Julie Lowe worked her way through graduate school—an MA and LPC in counseling from Biblical Theological Seminary—as a foster-care social worker.
“I hated the system, but there was a need,” she said. So much need that after graduation, she raised her hand to be a respite provider. She began caring for kids during some evenings and on weekends. Two of the children she regularly hosted were toddler sisters.
“The placement was going to fall apart, so I began praying about being a foster parent for them,” Julie said. When it did, she agreed to foster them full-time.
A year later, the girls became available for adoption. Meanwhile, Julie had become engaged to another counselor named Greg. He’d come to Christ in high school and quickly developed a theological conviction that he wanted to adopt. So they were both thrilled when, about a week before their wedding, they got a call that they’d be able to proceed with adopting their beautiful brunette girls.
“They were flower girls at our wedding,” Julie said. “We were able to talk about how God was bringing us together as a family—giving me a new last name and giving them a new last name. They were probably 3 and 4 at that time. It was a sweet, beautiful story.”
At least, it started out that way. Over the next 20 years, Greg and Julie would adopt three more kids and foster many more.
“We’ve been in front of police officers and detectives, and had kids sneaking out of the house at night,” she said. “We’ve been in the ER having to 302 children [place them in involuntary psychiatric care]. We’ve had to go through residential programs. We’ve had the whole gamut of our kids lying about us and making up abuse allegations. It makes people go, ‘Well, why in the world would I ever adopt and foster?’”
Why indeed?
“In Romans 12, we’re all called to be living sacrifices,” Julie said. “Really, I am grateful for the suffering. I always cringe when I say that. But I know things about God’s character—depths of his grace and mercy and compassion—I never would have known otherwise. This really is all about him and not me. I believe that with my whole heart, and in ways I’ve had to live it out. And I am so, so grateful.”
I am grateful for the suffering. I always cringe when I say that. But I know things about God’s character—depths of his grace and mercy and compassion—I never would have known otherwise.
That’s why Greg and Julie don’t regret their adoptions. And they’re not the only ones. Though this severity of disruptive behavior isn’t every adoptive parent’s experience, neither is it uncommon. Kids who are adopted locally or internationally, who look exactly like their parents or nothing like them, who come as infants or teenagers, who have biological siblings or who don’t, can be challenging to raise.
But if you ask Greg and Julie, and other adoptive parents, if adoption was worth it, nearly all say yes. They want their stories to circulate—not because they want to discourage adoption but because they think adoptive parents in hard situations would be helped by knowing they’re not alone.
“Even now, my husband will say, ‘We’re done. We’re never going to do that again,’” Julie said. “And I’m like, ‘Never say never,’ because all it takes is one really painful, lonely situation, and we both would be like, ‘OK, let’s do it again.’”
Jay and Jill
Jill and Jay got married young—she was 20—and within a few years, started having their four kids. Jay was a pastor, and Jill loved homeschooling the kids.
“We weren’t thinking about adoption—we thought we were done,” said Jill, who was 38 when she gave birth to her youngest. “But there was a family in our church that was thinking about it.”
The church family ended up adopting a little boy. His older brother also needed a home.
“We said, ‘Well, what’s keeping us from doing it?’” Jill said. “We sat our kids down—two were out of the house, and two were at home. We explained what was going on and they all said, ‘You need to do this. This boy, Jeremy, needs a home.’” (Jeremy isn’t his real name.)
Though their new 10-year-old physically looked like the rest of the family, he didn’t slide in seamlessly. Jay and Jill knew he wouldn’t—Jeremy had been in 10 foster homes in five years.
“You take all these foster and adoption classes, and they try to warn you how hard it’s going to be, but you have no idea,” she said. “Honestly, I don’t know if I would’ve wanted to know.”
Jeremy had an explosive temper. He’d run away from school or leap out of their moving car and take off down the street. He’d get violent and hurt them—once he even cut the phone lines so they couldn’t call for help.
He got the angriest when asked to do chores around the house.
“One Saturday I told him to clean his room, and he wouldn’t,” Jill said. “I warned him that I was going to take away the things that weren’t put away.”
Jeremy did nothing, so Jill began to take away his things. Enraged, Jeremy called the police and reported that he was being abused. When the police arrived and assessed the situation, they told Jeremy not to ever do that again.
“There were times we felt like, What in the world am I doing? This is so hard, God, I can’t do it,” Jill said. “But we knew this is what God wanted us to do, and we just prayed that somehow Jeremy would see Christ in us.”
