Arlington Heights foster parents describe power of prayer

For more than a decade, the Arlington Heights home of Beth and George Drost has welcomed 47 children on a temporary basis, providing a brief respite for families in crisis.

Now in their early 70s, the foster parents who raised three children of their own continue to answer a question one of their parents used to ask at the dinner table: What did you do for humanity today?

"I started to be convinced that George and I needed to do something for children," said Beth, recalling how they began volunteering with Safe Families for Children. "People ask me all the time, 'Why?' Why? I don't know. Grace. Was it something that God put in my head?"

"Prayer helps us to work through answers that are difficult," she added, speaking to a crowd of local religious leaders, politicians and community members Thursday at the 32nd annual Arlington Heights Mayor's Community Prayer Breakfast.

Throughout life's moments, Beth said she's turned to prayer to help make sometimes difficult choices: to go back to college for a master's degree in gerontology, take a job with Lutheran Home as director of an assisted living facility, then briefly retiring, before returning to work as director of senior ministry at First Presbyterian Church in Arlington Heights.

For her husband, George, whom she met while attending Augustana College in the 1960s, he says it was the so-called "compulsatory" chapel services he and classmates attended that helped him consider service to others.

"It helped me reach outside of myself and out of my comfort zones," said George, a local attorney and founding partner in Drost Kivlahan McMahon & O'Connor.

In later years, George Drost got involved in efforts to deliver medical supplies to Cuba, helping build a well and a church in Ghana, providing legal assistance in an asylum case, and helping with income tax returns at Cabrini Green.

The breakfast Thursday morning at the DoubleTree by Hilton hotel also included prayers, scripture readings and performances by Irish tenor Paddy Homan. The Arlington Heights event started as an offshoot to the national breakfast that began in 1953 under President Dwight D. Eisenhower.