We are part of The Village Chapel in Nashville. At our Easter services this year, we had three stories of how the Gospel has impacted people. Betsy and I told the story of our adoption and our move to Nashville. Here’s the script and the pictures we showed.
(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.
Last month, I wrote about being allergic to my home. It’s true. But it turns out that it wasn’t my primary problem. I got a toothache a few weeks ago. Suspecting a cracked tooth, I went to the dentist. Sure enough I had a cracked molar on the upper right and it had infected the root, so I needed a root canal. The dentist asked if I was having any problems with my sinuses. He explained that the x-ray showed that my sinus cavity was below the end of the tooth. The infection in the root was keeping me sick. He said I would feel better once the root canal was done and that my sinuses would start clearing up immediately.