There were periods of respite—in the summer, Jeremy went to a Christian camp. During the school year, he was at school during the day while Jill homeschooled the others. (“I tried homeschooling him for a year, but it did not go well,” she said.) Jill and Jay spent intentional one-on-one time with each kid, checking in, building relationships, and providing brief respites from family stress. As a family, with each other, and with friends, they had fun and laughed a lot.
After high school, Jeremy didn’t go to college or get a job. He’d say he was looking, but Jay and Jill knew he wasn’t. Finally, they gave him an ultimatum—find a job of some kind in the next six months, or you’ll have to leave. He didn’t even try, and at the end of six months, Jill cried as they packed him into his car.
She knew he had nowhere to go, and he didn’t. For more than a year, he lived on the streets. He bounced around on friends’ couches or in government housing for 10 years before he met a girl, married her, and moved into an apartment with her.
“I feel like God brought Jeremy into our life, not just for Jeremy, but to work in our lives,” Jill said. “There’s times you get bitter. I loved him because I’m supposed to love him, but I wasn’t always feeling it because of what he’d put us through. And one day, my husband said to me, ‘You’re getting bitter, I can see it. That’s sin, and you need to deal with it.’”
He was right. Jill confessed it to the Lord, remembering that he’d adopted her when she was ugly, and asking for help to love Jeremy.
“When you have a relationship with the Lord, and you believe nothing happens by surprise, and you’re trying to live your life allowing him to be in control, that makes a big difference,” she said.
The church was also helpful.
“We had a lady in our church who had fostered a lot, so she helped me,” Jill said. “And people didn’t act shocked when Jeremy acted out. They never, ever said, ‘Can’t you make your kid behave in church?’ There were times he’d run out the church door and run down the street, and some of them would go running after him. They’d spend time with him and loved on him and on us.”
“We’ve got you, Jill,” they’d tell her. “You’re doing a great thing. We’ve got your back.”
At a recent family party, Jeremy cried and told Jay and Jill he loved them and was so glad to be part of their family.
“I don’t know why God’s been gracious to us, but I’m really, really grateful,” Jill said. “Jeremy has healed a lot emotionally, and we have too.”
Dan and Pamela
Dan and Pamela got married after she finished veterinary school, then waited a couple of years to start trying for children. The journey was heartbreaking—a miscarriage, another miscarriage, a baby boy named Andy, then three more miscarriages.
“We said, ‘We just can’t do this anymore,’” Pamela said. “We didn’t really want to have an only child, but we weren’t actively seeking adoption, either.”
One Sunday, a psychologist from a nearby adoption agency spoke at their church. After the service, Dan and Pamela asked him a few questions, and he gave them the adoption agency’s number. Nine months later, they were holding their week-old son, Isaac.
“Everybody at church was excited because they had walked some of the path with us,” Pamela said. “Since Isaac is African American, when we were out in public we’d get asked if we were fostering him.”
About two years later, the adoption agency called: Isaac’s birth mom was pregnant again, and wondered if Dan and Pamela would adopt Isaac’s brother, Caleb. Of course, they said yes.
“We told the agency that since we both work full-time, we wouldn’t be able to take a child with special needs,” Pamela said. “God said, ‘Yeah, you can.’”
In second grade, Isaac was diagnosed with high-functioning autism. Pamela took him to therapy, filled his prescriptions, and wrote to every private school in the county to find other boys like him so she could create a social group. Later, Caleb would be diagnosed with bipolar 1 disorder.
“Isaac and Caleb would make threats, mostly against me, but sometimes against Pamela,” Dan said. “One day Andy told Isaac, ‘If you ever touch Mom, I’ll pound you.’ Isaac told him, ‘OK, then I’ll kill you in your sleep.’”
A few days later, Andy told his parents he couldn’t sleep. Every little noise made him tense.
“We put a lock on Andy’s door, because he needed to feel safe enough to sleep,” Dan said. He installed a lock on their door too—he knew it wouldn’t stop Caleb, but at least the breaking lock would wake them up. They hid everything sharper than a butter knife.
The verbal assaults grew worse: “I hate you.” “I hate your parents for having you.” “I hate the God you serve.”
One time when Caleb was threatening to kill them, Dan and Pamela called the police, who told Caleb to be grateful for his home and his parents.
