The Hard and Holy Calling to Adoption

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Jim Daly: This is John Fuller, and please remember to let us know how you're listening to these programs on a podcast, app, or website.
John Fuller: Welcome to Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. Today we're going to learn how all of us, each one of us, can play a role in helping needy children in foster care, especially those who are hoping and waiting for someone to adopt them into a forever family like this child.
Guest (Male): I'd like them to be Christian because if they're not Christian, they won't be able to they won't take me to church. And if I don't go to church, I won't be able to learn more about Jesus. And I won't be able to see my friends who also believe.
Jim Daly: Whew. I mean, that boy represents more than 340,000 children who are in the US foster care system right now. And that just grips my heart because if the church there's about 340,000 churches in the US. And you know, if we just looked up and said, could one church take one child as a community to help, it needs that one family, though, to step up and say, we will do that. Man, wouldn't that be awesome? I talked to a New York Times reporter once, and I said, this would be my goal for foster care. And he said, if you achieved that, we would put that on the front page that every child is taken in by the church. Wouldn't that change the kind of the brand dynamics of being a Christian in this country? And today we want to talk about that. I was that kid. My mom died when I was nine. I ended up in foster care for a year. And it was tough. It's a very lonely place, and you start learning coping skills that really can be a disadvantage in your adulthood. And so you've got to be with the best family you can be with. And I think there's no better family to be with than a Christian family. You know, Psalm 68 says this. He's a father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation. God settles the solitary in a home. Now, why did God create families? So that we could transmit the gospel to our children. And that's both our children and probably, hopefully, other children that might participate in our home as well. Isaiah 1:17, we're given this command. Learn to do good, seek justice, correct oppression, bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow's case. I think God is in the corner of the orphan, and so we as the church need to be aware there are many children that need our help.
John Fuller: And our guest today as passion and purpose, Ted Stackpole, is a chaplain to the foster care and adoption community in Florida. And Ted and his wife Angie were involved in pastoral ministry for more than 25 years, and they became aware of this great need to foster and to step in and adopt in their own community. He's got quite a story. Ted's a contributor to a book called Open When Parenting Through Foster and Adoption. It's an excellent resource, a little guide to help really understand the the biblical mandate for us to be involved. And you can learn more about Ted and this great little resource on our website.
Jim Daly: Yeah. Welcome. So appreciate you being with us.
Ted Stackpole: Hey, thanks for the invitation. It's great to be here today.
Jim Daly: Ted, let me ask you this. John didn't mention this part. You have a big family. Describe your family.
Ted Stackpole: Yeah. So you know, I always tell people, and we usually start off with this little story here that when we first got married, I wanted one child because one sounds really easy.
Jim Daly: Manageable.
Ted Stackpole: That's right. And I have an type A personality. I wanted that, but my wife wanted four children. And so we always say like every young couple does, we compromised, and we had five.
Jim Daly: 1 + 4 is five. I see you can do math.
Ted Stackpole: Yeah. So it worked out great. And so my older children that are adult children, they always say we had three families because then we we had three children, and then we started up again with with two more. So we have 11 children between the age of eight and 32 years old. Three we have three children out of the home, and we have eight still at home.
Jim Daly: So how many bio kids?
Ted Stackpole: Five bio kids.
Jim Daly: Five bio and then six adopted children.
Ted Stackpole: Six adopted children. Yes.
Jim Daly: Someone is falling back in their chair right now going, what? Adopting six kids, what were you guys thinking? What do you say to that comment?
Ted Stackpole: I think what our thoughts were, we just wanted to help. We wanted to serve kids that were in broken places. And we hadn't yet understood what we were getting into at that point.
Jim Daly: Yeah. Let me let me frame that a little bit because again, adoption generally is there. I mean, people can adopt often times, you know, for all kinds of reasons. They'll be perhaps even a teen in your church who is pregnant, and they don't want to have an abortion. Rightfully, I applaud her for that and her parents. But they also aren't in a position to to keep the child. And so adoption could be arranged to where hopefully somebody within that church or another Christian family can adopt. And that's that kind of adoption, you know. And then there's the foster adoption. It's a different thing. These are children zero to 18 who have lost parental rights or their parents have lost their rights. And they're wards of the court, and they're available. There's almost 80,000 children in that place right now in the US, and that number tends to fluctuate around 100,000. So I mean, they're just waiting. Think of that waiting waiting for a family like that little boy talked about. What better place for these kids to be than in Christian families? There are some states in politically supercharged states that are making it more difficult for Christian parents to adopt, which is so sad. I 've had many social workers tell me the best place for these kids, blue and red states combined, are Christian homes because they tend to be loved far better. That is a quote many times that I've heard. And that 's a good testimony for the church. But in that context that it is a risk. Describe that what that adoption out of foster care can look like.
