Offering God's Love to Children Without Families

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aioclub.org slash radio. I was afraid to do this. I was scared.

I wasn't special and God didn't design me to be some incredibly special person that no one else has the abilities to do what I do. I was just obedient and stepped into it and now I look at it and I'm like oh my gosh I get to see this every day in my home and it's kind of like a high it's kind of like a euphoric thing of like oh my gosh God look what you can do look what you can do in the life of this kid. Well that's Stacey Gagman describing her adventures as a foster and adoptive parent and she's here with us along with her husband Darren to share about their unusual family which is going to inspire and encourage you today. Welcome to Focus on the Family.

Your host is Focus President and author Jim Daly and I'm John Fuller. Well November is National Adoption Month and I am so glad that we can celebrate the courageous moms and dads that have said yes like Stacey and Darren who have stepped into this special calling and helped rescue really children that don't have families and it's a beautiful thing. Now we know that not everyone can be a foster parent don't feel a guilt trip that's not the the goal of the program today it's more to just make you aware of the needs in foster care adoption etc and then encourage you to ask the Lord what you might be able to do it might be simply coming around an adoptive family and embracing them and helping them.

There's many ways to get involved and we're going to cover those today. Yeah there's volunteering, the babysit running errands, a variety of things at our Wait No More website we have a lot of different ideas about how you can come alongside as Jim said a foster or an adoptive family and so stop by our website we've got the link and the episode notes. You know I've mentioned this before but when we started doing our Wait No More program here Focus on the Family which was to do exactly what I mentioned a moment ago to help inspire people to consider working in the foster care area I got home and Gene said hey if you're going to ask others to do it we need to do it.

It wasn't what you were expecting was it? Yeah it wasn't I was like no I was the foster kid I don't have to go through that again but she was right it was great to engage and we became foster parents we had both long-term children and and then short term stays where they just needed a place for a night or two but it was so rewarding and again we're going to cover this today in the U.S. it's called Wait No More in Canada it's called Waiting to Belong and we are grateful for all of the families that have said yes and come to one of the events. Yeah these events are all designed to kind of enlighten encourage and inspire families to open their hearts and homes to bring in a child through foster care and it's really made a difference in so many lives. It has and now let me officially welcome our guests Darren and Stacey thank you for joining us today.

We are delighted to be here. I so appreciate it as I understand it you're both passionate advocates for orphans and that's great and you have a heart for kids with special needs particularly which that's special in itself because that comes with a lot of additional requirements and I really admire the fact that you've done that but that wasn't your original intent when you started your family right so give us an idea about your family how is it comprised? Well actually my original intent was no children.

Okay no you know what a lot of women are in that spot so I appreciate the honesty of that. I was a college athlete very driven very career driven and I would say that starting out I didn't want kids and then you know we laughed. Let me dig into that what was that motivating reason to not want children other than you were an athlete and was it they were would be a distraction or just sum that up for me? I think if just summing it up is my I was raised by a single mother my father was an alcoholic and in my mind I didn't want to do that to a kid. I didn't want to have a family marriage or have a child be raised by a single mom and so I think that in my mind there were other things I could do.

I wanted to work with kids but I didn't necessarily want to have my own to raise. No I appreciate that and obviously your testimony your life shows that God changed your heart in that regard. With a sense of humor yes God changed my heart in that you know so I think as we were looking at our family then I conceded okay let's have two children and we had a boy and a girl and we were done and so at that point I was teaching in elementary school and a student came into my classroom who was new and with any new student you know you set them by the student who is super driven and super organized.