He wasn’t. He was struggling in school—having sex with an underage girl in the band room, sneaking out the window when the teacher’s back was turned, disappearing for days and then calling from another city asking for a ride home. As he grew older, he attempted suicide over and over—a gun in his mouth, standing on a bridge, hanging himself with an electrical cord.
Their church family was sometimes wonderful, sometimes not.
“They didn’t understand—honestly, we didn’t understand mental illness until we lived with it,” Pamela said. “But our pastor’s wife was really good with us.”
One of her gifts was laughter. “Between her and I and Dan, we would look for humor,” Pamela said. “God used that.”
Faithful
Today, Isaac lives with a girlfriend and gets in touch with Dan and Pamela about once a month. He regularly texts with Andy, who is now a Christian husband and father working for the Justice Department in Minneapolis. Caleb has three children with three different women. Neither adopted son is a believer.
“For years and years, we’ve shed so many tears,” Dan says.
“There are times when you wonder, If I had known what I know now, would I have willingly followed?” Pamela said. “But you know, we’re not called to know. We’re just called to be faithful where he puts us.”
There are times when you wonder, If I had known what I know now, would I have willingly followed? But you know, we’re not called to know. We’re just called to be faithful where he puts us.
Dan and Pamela are actively grandparenting Caleb’s children, often providing respite care for their mothers. They pray for the kids, read them Bible stories, and take them to church.
“We learn through suffering,” Pamela said. “Romans says, ‘For I reckon that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us’ [Rom. 8:18, KJV]. Are you obeying God? Are you doing true religion? Guess what—it hurts. Rejoice in the fact that you are obeying and following God. Trust him that all the verses are true, even though you may not see it now.”
Dan keeps going back to Philippians 4:4–8.
“Rejoice in the Lord always,” he said. “You’re not rejoicing that life is good today. You’re rejoicing that God is good today. If you truly believe that God’s sovereign and he controls every step of your life, then the adoption wasn’t a mistake—it was part of God’s plan for your life. He’ll lead us safely home eventually.”
“I would not change anything in my life—it was all from the hand of God,” Pamela said. “I only wish I’d responded better to what he was giving me. . . . We needed the boys in our family, because God is using them for us to become more like his Son.”
John and Jane
John and Jane got married while Jane was still finishing up her nursing degree, and soon began trying to get pregnant. (All the names in this section have been changed.) After a year and a half, they were staring at two options—a prescription to help boost hormone levels and an application for an adoption agency.
“We wanted to do both, so this was just a decision of which to do first,” John said. “We decided to pursue adoption, rather than spend a lot of time and money trying for a biological child. We could do that later.”
At 24, Jane was too young to apply for an international adoption, “which was probably the most popular thing back then,” she said. “But the foster system was like, ‘Yeah, come on in.’”
John and Jane asked for a matched adoption, which meant they’d bypass foster-to-adopt and be paired with children legally free to be adopted. Six months later, they met their match. The siblings—ages 7, 4, and 1—shared a mom and two biological dads, all of whom struggled with addiction to alcohol and meth. One of the fathers had recently been killed in a motorcycle crash, while the mom and other dad were in jail for going on a joyride with a stolen car.
The home had already been investigated by Child Protective Services nine times before “basically, they ran out of parents,” Jane said. But they had John and Jane, who look so similar to the kids that strangers never guess they’re adopted.
For the first few weeks, the kids were perfect.
“I had to adjust to feeding and clothing and bathing three little humans, but their behavior was very good,” Jane said. “They called us Mom and Dad right away. We went to church on Easter Sunday, and people were impressed by how quiet and still and obedient they were.”
They were also heavily medicated, and as John and Jane worked with a psychiatrist to cut down on the meds to figure out what was needed, their behavior deteriorated.
“Our 4-year-old was described in the foster system paperwork as goat-like,” John said. It was accurate—she climbed everything and ate out of the trash.
Their 7-year-old son, Andrew, was deeply disturbed and not sleeping. He’d been close to his father—the one who’d recently been killed. John and Jane wondered if he needed residential care, but when they asked their Christian adoption agency, they were told that if they chose that route, the agency would take the girls too, and never place another child with John and Jane.
Their church was of little help. As John and Jane struggled to emotionally attach, friends and church leaders wondered aloud if they loved their kids enough. The pastors wondered so much that they blocked John, who’d been elected as deacon, from taking office.
“Eventually another adoptive mom told me love is not about feeling the warm fuzzy feelings, but about getting up and doing this every single day,” Jane said. “But it was a long time before we heard that.”