Ted Stackpole: Yeah. So even with the kids we have, they're from our county. We we were fostering them. And either their parents' rights had been terminated by the court or their parents surrendered their rights. They just said, we don't want our children or we can't. We don't believe we can raise our kids.
Jim Daly: Yeah.
Ted Stackpole: And so you know, that story there, they're already in our home, and we just made the decision that this will be their forever home. They'll be a part of our family, and they'll stay here. They don't have to go somewhere else. They don't have to leave. They can stay here. So that was the decision we made with these six children. And so I think that's the the greatest surprise that I had as I was traveling to churches, meeting people who had adopted children, was hearing their story of what they thought it was going to look like and what it actually looked like. And so when I'm talking with people about adoption, I've tried to be really clarify a couple of things. And people adopt for different reasons just like you said.
Jim Daly: Yeah.
Ted Stackpole: But one of the things I I like to encourage people is that adoption is because children need a family. It's taking care of the need that a child has. But if we're always thinking that it's taking care of a need that we have, then we are going to be in a crisis mode when things don't go how we had thought it was going to be.
Jim Daly: Yeah. I think and Jean and I did this. We I think 11 or 12 years we did foster care. And we had, you know, probably 15 children that came through the home.
Ted Stackpole: Wow.
Jim Daly: And of course, this is on top of Trent and Troy being our bio kids at home. But in that context, one of the experiences we had, which most people who have done this like yourselves would have as well, you get a sheet. It's a single sheet of paper just like this. But on it is the things that you're willing to embrace, tolerate from a foster placement. It'll be things like on the sheet, head banging, food hoarding, arson, sexual disorientation issues. All And you're sitting there going, where's the box that's normal? That box doesn't exist on that sheet of paper. And then you suddenly realize, am I equipped for this? For you and your wife Angie, when you first started doing this, were you already well prepared for that or what what motivated you specifically for foster care? And then did you have that whoa, this is what this will be like?
Ted Stackpole: Yeah. So actually we had some families that were doing international adoptions in the church. And as we know as human trafficking became more an issue, then there began to be a a move towards understanding that there's kids in our own nation that need families as well.
Jim Daly: Hurting hurting children.
Ted Stackpole: Yes. Yes, absolutely. And so we're in a rural community, and they actually offered foster parent classes for the first time in our community. And there were families that wanted to do this. So like a good pastor, my wife and I, we said, well, we'll take the classes with you, see what you're getting into. And then we ended up going the next step, getting our home licensed. And then we ended up going the next step, and we were getting phone calls, and we were taking kids in. And at some point we had five girls in one room, two bunk beds and a toddler bed. Uh that's with our bio kids in there as well. And and then we started learning about statistics. And all the other families had gone through the class. We were all our homes were overflowing with kids. And we discovered we're not going to survive this. You know, we can't we can't manage this. What is the solution to this problem? And that's when we got good advice and discovered that our church needed to be involved in this as well, not just us. And so we began to put together a system in our church to help strengthen the families that were caring for these children as well as creating stability for the kids that were in their homes so they could stay there until they found what we would call permanency, but a place that they would be able to stay for with a forever family. Their family
Jim Daly: And that's our goal here. Wait no more is the program that Dr. Sharon Ford runs here at Focus on the Family. She used to be the head of it for the state of Colorado. And you know, we had a very successful engagement with the state when Sharon was there in that capacity. And I think that effort we with a lot of other help from other entities, but about over a two-year period over 600 kids were adopted into families. It's going to take more families to help that one family. And that is true. It's a ratio of about five to one. If you can get five families in your church to commit to helping that one family, what does that look like doing laundry, going grocery shopping, giving them a little respite break, taking the kids and leaving them with their bio kids for a weekend or something just to give them a break? Those are all things that make a much more successful environment, correct?
