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“What we are trying to figure
out how to do is to motivate the church to go get these kids. In America
right now, there are about 700,000 ids currently in the foster care system.
About 125,000 of them, the parental rights are already terminated and they
are ready to be adopted today.” Meet the Kirks, who are leading by example,
and still find time for music, too.
Dare to Love: Changing the
World One Child at a Time
Joe and Betsy Kirk share insights from 10 years of experience adopting special needs children. Come hear a vision for how your family and your church can model the Father’s love by providing permanent homes for needy children.—2003 Cornerstone Festival program The program announcement was inviting enough to encourage a very different type of audience to this Tollbooth Talk. Young couples laid out blanket play areas for toddlers. Slightly older siblings shyly met new playmates while their parents enjoyed a proper breakfast graciously provided by the Kirks before settling in to listen to one family’s saga. A family that the moderator introduced as revolutionaries. . . Linda LaFianza: I first met Joe Kirk’s family a few summers ago when all the kids and boxes of pre-release Vigilantes of Love CD piled onto a golf cart he was piloting arrived at my campsite. Over the years, we’ve gotten to know each other a little bit better, and I’ve always found Joe Kirk to be an incredibly thoughtful, dynamic, passionate, intelligent person who is very well spoken; an incredible communicator. His story was one I could not keep to myself. Last spring, I encouraged him to share it at Cornerstone Festival. He was a little hesitant because he and Becky weren’t telling their story that much at that point, but they were getting ready to. So that’s why I’m saying this might be the birth of a new epoch. I present to you a pair of revolutionaries who could well bring the American church to complete revival. Here are the Kirks. First Steps
Joe Kirk: No pressure! Good God, I’m going to cry! Thank you. Becky Kirk: Good morning. Joe Kirk: Come on in, everybody. There are donuts. Get very comfortable. We are going to be as informal as can be. Somehow, Cornerstone does not feel like a place to be formal. We want a lot of interaction. Let me say first that we really appreciate Linda LaFianza giving us this chance. We have been coming here a long time. I actually drove to the first Cornerstone, from Florida to Chicago, because I had to see Mike Roe, and there was no other chance to see the 77s. We have been coming here a long time, have been at every festival they’ve had here at the farm, have raised our children here, and it is just really special to be able to tell our story and give some of the vision that we believe that God has given us for the church; and to be able to do that here. I hope she is right. I hope it is the beginning of something. I appreciate The Phantom Tollbooth stretching out and being more than just press conferences. Again, we are Joe and Betsy Kirk. We are from Atlanta, Georgia. What we want to do today, for the first twenty minutes or so, is just tell you our story and give you some feeling of the experience God has taken us through. I know from talking to other people here, there are a number of people here who have adopted themselves. We’re not trying to say today that our story is somehow better or normative for everybody, but we have learned some things in the last ten years of our marriage through what God has done in adoption and we are going to tell our story and see if it touches you-all. Second, we want to give some ideas of what we’ve been learning from it and things that we think that we could be doing in the church. And then we want to open it up for a lot of discussion. Some of you may have better stories than ours, and we may need to hear that. The story really starts with Betsy, so we’ll start with her. Betsy Kirk: Good morning. In 1990, we were living in Augusta, Georgia. At that time, we had tried for many years to have children, and were finally blessed with three beautiful, blond daughters. I got the privilege of staying home while Joe had to go out and make a living as a manager. We had a great house in a wonderful neighborhood. We were very involved with our local church. We were the perfect model for a Christian family. We had it all. We would’ve made [Dr. James] Dobson proud. [laughter] Joe Kirk: Spanked our kids and everything. Betsy Kirk: Yes! [laughter] But we realized that there was something missing. I felt overwhelmed that our lives were totally, totally focused on us. That did not seem right. I felt convicted by that, and Joe did, too. I realized part of the big thing for me is, I came from a very dysfunctional family. I know that is the catch-phrase of the age, but you have to understand, that when I was in first grade, I came down with something called encephalitis and my parents were informed that pretty much, I was labeled as mentally retarded, and for the rest of my life, that was how my parents introduced me. ‘This is Betsy, our retarded child.’ When I became a Christian, I was so blown away by God’s unconditional love for me. I can’t tell you the freedom that came in that. I realized that, because of that, I wanted to share that with others, and show other people that they can be freed by receiving unconditional love. I wanted to do that both as a parent, and to show people, my children especially, the love of Jesus. So I felt compelled to do something other than focus on us. So we started looking. Very quickly, we narrowed that down to children, but didn’t know what it meant to minister to children. We started looking into a lot of things. We looked into foster adoption, we looked into unwed pregnant teens, we looked into abortion ministries. Something compelled me towards foster adoption; God’s Holy Spirit, I would imagine. So I started on a fact-finding mission, just trying to get information. I called DCFS up and they were willing to send us out an information package and found out that to foster-adopt in the State of Georgia, where we were at the time, you have to take a ten week class. They were going to send me the information on it and we had forms to fill out and all that. I told them to send it on! The day it arrived in the mail, I was so excited. It’s like finding out you are pregnant. I couldn’t wait for Joe to come home. When he came in the door, I ran up to him. ‘Look what we got in the mail! Let’s fill it out now!’ He looked at me and I realized this wall went up between us. It wasn’t there, but it was there. I didn’t understand it. It was very confusing. I tried to explain to him, ‘Joe I feel like this is what God is calling us to do as a team. I don’t understand what is going on, but this is what I feel God’s doing in our life.’ I handed him all the information, the packet and everything to fill out, and I walked away. And I waited, and I waited, and I waited for a year, and he finally came back to me and said, ‘Okay. We can go to the class, but I’m not committing to anything. I’m committing to go to the class. I’m not committing to foster, I’m not committing to adopt, but I’m committing to go to the class.’ And I said, ‘Okay!’ And he said, ‘Well, find out when it is.’ So I did, and I came back to him and he said, ‘Okay.’ And I waited, and I waited, another six months for him to finally come back and say, ‘Okay, I’ll go to this one.’ I said, ‘All right,’ and we went to the class with a very reluctant Joe dragging his feet. Joe Kirk: I’m not looking very good in this story, am I? [laughter] All those ladies are saying, ‘Hissssss! Bad, bad husband up there!’ And I don’t look that great in the story, to be real honest, at that point. At the risk of sounding defensive, what I want to do is take you back and talk about what God was doing in my life at that point because what Betsy couldn’t see was, I was wrestling with the same issues she was wrestling with. If you look up extrovert in the dictionary, there is a picture of me there. I process everything very externally, but somehow, on this issue, I couldn’t do it. I had pulled inside and was not talking about the things I was wrestling with. A lot of it was because I was wrestling with two things. The first was the same thing that Betsy was feeling, that God was calling us to do something else. We had actually done ministry before. When I came out of college the first time, I spent four or five years on campus with Intervarsity Fellowship on college campuses so we had done ministry and had really walked away from all that and ended up in this sort of “family values lifestyle” out in suburbia and something just felt wrong. It just felt like we needed to be doing something more. So I was on the same kind of quest for that “something,” whatever it was. But the second thing was, despite all of our little hippie ethic, and hanging out here at Cornerstone, and all of that stuff, that really, we were very, very traditional. I worked and Betsy stayed at home. My career moved me from town to town and when I came home and said, ‘Honey, we need move from Pensacola to Augusta,’ she said, ‘okay,’ and we packed up and went. Basically, our life was based on what I felt called to do. I was realizing that I really had never listened to what God was calling Betsy to do. You know, when you get married, when you talk about the two becoming one, a half of me is sitting in this chair over here. So I thought, half of the message that I’m getting from God, I’m just shutting off, and not hearing it, and Betsy is having to tag along with mine, and she was a good, supportive wife to do that. So I am wrestling with this, this feeling that I need to be listening to Betsy more, and I don’t like this feeling very much. I’m really struggling with it. So I was putting up a lot of resistance, and she was taking the heat, but it really wasn’t her. Really, I was wrestling with God. I was fighting what I thought He was telling us to do and Betsy was just the punching bag in the middle of this thing. But God didn’t let go. He kept getting the message to me, and so eventually, yeah, I agreed to go to the class, but I had to have this door to get out. So I said, ‘We’ll take the class, but at the end of it, if we choose not to foster adopt, you can’t hold that against me. I’m going to go to the class and that’s it, but I will go to the class. I will go to every single one of them, and I won’t bail on that.’ So we went and I gotta tell you, I hated the class. The first week we were there, I just thought I was going to out of my chair. I hated the material, I hated the instructor, I hated everything that was going on. We felt very out of place with the people there, it just wasn’t what I wanted to do. There were things that they were teaching; I don’t know how much you-all have sat through training given by bureaucrats, but it is the most uninspiring stuff in the world. And I wanted to argue with the teacher about everything. But I stuck with it, and every week, I would say, ‘Okay, let’s go,’ and we would drive off to this class every Tuesday night. This was ten years ago, this past winter. The Call
So this is the event we’re at. In fact, just to give you a feel for what this is like, we took our birth children with us. We had three daughters at the time, they were between two and eight, blond girls, cute, wonderful kids. We take them to this thing, and Betsy is sitting at one point, our kids are playing some game, and Betsy is not with them, I’m off in some other part of the building, but she’s close, and she can hear this couple start talking about our children. We all had color-coded nametags, and the kids don’t know what the colors mean, but the adults do. If you’ve got a green nametag, it means you are up for adoption, if you have a blue nametag it means you are not. So you could tell everybody apart. And this couple is watching our children and Betsy hears them say, ‘Oh, honey! Look at the adorable little blond girls! Wouldn’t that be wonderful if we could get these little girls? This is great!’ About that time, one of them turns, and they see the wrong colored nametag and the wife says, ‘Oh, crud! They’ve got parents.’ It was just bizarre, the whole thing. So we go to this, and I really don’t want to be there. Just to make the women really hate me, I can tell you that as we were driving, we were in a minivan, we have two children that have car seats, and then the back seat holds three, and our oldest was in the back seat. I remember looking in the rearview mirror and realizing that there were two empty seats next to our oldest child. I turned to Betsy, and just as rude and nasty as I could, I said, ‘Whatever we do, we can’t get more than two, because that’s all the seats we got, okay.’ And Betsy says, ‘Well, okay, two would be good.’ I’m just fighting the whole thing. This story is going too long, but we get there and they take us in a room and they explain the nametags and kind of how all this thing works. And then they said, ‘So now the kids are going to be out in the other room, go play with them. And oh, by the way, there is a table over here that has information on the kids who couldn’t be here today.’ If any of you are going through the adoption process right now, the Department of Family and Child Services creates these one page sheets with a picture of the child and a little paragraph explaining the history of the kid. 650,000 kids, roughly, in America right now, in Department of Family and Child Services. So they have these notebooks full of these little stories. And they said, ‘There’s a bunch of those over here for kids who couldn’t be here today. You may want to check them out.’ I ran as fast as I could to that table because there were no people there. I didn’t have to deal with the kids, I didn’t have to deal with my wife, I didn’t have to talk to anybody. I just went over and I started flipping through the pages, and everyone is worse than the page before. It’s all, ‘This kid was beat, and this kid was abused and this kid has mental retardation, and this kid has AIDS,’ you are just flipping page after page of this stuff. After a while, you are just numb reading these stories. And as I am flipping through them, and my eyes are just kind of wandering around the room, I glanced up on the wall in front of me, and there is this yellow piece of construction paper. And on it, there were pictures of these four children, four girls, and below the pictures are just their first name and their birthday. That’s all that’s on here. And I looked at that piece of paper and immediately knew that those were my kids. I can’t quite explain what it is that happened. I didn’t hear a voice, but if I had heard a voice, what the voice said to me was, ‘Those are your children. Go get ‘em.’ It really shook me. If there are any fathers here, I can tell you the closest I know to describe it is that feeling you get in the delivery room when your child is born. The man’s kind of separated. The baby is inside the mother, and the mother is feeling it, ‘Oooo, come put your hand here and feel the baby,’ and the guy never has any clue what’s going on. And all of a sudden the baby comes out and you go, ‘[gasps] bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, this is my child,’ and that feeling really overwhelmed me on our three birth kids. I was suddenly feeling that for these strangers that were hanging on the wall. And it shook me; literally shook me. I stood there and shook for ten minutes, staring at that piece of paper, and couldn’t make the feeling go away. So finally, I walked over to Betsy, and I said, ‘Honey, let me watch the kids for a little while. Why don’t you go check out the stuff on the table.’ She says, ‘Okay!’ and she bounces off to the table. I play with our little kids, and about ten minutes later, Betsy comes back and she is white as a sheet. She walks up and looks at me and the first words out of her mouth were, ‘The kids on the yellow sheet of construction paper, they’re ours, and we’re supposed to get them, aren’t we?’ Answering