Three months after the adoption was final, Jane secretly googled, “I don’t like my adoptive children.”
“I didn’t know who else to tell,” she said.
Disorder and Deliverance
Jane’s search brought up the term attachment trauma, which was the first she’d heard of it. She and John were beginning to uncover the layers of their kids’ struggles—after sorting out medication, then attachment and trauma, would come learning difficulties. Finally, at the center, they’d find drug and alcohol exposure.
Prenatal substance exposure has varied effects on developmental aspects such as emotional self-regulation, sleep, IQ, and social skills. All three of their children had been prenatally exposed to drugs and alcohol. All three were sometimes so violent that she and John had to call the police. And all three would spend months in psychiatric-based residential treatment centers.
Rejoice in the Lord always. You’re not rejoicing that life is good today. You’re rejoicing that God is good today.
“Kids with a fetal alcohol spectrum disorder are labeled as bad kids, but they’re not bad kids,” Jane said. “They have organic brain injuries that will not heal.”
As Jane began studying all this, she also learned something else. She was pregnant.
“I don’t recommend having your first newborn with three other kids in the home,” she said. “It was extremely difficult. But it was also a wonderful, beautiful experience. It activated the little attachment muscles in our three older kids.”
A few years later, those muscles grew even more when Jane and John had another baby.
The Lord provided more than that. John’s job in tech allowed them to have good health insurance, to buy a home with enough bedrooms to keep everyone safe, and to move near their extended family.
At their new church, John and Jane were asked to share their story on a Sunday afternoon. Eighty people showed up to listen.
“That was a time when we were calling the police, dealing with physical assault, and trying to keep the babies safe,” Jane said. “We could just text that group, and our yard would be full of people.”
No Happy Ending Yet
A fetal alcohol spectrum disorder makes adolescence especially hard. As each of John and Jane’s children hit puberty, any gains in behavior rapidly deteriorated. Andrew didn’t make it through high school. To this day, he moves around a lot and struggles with addiction.
“Their bio mom got back in the picture as they were turning 18,” Jane said. “She still struggles deeply with substance abuse. She’s in prison again—she was part of a federal indictment for international drug trafficking. She ushered both of the kids into the system she’s in. . . . We do believe our oldest daughter, Briana, is being sex trafficked at this point.”
Introduced to that, too, by her birth mom.
Jane and John text regularly with Andrew but have no contact with Briana.
Claire was always a spot of joy—sweet and snuggly, easy to love. But when she hit puberty, her prenatal substance exposure made her violent and challenging. From ages 12 to 15, her physical assaults against her parents got worse every day. John and Jane tried everything, including four psychiatric hospitalizations, three stays at residential treatment centers, and multiple police interventions.
However, as Claire got older, changed her medications, and had her adenoids removed to help with sleep apnea, she stabilized.
“Things with her are miraculously good,” Jane said. “It’s like we got our girl back. Before she was failing, never turning in work. Now she’s getting A’s and going on college visits. She’s the first kid in our family to get her driver’s license. She’s working at a Christian summer camp this summer. She has been free of aggression for over a year and is well attached to the family. Still, we’ll continue to navigate lifelong challenges related to her prenatal substance exposure.”
While John and Jane never thought the adoption was a mistake, over the years, they’ve done “a lot of wrestling with God,” Jane said. “We came up against brokenness we could not fix, and it gave me a different perspective on seeing just how much needs to be restored. Adopting brought me to a better understanding and longing for heaven.”
But even here and now, she can see God’s care.
“There were times I can remember praying out loud, ‘I don’t know what to do next. We’re out of options. You have to show us, so that we can’t miss it,’” she said. “And through some kind of means, or some person, or some new resource or facility, or something, he would.”
She’s also seen redemption in her work. A few years ago, she went back to school to be a nurse practitioner.
“All of our experiences really informed my training and focus,” she said. “I’ve had the opportunity to do a lot of advocacy and to share our story and offer hope to a lot of families.”
Last year, Jane opened her own private practice in pediatric psychiatry, where she reserves the majority of slots for those on Medicaid. She’s also partnering with foster and adoptive organizations in her community.
“I want to get people the information they need a whole lot sooner than we got it, so that their families don’t feel like our family did,” she said. “I want adoptive parents to have a safe place to come and tell me all the crazy things, and for me to say, ‘I believe you.’”
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