Is that why I always moved around? And so I started teaching away and going about the day and about halfway through the day I look back and he is slumped over on his desk and I hear him just ugly sobbing and I'm like oh my gosh and so I walked back there and I put my hand on his shoulder and I had him come right outside the classroom door and he just slumped down the side of the building and was sitting on his head in his arms and I kneeled down and I said what's going on bud and he looked at me and I just remember his face you know just streaked with tears and he said they took me from my home last night. I went to a foster home in this town and I don't know the lady's name I'm staying with and I don't even know what bus to ride and I was just horrified that one of my students was living this and so I did a little more investigation and found out that in my community that they were having to stack children in homes because they didn't have enough foster homes and so I went to Darren and and just said you know we need to do this we can be a home for kids we have extra room and you know we can we can do that and so I guess the rest then is history and that child was eight I believe is that right yes to paint that picture but I'll tell you that is such a significant moment because I live that too I mean that loneliness and that unknowingness that's the best way to describe it and when a teacher would put their hand on my shoulder and say hey do you need help it was an awesome thing you know it just reinforced the fact that somebody does care. Darren you're a teacher you that's what you have done and that's beautiful you taught high school talk about you as the husband so you know your wonderful wife is saying hey I'm feeling like this nudge where were you at and that sure so you know I've always enjoyed working with kids all through college I taught middle school Sunday school that so you're one of those guys that said yes to middle school and it was always great you know I felt like in this situation God kind of said look I'm gonna open your eyes to to a situation and then I'm gonna ask you to do something about it you know I mean in America so many times like we we're aware of things but we hesitate to get involved or you know it's life can be pretty complicated sometimes and so in this case when Stacy told me what happened I talked to some friends of ours that were foster family and we just decided why not if God's calling us to do it we should do it and we're going to explore the why nots because it's not easy sometimes you'll get a child that you know it can be easier but these children come with a lot of emotional baggage and I do want to uncover that as we move along let me ask you about backwards parenting that's an intriguing I guess approach what are you getting at when it comes to backward parenting especially those kids that are coming from trauma which many of these kids I know the 15 or so kids that we had through our home some were little babies you know they were coming in because their mother was addicted to drugs and they're trying to sort it out then others had other issues whether it was abuse or something like that but they come in with brokenness I mean that's where you have to start and it's got to keep your anger or your over zealousness in check right absolutely to start where they're at and and I think so we laugh because what I said earlier is we thought love can fix this I'm going to parent like I did my bio kids and you know we subscribe to so many of Dobson's books you know we love what we read the strong-willed child we read all of the books because we wanted to be prepared and I will tell you yes that with my my trust base my bio kids that worked but that kind of parenting does not work so much with the trauma child because their brain has been the foundation of their brain is different and so backwards parenting is understanding that behavior is communication and we believe that right and we say yep behavior is communication but for some reason down the road we start we kind of lose that and so when we're parenting our kids and we see a scary behavior we recognize that scared kids do scary things and so we are look we are going to ignore the behavior and figure out what is the underlying need or fear that is not met right now and it all goes back to attachment it all goes back to that early foundational thing that's happening and so when we are backwards parenting it is not a free ticket out of consequences it's understanding I'm not going to play whack-a-mole with behaviors all day and not actually figure out why the behaviors are happening well which is the the baiting that these kids typically do because I think in so many ways they want to basically say do you love me even if I mean then you can fill in the blank do you have some examples so people can attach to what you're saying I mean again people that have compliant bio children they're like what is going on you know it's kind of like the person who's never had children in the grocery store watching the kid have a frantic moment and and they say to themselves when I have children they will never act like that well I don't think that's the case right you will soon find that not to be true uh but give us an example of what you experienced with these traumatized kids and how they continue to say we love me even if I I like to use this story it does not shine kindly on me but it was when we first started fostering we we got two children in our home and um often is the case in foster care you don't know the history yet you know we were told that we were getting um a four and a half year old and a two-year-old who didn't speak English they only spoke Spanish which we find out later that they didn't even speak Spanish um they they were pretty much speaking gibberish but um I remember within the first week of being home or in my home I had made cupcakes for all of the kids and I had put them on the counter and I had told all of them like hey guys we're going to have these after dinner don't eat the cupcakes and I'm pretty sure right now your studio audience or whoever is laughing because I guess I'm sure you guys can all guess what's going to happen I left the room to go do laundry because at my house there is always laundry to do and when I came back in the four and a half year old boy was standing there with cupcakes in both hands cupcake all over his face and I in that I just I rounded the corner and I looked at him and I said did you eat the cupcakes well I'm sure you can guess what he said no yeah right no and I'm looking at him and I'm like you're holding the cupcakes in your hand and he is lying he's gonna lie to me again no and he puts them behind his back and he's like no and he's adamant that he didn't eat the cupcakes and I'm adamant that he's holding the evidence in his hands and so in that moment um I realized that I was triggered by his lying and he was triggered with a survival brain telling him the worst thing that ever happened to me is about to happen again and so he was going to lie to survive and had I known his internal narrative or his history I would have understood that he and his sister had been locked in a room in an apartment with with um no one around no one even knew children lived in that apartment um they had witnessed the murder of their infant brother of their infant brother they had been without meals many many times and so I didn't know that and I was going to punish the behavior instead of recognizing that he was a child that had food insecurity right and so we learned very quickly wow he had his own set of food I mean we nicknamed him pop tart because he was addicted to pop tarts and he could have them whenever he wanted so we would just like you know I mean he had we had boxes of pop tarts because that's what he loved yeah and so that's a point of backwards parenting where we recognize that the behavior doesn't matter it's what's the underlying need that needs to be met that's really good Darren let me pull you in here because uh you know people are listening we've had about five thousand families start the adoption process through foster