But it’s going to get busy starting next week when I start working three jobs. Yep, three.

My day gig is going to be contracting with the Tennessee Department of Transportation. I’ll be doing project management in the IT department 7.5 hours a day. We’ve been in Nashville almost a year and in that year every dollar we had invested is now worth 65 cents. Tough economic times indeed. So, like almost every artist in Nashville, I’m getting a day gig. This is how I made my living eleven years ago and I can do it in my sleep. So I’ll go in early every day and get out mid afternoon with time to do focus on the stuff I care about. The lady I’ll be working for is great and I’m looking forward to serving her.

I’ve also joined the partners at NoiseTrade, which is a major cool music marketing company. We help artists build their fanbase by targeted campaigns of giving away music. I have great partners and we have a great reputation. There’s lot’s of great music available there for free. Check it out.

I’m also starting to work part time with my church, The Village Chapel. We’re starting a college age group and I’m heading that efort. Betsy and I have commented a lot over the last year that we feel like we are doing an adult version of our first year of marriage when we lived in Gainesville and I worked with IVCF. So here I am working with college students again. I guess the circle is complete.

I’ll try to start blogging more often, but I’m making no promises. But I am starting to blog a lot on the NoiseTrade blog. It’s all geared towards the business of music, but we’re starting to build a great community over there. You might enjoy subscribing to that blog too. And I’ve turned into a Twitter nut so you can follow me there.

Joe

Neil Young said that he wasn’t happy to have ended up in the mainstream after Heart of Gold, so he “headed to the ditches.” We were full of youthful idealism and the ditches seemed pretty romantic to us. We lived in a house in the ghetto for our first year together. There was a detox center on the next block and a biker gang behind us. Betsy called for a cab one day and they said they didn’t send cabs to that neighborhood. But we loved it.

InterVarsity sent me to Pensaconservacola, Florida the next year and we started moving to the middle. We spent the next 28 years in the burbs and suburban evangelical churches. Betsy helped me discover my inner parent and we eventually discovered that adopting a bunch of kids was a way to change the world while living in the burbs and working for the man.

So here we are, twenty nine years later, living in the city and looking for ways to save the world. Betsy and I are more in love today than we were when we stood in front of our family and friends at the Community Evangelical Free Church. It hasn’t always been easy, but we’ve stuck with it and we’re really happy to be together.

Happy anniversary Betsy. I love you.

Joe

Fifteen years. A lot has happened in that time. Think of it this way. A few months earlier, the first attack on the World Trade Center occurred. It’s easy to forget that event, since it was a failure. But it was intended to have the same impact that eventually happened on 9/11. It was the moment that the radical Muslims declared war on America, and our lives have never been the same.

On April 17, 1993, God drew a line in the sand and our lives have never been the same. On that day he asked Betsy and me if we were in or out. Did we really want to follow Jesus or did we just want to be a nice family. As the poem says, we chose the road less travelled. And it has made all the difference.

In the movie Three Days of the Condor, Cold War CIA Operative Cliff Robertson asks John Houseman if he misses the action of WWII. Houseman replies, “I miss the clarity.” Most of our life is gray with unclear guidelines for who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. Houseman looks back at the horrific time of the second world war and remembers it fondly, because there was no ambiguity about who the bad guy was.

The day God told us to go get those kids was that moment of clarity for Betsy and me. Life has been pretty gray since that time. Sometimes, it has been completely dark. But we can look back at that day and remember that there is a God and we are his.

Communion, Passover, 12 stones from the middle of the river, wedding rings. Stuff that makes us remember. God gives us moments in the light to keep us on course when we are in the dark. That’s what today is for me. A time to remember God is there.