Ted Stackpole: Yeah. And I love Sharon's story how it impacted us. So you know, we launched a ministry like that, and we were fostering as well. So we had several people on a team that basically helped provide for some of the needs we had. And I think the mistake I made as a pastor, sometimes I'd ask people like, if you ever need anything, let me know. What can I do for you? I think the mistake that I made when I was pastoring was not being sensitive and asking the right questions like, you know, when's the last time you've been on a date with your spouse? You know, what's the hardest meal you have to make during this week? Like those are important questions, and they they're a flag quickly to say, hey, this this person needs some meals, they need you know, laundry, they need respite. But in our situation, we had gone on vacation. And while we were gone on vacation, somebody snuck into our house from the church. And they'd written cards, and they planted them all over the house. And so when we got home, we started finding these cards, and they were just inspirational cards. And so we always encourage like, do something inspirational for these families. But there was one morning that we were getting ready. My wife was the principal of our school. She was getting fielding calls for teachers that weren't going to show up. And she walked into our walk-in closet, and I was kind of behind her there talking to her, and I looked, and she was visibly upset. Like we had to get the kids fed, breakfast, school lunches made, dressed, all the stuff. And she was visibly just upset. And I remember she she Excuse me, but she reached up and she pulled down like a shirt off the off the top shelf, and something caught her eye and fell to the floor. And she picked it up. And there was one of these cards had been in the in the house for months now. We hadn't seen it. And she opened it up and read it. And the gist was, you know, thank you for what you're doing. Keep it up. You got this. But in that moment like she needed she needed that word. And it was because people in the church had a way to say, we can't foster adopt, but we can encourage you. We can do something. And so those kind of things make bring people to a place where they think they're going to quit till I'm not alone.
Jim Daly: That's so good. You know, when you look at the Lord's work in our life, right? It's to become more like Christ. And so our circumstances really do shape and mold us in so many ways. And I would only say, you know, I think on the other side of that if you're analyzing it, it also shows where perhaps you're falling behind a little in the area of selflessness.
Ted Stackpole: Oh, absolutely.
Jim Daly: You know, the me thing. And it it permeates us in this culture today. There's so much of us or me in what I want to do. And I mean, this is an area that if you want to grow in your Christian faith and Christian fruit, I can't think of a better, you know, battle zone to become more like Christ than in foster foster adoption because it it does push all the buttons. You have to become more selfless. You have to become more caring and giving and tolerant and patient. I mean, all of it, right? Which you know, for the average person you're going, yeah, I don't really want those lessons. But for the Christian, we should be saying, thank you, Lord. Right?
Ted Stackpole: Yeah. And I think it for me it was an after. I think most foster parents too, they step in, you go through pre-service training even in adoption. Like I think I meet families, and then they discover quickly that this isn't really what I thought I was signing up for. Even though you try to educate people, but until you're in that moment and then you're at a crisis like there's an internal conflict that's happening, and you're having to make a decision. And am I going to let this produce something good in me or am I going to jump ship on this? And that's where the rubber meets the road. You have to just figure out where am I in this. But when people are with you on mission, then you it yes, absolutely because you realize we would never send a missionary to a a foreign field without providing support for them. And a church should never basically recruit foster families unless they're willing to provide support because they they really are frontline missionaries right here in our own nation.
Jim Daly: Yeah. That's good. This is Focus on the Family with Jim Daly, and our guest uh today is chaplain Ted Stackpole. And I hope that you're curious about adoption and foster care. And certainly you know somebody who's in this space. Let me encourage you to get involved. And an excellent way is to get a copy of the book that Ted contributed to. It's a very quick resource-oriented book. It's called Open When Parenting Through Foster and Adoption. And the subtitle really does say it all where biblical wisdom meets modern parenting. So this is a messy journey, and this book will help kind of level set your expectations. Reach out to us when you call 800-A-FAMILY or stop by focusonthefamily.com/broadcast. I love the call to surround. I think you had somebody that was called Nanny Brown who kind of stepped in, and she was a difference maker. What did she do?
Ted Stackpole: Yeah. So she's absolutely amazing. Our kids, you know, when you start to foster, one of the things that you need is school and sometimes daycare. So we met her at the daycare. She was a daycare worker there. And she had a way of helping us with our kids that nobody else would. She really and she became really our nanny in in many ways. And so we could count on her to drive my 15-passenger van, pick kids up from school if we needed to, show up at our house last minute and help watch our kids if we had to go take care of some business. She would keep some of our kids at her own home. And at one point she even was keeping a young boy that had been with us for a short while in her home during a transitional time where we were needing some respite, we were needing some weekends off. And she was really helping us through that season when when we were really struggling in the front end to figure out how do we make it through this journey? How do we succeed in this journey? And so she's been on this journey with us from from really almost day one. She's been on this journey and helped us in our home with our kids. And we really could not have continued on the way we had without her just being there and understanding that we're not alone in this.
