Overland Park wanted to meet him, he shrugged. "What do they even know about me?" he muttered.

What Marcus didn't know was that David and Rosa Herrera had already read every page of his file. They knew he loved astronomy. They knew he struggled with math but devoured science fiction. They knew about the telescope his birth mother had given him before she lost custody — the one that got lost in his third placement.

When Marcus walked through their front door for the first visit, he stopped cold. The bedroom they had prepared had glow-in-the-dark stars mapped across the ceiling in actual constellations. On the desk sat a refractor telescope, not expensive, but real. Rosa had even stacked three paperbacks by Arthur C. Clarke on the nightstand.

"How did you know?" Marcus whispered.

David knelt beside him. "We've known about you for a while, son."

That is the startling intimacy of John 1:43-51. Before Nathanael ever decided to "come and see," Jesus had already seen him — beneath the fig tree, beneath the skepticism, beneath every defense. The Almighty does not discover us when we finally show up. He has been preparing a place that fits the shape of who we already are, and who we are becoming. "You will see greater things than these," Jesus promised. The room was ready long before Nathanael walked through the door.