It worked. It’s still Spring and Nashville is in bloom, so I’m still struggling some. But I feel tons better. Looks like we should have been listening to our dentists after all. Gotta go floss my teeth…

(FWIW, I’m really aware that this is a pretty transparent and revealing story to put on the World Wide Web. Some of these details and pictures are a little uncomfortable for our kids. But we are very aware as a family that this is a good story and it needs to be told. If one person is inspired to help one child or is motivated to trust God, then we think it’s worth a little risky transparency on our part.)

The audio of the service with all three testimonies and Jim’s sermon can be found at The Village Chapel website. It is an enhanced podcast file, so the pictures display in iTunes while you listen to it. Ain’t technology grand?

JOE

Hi. We’re Joe and Betsy Kirk. We moved here in December after ten years in Atlanta where I was a marketing weasel for the telecomm industry and was one of the partners at Paste Magazine. Betsy was a stay at home Mom. Which is a good place to start our story.

BETSY

In 1991 we were living in Augusta, Georgia. After four miscarriages, we had three beautiful children. Joe had a good job that allowed me to stay home and be a Mommy. We had a great house and were active in our local church. James Dobson would have been proud of us.

But it was totally unfulfilling. The problem was that our lives were focused on us. So I asked God to change us. We loved children, so I looked into fostering, adopting and taking in unwed mothers.

But I kept being drawn back to adoption. I liked the idea of making a lifetime commitment to someone. I knew that there were lots of couples that wanted healthy infants. I wanted a child that no one else was going to help.

You have to take a ten-week class to be certified to adopt from the state. So I sent away for an application. When it arrived, I was so excited. It was like finding out that I was pregnant again.

Joe, however, was not excited. I was completely caught off guard by his attitude. I thought we were in this together. And I truly believed that God was calling us to adopt. So I gave the application to Joe. And I waited. And I waited for almost a year.

Finally, Joe came to me and said that he would take the class. I asked him to pick the class that fit with his schedule. I waited for another six months while he looked for an opening in his Day Timer. He finally said he had registered us, but he only committed to taking the class, not to actually adopting a child afterwards.

JOE

I’m not looking too good in this story am I? To be honest, it was just my male ego keeping me from hearing what God was saying into our marriage through Betsy.

I knew that taking the class was the right thing to do and I eventually gave in. But it was a good thing that I made a commitment to her because I really hated the class and wanted to bail out the very first week. Imagine parenting taught by bureaucrats.

A few weeks into the training, they had this event where we could meet children who needed homes. On the way there, I remember looking in my rear view mirror at the two empty seats in the back of our minivan. I turned to Betsy and said, “Whatever happens today, we can’t get more than two, OK?”

BETSY

“Two would be fine.” I said.

JOE

They had a table with information on children that were not able to be there. As I read dozens of stories of abuse and neglect, my eyes fell on a yellow piece of construction paper taped on the wall. On it were pictures of four siblings with their first names and birthdates handwritten below.

Immediately I knew that God wanted us to adopt them. I didn’t hear a voice. But, the voice I didn’t hear clearly said, “Those are your children. I want you to go get them.” After shaking nervously for a few minutes, I went to Betsy and said “Honey, why don’t you go check out the information table and I’ll stay here with our children. Several minutes later she came back and simply said, “The children on the yellow piece of construction paper, those are our children. God wants us to go get them.”

That was April 17, 1993. Four months later, we met them for the first time and the next day they came to live with us forever. Overnight, I became the father of seven daughters. Our oldest daughter, Megan, is 23 and lives in Japan. Lindy, our youngest is a 17-year-old junior at Hillsboro High School. But there was a time a few years back when they were 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18 and 19.

BETSY

The last fifteen years have been challenging. We’re the tenth set of parents in this situation. We deal daily with the impact of years of neglect and abuse. And we exposed our birth children to everything we moved to the suburbs to protect them from.

So, why did we do it? The simple answer is that we had a home and they needed one. But clearly we were being obedient to what God was telling us to do.