the Call
Joe Kirk: Yeah! They could not fit in the car. And so now, Betsy drives a fifteen-passenger Ford Club wagon, and just get the heck out of here way, ‘cause she’s the biggest thing on the road. We really had no idea how to respond to it. We didn’t know how we were going to afford it, we didn’t understand anything about the system. We can talk in some details if you want about how adoption works and what the system is like. It turns out the state actually pays you to take the kids off your hands. We didn’t know any of that. We found out later there was financial help, and basically, God has tremendously provided for these kids. The Department of Family and Child Services was scared to death of us when we first talked to them. Because, like good Cornerstone kooks, we went up to them and said, ‘God told us to have these children [laughter] so you need to give them to us now. [laughter]’ They fought and they struggled with us and there was a great moment. If we write a book, this should be title, they finally called us and they said, ‘We have had a lot of debates about you people and why you want these kids that you’ve never met. We’re trying to decide, frankly, if you are kooks.’ They said, ‘We have come to the conclusion that you are. But we have decided you are harmless kooks.’ That’s a great tag line. I can live with that, “harmless kooks.” Living
the Call
Betsy Kirk: Counts for double! Joe Kirk: [laughs] Counts for double, and we have a female dog and we have four female cats. [laughter] We got a male dog and he fought me for control of the women, and he’s gone. [laughter] Lessons
Why Did
We Do It?
We Had A Home And They Needed
One
Betsy Kirk: And if you don’t
have a home, you can support those that do choose to adopt or foster. I
can tell you, some of the most important times for me personally was in
the early days, when we first adopted, we went from three to seven overnight,
and we had three in car seats. That’s a whole different story, but there
were times when I was going out of my mind and I would call a close friend
and that was her role, for me to just call her, whatever time, and say
exactly why am I not throwing this child out the window? [laughs] And she
would go, ‘Well, because of this . . .’ and that was incredibly, incredibly
helpful. People that came in and did our laundry, without me even realizing
it, other people that came in and did mending; we’d have a daughter, we’d
buy her a pair of jeans, she’d go out that day, and they would be totally
trashed when she’d come in that afternoon. So there are tons of things
that even though you may not feel personally called to adopt or foster,
there are things you can do to support those that choose to.
Positives
and Negatives
Betsy Kirk: We already talked about this idea of unconditional love. We brought these children in and gave them unconditional love from us, but also showed them the unconditional love of a father that they had never known. Also, we have given them a safe haven and the support to deal with their issues that they’ve had, whatever those issues are. It takes times to deal with some of the hurt and sorrow and suffering that some of our girls have been through. That is a real positive for them. Joe Kirk: On the negative side, these kids survived by being fiercely independent. Their parents were drug addicts, they lived on the street. Their parents used to drop them off at a truck stop and let them panhandle all day, this is when they were little, five years old. They would panhandle at this truck stop and then their parents would pick them up, take the money, and go buy drugs. After the parents finally passed out that night, the kids would go dig through their pockets, find the spare change and go to the 7-11 and buy junk food. That’s how they survived. They learned to be really, really tough and independent, and all of a sudden, they’re in a family where we’re saying, ‘No, no, no. We’re the parents. We’ll take care of you and you do what we tell you to do and let’s all just love one another. And be nice to your sister and tell her you are sorry and hold her hand.’ And we’re the tenth set of parents in this thing, and frankly, they don’t know if they trust us, and we’re ten years into it. This August will be our tenth anniversary of adoption, and we have some who are still not sure if they really trust that we’re going to stick with them. So it’s pretty tough on them to overcome the toughness that they had to go through. Impact on the
birth kids.