Jim Daly: That's an example of somebody being what I call a saint. Right? She comes along. You know, Ted, one of the things that I've noticed when we were doing the foster care was this is something that Ray Vander Laan talks about that when sin entered the world, chaos entered the world, and that Jesus came to bring us God's shalom, his peace. Whew. You don't see it any clearer than in foster care. These families are in utter chaos. Uh drug addiction is big right now, opioid addictions, etc. The state has stepped in. They've taken the child out of the home. They're trying to work with the adult parents to get them in a better place why their kids are in the foster system. But it is demanding, and there is a lot of chaos. Speak to that intersection doing foster care while you're engaged then with those bio parents of the foster kids. I remember Jean doing a lot of the meetings. She had to do them at like a fast food place. That's where the state worker would the social worker would say, let's meet them at you know, the Burger King on this corner and this corner. It's that kind of odd. But they had to keep separation, and the transfer of the children would occur there if that was happening, etc. But over the years, particularly one sibling set, we're still engaged with this family. We've become like the grandparents to these kids, and we were trying to help the dad who is single now trying to get on his feet over the last many years. But it it can pull you into that orbit. How do we respond to that engagement that it's more than the kids? It ends up being sometimes the parents of those kids.
Ted Stackpole: Yeah. So let me share kind of an interesting story. You know, we come from a community, and there's there's a lot of generational mental illness. So one of the the children that young boy that we fostered, we were told that we couldn't use the visitation center to interact. Like we we would drop the boy off, and he would see his mother. So we never could interact. And she'd been in jail because she wasn't on her medication, was you know, was arrested again. So my wife would do something. Our wives are amazing, right? So my wife would write cards to this mother. And whenever we dropped the boy off at the visitation center, she'd slide the card into a backpack, and she the backpack would go in. Well, she did this you know, every few weeks as visits were taking place. And one day the caseworker was at her house. And she said, hey, I just met with with the bio mom. And I got to her house, and you know, it was a low-income poverty situation. I went in. I went into the bedroom. She just was living with her dad. When I got into her bedroom, on her bed were these cards all across her bed. And this this bio mom looked at the caseworker and said this, I know this woman loves me. She never met my wife. She she didn't know who we were. But just that simple fact that a card was going in that backpack every week, this is what And this mother who would had she didn't have transportation, so she walked to visits to court. She got her back on her medication. She got uh her her boy back. She was reunified. And But can I tell you that that there are things we can do just to encourage people, that people know that we don't need to know all their story, but God loves them.
Jim Daly: Yeah.
Ted Stackpole: Don't give up. Keep working hard. You can do this.
Jim Daly: Ted, so often in the Christian faith we talk about you know, avoiding materialism, avoiding the pursuit of wealth, and all those right things. And many people will say maybe, you know, many theologians will say, to find true meaning in life, it's to give to others, to serve others. Can you think of an environment any richer than doing that than foster foster adoption? I mean, really.
Ted Stackpole: No, there there's no environment for that. And I think on the the church, if we look on the spectrum here, we see this in transactional. And we see it this in transformational. And I think as as believers we need to be stretched because we're really good at the transactional place. Like I go on a mission trip, I come home, I'm safe. I give an offering. Yes, I give an offering. I did that. I feel safe. And I think we have to be stretched as Christians. We have to be stretched and move up that continuum to a place where we actually are involved with transformation in people's lives. And that's a dirty it's a it's a broken place. It's a difficult place. But as long as we live down here in a transactional place, we're never going to see our really all that God has for us because the transformation at the end of the day is happening actually in our lives. We're being transformed because we're making a decision to move up that continuum.
Jim Daly: Yeah. And I can say honestly it's comfortable to be in the transactional place. And I I'm guilty of it, and I've done both. And it's much easier to sit and be calm and quiet with your bio kids or your adult bio kids and whatever it might be. But where does the Lord want you? What does he want you to do? And you don't want to be tricked. And I'm not trying to manipulate. I'm just saying, if you want to go more deeply with your relationship in Christ, serving others is generally a great way to go because that will teach you so much about the leftover stuff that you need to work on. And then the delight of bringing shalom to other people, his peace to other people. And you've done that so well, Ted. Any last-minute pitch here that you'd like to make to a couple that's watching or listening that are teetering like, honey, I've been feeling like this for a long time. What do you think? And husband may not be quite on board. What do you say? What's your pitch?