JOE

We could end our story at this point, and you’d probably be pretty impressed. After all, the creator of the Universe leaves cosmic post-it notes challenging us to perform sacrificial and “spiritual” tasks. As a result, four children have hope today. I even got in touch with my feminine side. But our story is not finished.

Last September I decided it was time for us to leave the Atlanta suburbs. God had called us there to raise seven children. We had a big house, a big salary and a mega-church. But our youngest child was now a junior in high school. We had done what God asked us to do and our work was coming to an end.

BETSY

I thought that meant we got to retire and go back to focusing on us again. I pictured a country house on a lake. Joe and I would work in the yard together and the kids would bring the grandchildren to visit from time to time.

JOE

I wanted to move to the city. Get a smaller house in an old neighborhood. Simplify our lives. Hang out with artists. Walk everywhere and drink lots of coffee.

BETSY

We settled on Nashville. Joe said it was a small town with more culture than it deserved. Or a big town that felt like Mayberry. Or something like that.

JOE

I quit my job and was in Nashville within a few days. Several friends sold me on the Belmont-Hillsboro area and told me that we needed to visit a church called The Village Chapel. Less than three months later we had sold our house in Atlanta and moved into our new house on 18th Avenue, about four blocks from here.

BETSY

We love it here. We love this church, our house and our neighborhood. We walk to church sometimes and Joe does his bit to support The Bongo Java Brewing Company. It’s actually quite romantic. But over the last few months, God has made it clear that He is not through with us yet.

One of our daughters is in recovery. She asked us to take guardianship of her daughter while she works to break the legacy of addiction her birth parents passed on. Sophia is eight months old.

JOE

For those of you keeping score at home, Sophia would be the ninth woman in my life.

BETSY

We don’t know what kind of work Joe will end up doing. We assumed it would be something in the music business. But we have a growing sense that God is calling us to help children in some way. Joe’s been wrestling with it. Sound familiar?

JOE

This part will sound made up, but it’s not. When we got married Betsy made me promise that I would never move her to Atlanta. I made her promise that we would never have children. Twenty years later, we were living in Atlanta with seven children. For the record, she broke her promise first.

When God told us to adopt, Betsy and I had been Christians for a long time. But God was asking us if we REALLY believed the gospel. We called Jesus our Lord. On that day, he asked us if we really meant it. If we had decided not to adopt those four girls, we would have been saying our faith was nothing more than a lot of nice family values rhetoric. We didn’t adopt because we are giants of the faith. We adopted because God told us to. Frankly, we had no choice.

In John 6, After feeding 5000 people with a couple of fish sandwiches, Jesus gives some particularly difficult and challenging teaching. John tells us that many of his followers turned back and no longer followed Him. Jesus turns to Peter and asks if he wants to go too. Peter responds, ø? “Lord, to whom shall we go. You have the words of life.” It’s not the triumphant proclamation of victorious Christian living. It’s the humble confession of a man who has no choice but to trust his Lord.

We’re gathered today to worship the risen Lord. And Jesus wants to know if we REALLY believe it. God is probably not calling most of you to adopt four children. But He’s calling you to do something.

Maybe He’s been changing the desires of your heart. Maybe He’s been speaking to you through His Word or through the words of his children. Maybe you’re so dense that He’ll have to leave you a big yellow post-it note too.

Are you willing to trust Him? Are you willing to let Him be the Lord? Where else are you going to go? He has the words of life.

Been feeling pretty draggy since moving to Nashville. Kept thinking I was getting a cold and blaming the grand daughter. Finally went to the clinic today to get on an antibiotic for what felt like flu.

It’s not the flu.

Atlanta had pine pollen. Nashville has mold spores. I believe the quote was “if you have indoor plumbing, you have mold spores.” When I told her my house was built in the 20′s, she actually laughed. Apparently old houses have them even more. So I’m filling a prescription for prescription strength Alegra. I’ll take it every day for the rest of my life. But I’m supposed to feel better by the end of the weekend.

Is this ironic or what?