Joe Kirk: If the positive impact on the birth kids is that they learned that blessing comes from obeying God, the negative impact is that they have also learned that blessing doesn’t necessarily mean you are going to be happy. And that is a really big misunderstanding in not just kids, but I think all of us wrestle with. That we think that if God tells us to do something, and we do it, that He’ll make us happy for doing it. We’ll get some goodies. Here comes Santa Claus. Our children went into this very much, they were a part of the decision, and they believed in this. Particularly our oldest, who had been 9 at the time. She absolutely believed that God was just going to make her life great. She was going to have a best friend and all of these wonderful things were going to come, and the Wicked Witch of the West moved in as her roommate! This kid, ah, I’ve got one that’s going to go back and report that! [laughter] Don’t quote me, Katie! That was a tough kid who had survived, the oldest of adopted kids was her roommate, and she was the one who had kept the others alive on the street for all of those years. It was greatly disillusioning to some of the birth kids to realize blessing doesn’t mean it is always going to be fun. I can tell you we have some who are really struggling. We have some kids right now who believe in God, but they don’t think he is a very nice guy because He told them to go do something and they did it, and life has been really difficult since then. That’s a lot to be putting a ten-year-old through. A lot of adults can’t handle that stuff. The other thing on the birth kids is that, any of you that live in suburbia, we moved to suburbia to get our kids away from all of this kind of stuff. We don’t want them to be around crime and drugs and prostitution and all these things. So we take them out to suburbia and we get in these mega churches and we try to keep them safe, and we’ve done that, too. Then we go get all these kids and move them in and make them roommates to our children. So you will be exposing your kids, if you choose to adopt these kids, you will be exposing them to all the stuff that you want to protect them from. And that is a real challenge, it’s a challenge that we think really matters. Impact on the parents.
The other thing is, it has really pulled us together as a couple. It can pull you together or it can pull you apart. You have to do this as a team. There is just no other way to do it. The other thing is, and this was a biggie for me and still is, I’m a big [Dr. James] Dobson believer. You can’t judge yourself on your parenting; your identity can’t be as a parent. Your identity has to be who you are as Christ, and that is a biggie for me. Joe Kirk: The negative on us is real simple; it’s exhausting sometimes. A lot of you, I’m sure, deal with very exhausting things, too, so it’s not a competition, it’s merely an exhibition. Please, no wagers! [laughter] Sometimes dealing with the abuse is just really tiring. There are days that I just want them to be normal, I just want everybody to be happy and get along and not have to struggle with stuff. It’s tiring, but I can tell you that there are four kids right now who have hope who did not have hope before. That makes it all worth it. The Vision
But privately, we’ve told this story hundreds and hundreds of times over the past ten years. I see a lot of friends here today, and many of you have heard this story. We constantly hear, ‘Wow, that’s a really cool story, that’s really inspiring, you people are saints,’ etc. etc. In ten years we have never seen anybody actually go adopt a child as a result of hearing this story. We have some friends here today who I tried to take credit for theirs one time and they informed me that, ‘No, no, we were doing this before we met you.’ [laughter] So something seems really wrong to us, that here is this great story, and at the end of it, nothing seems to happen. I’m thinking, __Star Wars__ is a really great story, too, but you know, you go get a burger and move on. Somehow, we want to see that people hear stories like this, stories from others, and then go get these kids. So we have been wrestling the last year with, why is that? What we’ve decided, and Betsy hates the analogy, but it’s kind of like AA. If you come to conclusion that you want to give up drinking and you don’t immediately go join a support group, you are drinking within the next week. You’ve got to have somebody to sort of help you through it and we have not found, in our church at least, a lot of support. Betsy had some friends who really helped us out early on; she was involved in Moms in Touch, if any of you have done that in schools, and those mothers were great support. But for the most part, our church did not know what to do with us. So what we are working on right now, and we would love to work with anyone here to try to develop these ideas, is how can you build a support group within a church that allows families to go adopt kids and deals with all of the issues that the have. Counseling; the State will pay for counseling for our children, not Christian counselors, not the counselors that we want to go to, bureaucratic counselors who are in facilities that really don’t even want to take your kids to sometimes. Dealing with just the struggles you have; support clothes. There are lots of issues that a support structure within the church could actually help parents with. We’ll close with this. In America right now, as I said, there are about 650,000-700,000 kids currently are in the foster care system. About 125,000 of them, the parental rights are already terminated and they are ready to be adopted today. 