Ted Stackpole: Yeah. I I think a couple of things, but the first one is is kind of how I came into this. Like my wife always really felt like a calling to be nurturing and to help kids. And I just read read James 1:27 and think to myself, it's just the right thing to do. So I think one of the things is is just first of all from a a spiritual and scriptural perception like, what is it that the Lord would have us to do? He has shown you a man what is good, and what does the Lord require of thee, but to do justice, to love mercy, and walk humbly with our God. And this is an opportunity. I would say the first thing I would encourage any family that's teetering on this to do is to not necessarily go all in. And maybe that's not what you would expect me to say, but begin to invest in people and in the foster care community. Like what can I do to get involved? It's it may be transactional, that's okay because like I've mentioned other families like they start off, and we need people as foster adoptive families. We need a community of people to partner with us. And maybe it never moves beyond that. But I would just start from a place of saying, how could we do respite for a family?
Jim Daly: Yeah. That's the word, respite care, that you're giving some respite to the family.
Ted Stackpole: Yeah. Yeah, some relief relief care. How could we give relief to a family for, you know, four to 48 hours? Like what would be involved in that? You know, how could we do something inspirational for a family or provide something relational for them or do something tangible for a family? So I think finding a place where you can just start, it's a safe place, but it gets you involved to understand what that looks like, what the needs are that are there, and allow the Lord to stir something in your heart and move up that continuum. Like what would be the next thing? Like if this year you're doing respite, what else could we do to be involved as to make a difference? Because everything that everyone does makes a difference when you're involved. So I would just say, look for an opportunity to make a difference. And it may seem small. Remember that card that I said fell. Guess what? That was small, but that was big. It may have saved a child and kept them in our home because they took a few minutes to write a card. So small as it is, you don't know how big the contribution that you just made to help to stabilize a child and help stabilize a family, strengthen a family that stepped into this place. That is so good. Ted, this has been great. I think we've stated it as best as we can. If you're tipping in that direction, get in touch with us. We'll give you that number in a moment. At least inquire about the possibility and what's required. It's uh it's rewarding, but it's challenging. And we want to make sure you realize that and you're not uh kind of myopic in uh fairyland here when it comes to what you're going to engage. It's going to be tough. You're going to learn a lot. And most importantly, these kids are going to be loved. And if you can do that, I don't think you're making a mistake. And but again, get in touch with us. Another thing that we're doing that's very practical and I think very good is uh most foster kids come to that foster placement with a trash bag because it's happened late at night. That was our typical situation. We'd get a call at midnight, can you take two children? We're doing a drug raid tonight, and the kids have to go somewhere. That's how it works. And we'd say yes, and then we'd sit patiently waiting for these little children to come in. And they'd have a trash bag each of their clothes. So that was something we spearheaded which is our suitcase bundle for $100 we give them you give them a duffel bag, a children's Bible, a teddy bear, and a handwritten note typically from churches that participate with us. So teens and adults will write handwritten love notes to these kids saying, we see you, we care about you. It's really brilliant. And be a part of it. We've given away about 60,000 suitcases. Isn't that awesome? And we're only able to do that because of you. So if you can participate in that way, that's one small step as Ted is saying to help.
Jim Daly: Yeah. So make that $100 gift for the suitcase bundle to happen for a child. And uh we have a special matching campaign going on right now. Some generous friends have agreed to match any donation you make dollar for dollar, which means you can help twice as many children with your giving. Let's work together to deliver hope and joy to more families this year and uh to find more forever homes for orphans in foster care. Start by calling 800, the letter A and the word family or when you visit focusonthefamily.com/broadcast. And we'll say thank you for your generosity by sending a copy of the book the chaplain Stackpole has contributed to Open When Parenting Through Foster and Adoption. Thanks for listening to Focus on the Family with Jim Daly. I'm John Fuller, inviting you back next time as we once more help you and your family thrive in Christ.
Ted Stackpole: When Susan's full-term baby died in her womb, she was devastated. She wondered if she could ever trust God again.
Susan: And so Focus on the Family um really was monumentally instrumental in teaching me this truth and healing me from the grief of losing a child.
Jim Daly: I'm Jim Daly. Let's rescue people like Susan. Give today, and your gift will be doubled at focusonthefamily.com/family.