17% of them will ever be adopted. They will go through the system, they’ll turn 18, the state will turn them loose on the street, and 83% will never find a home. Why is that? Most people who are adopting are driven to adoption because of them having problems having kids themselves. Nothing wrong with that, it is a marvelous thing, particularly for the Pro-life movement, but there aren’t a lot of people who are motivated to go get kids for the kids, rather than for themselves and therefore are willing to take the older kids. We use this phrase “special needs,” if you saw that on the poster, that’s just the phrase that the state uses for anybody that is not an infant, basically. Our kids qualified as special needs because they were a sibling group and they were all over three years old. None of them have physical handicaps or mental handicaps or any of that. There are a lot of kids out there that need homes, and most of them will not find them. Some of them are really severe situations; they have AIDS, they have birth defects, there are some really, really bad situations. But there are a lot of kids that need homes. What we are trying to figure out how to do is to motivate the church to go get these kids. Here is our summary belief on it. Our voice as a pro-life church will be much better if there are no kids who ever go unwanted because the church takes them. [applause] Thank you. Think about how the media portrays the Pro-life movement. We’re wackos. We lived in Pensacola. They shot doctors in Pensacola at abortion clinics and that’s what we’re presented as in the media. If every child the day parental rights were terminated, some church, some local church, stepped in and grabbed that kid, and no kid ever went unwanted, how would the media portray us then? So that’s sort of the bigger picture of what we are trying to accomplish. Let’s open it up to you-all. We’ve talked longer than I thought we would . . . Q &
A
Betsy Kirk: The birth children were 9, 4, and 2. Our adopted children were 8, 7, 6, and 4. Joe Kirk: It actually worked out nice that the oldest birth child is still the oldest and youngest birth child is still the youngest. We basically filled in the gap. And you want to talk about God’s mercy; Betsy actually had four miscarriages. It’s as if God just sort of replaced those four kids, in a really odd way. Sibling
Acceptance
Joe Kirk: Well, we can ask one: Are you happy? Little Kirk: Yeah, sometimes. Betsy Kirk: [laughs] You’ve got to remember these are sisters and they fight like other sisters. The other day, one of our adopted daughters took a tumble off a golf cart and really banged herself up. It was really heartwarming to see all of them surrounding her, getting her drinks. So they are siblings and there is that connection there. It has been very hard, especially for some of them. Some of them our adopted children felt we should have stopped adopting after her, that we should’ve just adopted one because she was so responsible as a “parent,” even as a child, that she didn’t want anymore burdens. So I think that is a really tough question to answer, but that’s the best answer I can give. Joe Kirk: I can give you a practical thing of what we did. I don’t know what will happen in the future, but I do know, and we predicted, we would hit a point where our kids would say, ‘This is the stupidest thing you’ve ever done.’ In fact, we have one who is in counseling right now dealing with the issue of parents are supposed to protect you and her parents went out and dragged all this mess into the house. She’s really struggling with whether or not she trusts us; one of the birth kids. There is this principle in scripture of where you do things in the light to remember in the darkness what God has done; Joshua and the twelve stones, communion, Passover, there are all these examples of where of God does something and later, it is going to be very hard to remember that God did that so you do a physical act to be able to look back to that moment. The day that DCFS called us and said, ‘We’re going to let you have these kids,’ I can remember really clearly, we were sitting in our bedroom and it was like a party. We jumped up and down on the beds and we hooted and hollered, ‘Great! We’re going to have these kids.’ I let the celebration go for about thirty minutes and then we gathered everybody together and did some things as a family to remember that moment. Because I said to them, and one of these kids was two years old so she’s not catching it but the nine-year-old is, ‘There will come a day when you are going to say, “This was the worst decision of your life,” and when that day comes, I want you to look back at this moment.’ So we did some things as a family to remember that moment because, ‘Right now, we know that God’s telling us to do it.’ It is like wedding rings. There was a day when I stood on a platform and I said, ‘I absolutely committing to this person,’ and I have these days where I say, ‘That’s a dumb idea! I’m going somewhere else,’ and on those days, I look at my ring and I say, ‘I remember that day. It was very clear. Right now it is very dark,’ but there was a moment I can latch onto. We did some of that as a family and I think that really helps. Because sure enough, six months was all it took, and I’m sitting on the back steps with my oldest kid and she is in tears and she says, ‘I thought this was going to be the greatest thing in the world, and I’ve got to tell you I hate these kids.’ She was really struggling and I took her back to that moment and said, ‘Remember what God did on that day.’ We’ve had to go back to that moment a lot, and I’m convinced we’ll go back more. Resources
Joe Kirk: Absolutely. There is somebody in particular that we really like. There is a lady named Nancy Thomas who was with a group called the Evergreen Center in Colorado. A lot of these kids suffer from what has now been labeled reactive attachment disorder. It’s the concept of when a child is young, they learn to form attachments. If we’ve got any two-year-olds around here, you stand a two-year-old up on table, and Daddy steps back, they will just free-fall into your arms. They trust you that you are not going to let them get hurt. If during the period where they are developing that trust, if you beat them and neglect them and rape them and abuse them and do all the horrible stuff that people do, they don’t learn to trust. They become fiercely independent and they can’t attach. There is a lot of working being done trying to deal with how do you create that attachment later? The lady that we really like is Nancy Thomas. She has written some wonderful stuff. We have some tapes of hers we’ve listened to. Betsy Kirk: I don’t know about you, but I need very practical advice; they knock this over, you to this. She was really helpful for me, personally, in giving me ideas of very helpful advice on how help handle some of the situations we were having. It was really personally very helpful for me. What else? Joe Kirk: There are a lot of other good resources, but I’ve got to tell you, the thing we think matters the most, and why we are committed to this idea of building these groups in churches, is the idea of the talking to other people. This couple there that are with us, that have adopted kids, too, just go into their house and sitting down and having dinner and talking about it, is what we need the most. Betsy Kirk: And really bouncing ideas off of other people because sometimes, it is really hard to see what is a good idea. It was just really helpful to get somebody else’s view on things. To me, that has been the best thing, bouncing ideas off of other women. Dealing
With The System
Joe Kirk: How did we deal with DCFS, and the struggles there. Betsy Kirk: First off, it’s a two-part question. One is, they worked really well with us because we had an awesome case manager. The problem with DCFS is, it is a low-paying gig [laughs] and if you are good, they move you quickly out to do something else, unfortunately. So we got a window of where we got an incredible case worker to work with us to give us our kids. So that was really good. We have some friends that have experienced a horrible time working with DCFS. The other thing is, for us personally, DCFS, at the time, it may have gotten better, talked about us being a partner and, ’We’re going to team together, when you have problems call us,’ that did not work out at all. In fact, I can remember very clearly; within 24 hours of having our girls within our home, I had a child in a timeout chair, sitting on top of her, my legs wrapped around the chair, my arms wrapped around the chair and her knocking me off and saying things you could not even imagine out of a four-year-old; and me going, ‘This is out of control. Can I spank this child?’ because that is a big thing. We called our case worker and basically, she said, ‘Talk to your counselor.’ So our experience as a “team” was not very good at all. Joe Kirk: Let me say one thing in DCFS’ defense. They are shuffling kids through like crazy, and the last thing that they want; there is an enormous issue, and a lot has changed in the last ten years, of you don’t want to just have the state rush in and terminate parental rights immediately. Because if we get to the point where the government thinks that you are not doing a good job with you kid, that they can take them away, we are all in trouble. At the same time, you don’t want to drag these kids; they’ve been three years bouncing around the foster care system trying to get parental rights terminated and it’s a really tough balance to try to find. So it is a tough job. Basically, their job is to find beds for kids. Foster care is a temporary bed and adoption is a permanent bed, and they’re just trying to get them through and they want to make sure that the bed for them is safer than the one they were in last night. So they are watching to make sure that we’re not whack jobs, that we’re going to be worse for these kids. So in their defense, I want them to do that; I want them to be cautious, but quickly, as soon as they realized that they were ready to trust us, they were history. They quit paying attention because they had to get on to the next kid. They’ve got a stack of folders to get through. Also, a lot has changed in
the last ten years. The government privatized a lot of this stuff and you
can go to places like Bethany and whatnot and work with them, and it’s
gotten much better than it was, but Georgia is one of the worst states
in the union. We’ve got friends here that had to go to Texas to find a
kid because Georgia is so horrible to work with.
Joe Kirk: Right! It’s not romantic. Betsy Kirk: We’re not trying to portray that. Believe us, it is the hardest thing we have ever done in our entire life. It’s also the best thing we have ever done. It has stretched us beyond our imagination, but we will spend hours and hours talking to a child, trying to help them work through a particular issue, and the majority of the time, it comes back to low self-esteem, feeling worthless, all the things that you spend, for those of you that have birth children, you have spent years trying to cultivate. Joe Kirk: Guys ask me all the time, ‘How do you do this? How do you live with all these women?’ and I always respond, once you give up hope, it’s not so bad. It’s a joke, but there is a sense in which it is exactly how I approach it. You have to kind of let go and say, ‘I can’t control it.’ My wife is a massive control freak, and she just wants to corral these kids and, ‘Let’s keep them in line,’ and it’s been a struggle, particularly now we’ve got seven teenagers. It’s not about us controlling them and organizing everything, it’s just about doing the right thing, and being responsible and loving them, and let’s see where God takes this thing, because we don’t know. We’re not in control of it. Betsy Kirk: You’ve got to
remember. If you have birth children or adopted children, they are yours
temporarily. They are God’s and I have to constantly, constantly every
day, I place each one of my kid’s in God’s hands because He may be taking
them down a path I don’t desire for them, but I’ve got to trust Him. Is
He God or is He not? That’s what I’ve got to constantly remind myself.
Joe Kirk: We don’t necessarily propose sitting on them; we were young and innocent and it seemed like a good idea at the time. Betsy Kirk: Yeah! Well, you’ve got to remember, some of these kids, they are used to a certain thing, and for our kids, they were used to getting beat; that was how they were shown love. So their whole goal was to make us so mad that we would eventually beat them. That was really hard. You sit there and you go, ‘How can a four-year-old do that to you?’ I can’t even begin to tell you. They get up in your face, and they have this scream that just makes your skin crawl, and you want to just whack! Some of you may have experienced it, but it is really pretty phenomenal. It’s really hard to figure out what is the best thing. I think that sometimes we do it well and sometimes we do it really badly. For some of our kids, we
chose to spank them. I think some of our adopted children would tell you,
to this day, they know the difference between a spanking and a beating
and there is a definite difference. I remember one of our adopted daughters
sitting down and telling me, ‘I know the difference.’ I was pretty blown
over by that. I think you’ve got to try other options. I don’t think that’s
the best thing because some of these kids, that is not what you want to
do, especially for some kids. But I think there are all kinds of options
you have. For us, a lot of room time out, and a lot of it is getting yourself
under control because it is really hard when they are out of control to
control yourself.
They said, ‘Every time our birth parents did something like that, they started beating on each other, and we would go and hide,’ and protect themselves. I think that was the moment we realized the things we are doing have whole different signals to these kids. So we had to just start learning what is it that they’re reading into it. The big thing for us is to realize that we’re not perfect and we don’t get it right. That we have done some things to raise them that were just stupid and afterwards, we realized that was the worst idea, and we just kind of keep getting better at it. But we’re open is a lot of it. When we do something that is really stupid, we’ll come back and tell them, ‘That was a bad idea.’ Let me say one thing, if anybody wants to talk afterwards, we would love to talk to you. I want to covet your-all prayers for us. We’ve started down this journey of trying to figure out how to build these groups within the church and I’d have to say it’s not going great for us right now. We’re in kind of a big mega-church; 3,000-4,000 people, whatever, in Atlanta. Very affluent, a lot of families who could absolutely take these kids in; they’ve got a lot of empty bedrooms. The response that we are hearing right now is, ‘This is really great, we’re very impressed with your-all’s vision; how can we help you move slower.’ We’re struggling with that. Some of the elders have sat with us and said, ‘We really want to support this, but we’re not sure this fits in an affluent church.’ Our experience, actually, you go through the training with DCFS, there was no question, we were far and away the wealthiest people in our class. It’s a tough thing to do in our kind of church. But we believe that God has put us in that kind of church because if we can figure out how to do it there, and build a model, then you can carry that model to lots of churches. If we can crack all our rich neighbors, then we can get to a lot of other places. So pray for us as we try to work through this and build these support groups. We would love to correspond with any of you who are dealing with similar issues. This is not just our thing. We want to try and figure out how do we get thousands of churches in America to grab these kids? Let’s not have 125,000 of these kids with parental rights terminated [unadopted]; let’s have all of them have homes. Thank you very much for coming.
We would love to talk to you afterwards.
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