care which is great that doesn't count the number that have wrapped around other adoptive parents etc we don't know that number but uh you know they're they're energized by the discussion they know what the lord is calling them to the book of james talking about caring for the orphan uh but you know there's that apprehension describe that and how to how did the two of you get through that apprehension you know stacy and i over the years have talked about the um the idea of the american dream right and everybody talks about the you know two and a half kids and a dog and a you know a nice home and white picket fence yeah exactly and so we decided once you know we didn't really set out to be foster parents it kind of fell in our lap we responded when we were kind of called to do it but we kind of learned early on like if if you're truly going to do what god asks you to do the american dream has to kind of go uh go away and you start to live your life with purpose and you so so you you know there's a lot of fear involved and i think that i think especially for people who are looking from the outside in at fostering you know you hear all the horror stories of people who had bad experiences but if you can get through that and you can go with faith and you can say you know we're going to do it even if things might go bad we know this is what we kind of feel we're called to do when stacy and i were fostering you know the phone would ring and they would say well we have a a child and you know most of the time you'd ask lots of questions you know you'd want to know their age and lots of information about their background to decide if it was a good fit for your family well after maybe six months of fostering and the phone kept ringing and we kind of didn't know whether we should say yes or not we just decided you know that doesn't make any sense if if the phone rings we're just going to say yes because we will know that god has already just decided we're the ones that they're going to call they could call all kinds of different foster families but they called us so faith just leads us to say what does he say yes and i think i think people just need to recognize that if if they're listening to what the lord is calling him to do just say yes and he will take care of the details now in that context you have the two bio children that you've talked about but you had something like 30 foster kids come through your home and you adopted five of those i believe is that accurate so we adopted three of them and then adopted two from orphanages in eastern europe okay so you know quite a combination of needs and you know parenting needs etc but one of your sons named joel it was very special describe they're all special obviously but joel had unique challenges what what was joel's story so joel um we were done after four so we always laugh after two done after four and we were like you know what we have we have room for one more and we had just you know adopted our our two middle children that had special needs and we're like you know this is a niche you know everybody wants the baby or everybody wants you know the child that's neurotypical and you know we let's give a home to a child that maybe would not get a home and so we said one more and so at that point we let our licensing worker know and she like goes oh my goodness i i know this kid i saw him a year ago so she tells me about this child um in another town who has what's called golden heart syndrome and golden heart is a cranial facial impairment or deformity if you will so joel has um facial disfigurement so he's missing an ear part of the jaw and his face and um he's deaf and also has vision issues and so um we were like yeah just like darren said yes you know we just learned to just be obedient and say yes and um we went to meet him and it was just i instantly knew like he's he's number five wow the lord just confirmed that in your heart yeah now i mean that takes um some consideration i i agree with you darren that as christians that the yes i love that that step of faith but that can be intimidating to most people and i understand that it's not a guilt thing um how did you plow through that i mean just to say yes because we trust god's got a plan here and we need to be part of it is it that simple i guess i would say yes because nothing we do make sense on paper from finances to what our family makeup is to all the the things that we do from day to day none of it actually makes sense unless god's involved in it and so um and i also if your listeners could hear this disability is not a tragedy god formed my children to be exactly who they were supposed to be and the tragedy is the fact they didn't stay with their bio parents that's a tragedy that they needed and i i think when you are looking at kids we all and adults too we all have things that are special needs or extra needs within us my children's extra needs are just more external and so i don't i will tell you if you met my kids you would just be like you are so lucky because we are we're so lucky yeah that's beautiful and in fact it led to you writing a children's book with joel about joel you know in a way but it's called cowboy joel and the wild wild west uh what happened with that how did that idea come about you know that was it was a long process but it was really fun to do um you know years ago when joel was pretty young he had a kind of a bad experience and and um stacy wrote a blog post and talked about how as parents we just need to be intentional about teaching kids that there are other kids who look different and if we can if we can kind of prepare them ahead of time we might avoid some of the issues that joel has because joel looks different and so kids look at him and and tend to stare and it's just a matter of you know misunderstanding most of the time and so when that had happened we got contacted by nbc we ended up going on the megan kelly show we talked about about how we can you know as parents do a little bit better and then out of that people said well how do we do it how do we teach our kids about kids who look different if we don't know any kids and so we wrote a book yeah and that's good and in fact that was born out of an experience where you took joel to church and kids were kind of not very kind they were looking staring maybe i is that a fair description yes so i had walked him back we had gone to a new church because our oldest son was presenting um there and so i had walked him back to the children's ministry and and the reality is i forget that he looks different like we live in a small community and you just people are you know he goes to school with other kids and so we don't see it or recognize it till we actually leave our town and so um when we walked back into this children's ministry building every kid when we walked in the door stopped talking started um whispering behind cupped hands and pointing at him and he just like ran to the back of the room and put his head into his arm and i'm like oh so to to me it just it it just made me upset because i'm like oh my gosh parents have got to teach their kids the correct way yeah a better way a better way yeah to teach especially in that context you know i can only imagine joel's little heart yeah and so you blogged about that and got a little bit of reaction yeah so it went it went viral and um you know it just really became more of a conduit for us to be able to speak out about how to educate kids on children that have differences so stacy you've admitted and i think very kindly you know you're not a perfect mom guess what there are no perfect moms and there are no perfect dads um but we try hard and that's the the point um but i do want people because part part of what we want to do is nudge people to consider how they can get involved right in that regard what are the challenges that you face and what did the lord teach you about being enough for your kids not perfect but being enough and kind of letting go of the laundry and all the stuff that make you feel imperfect because it's not all done you know i i look back on just um my life and and especially in college and shortly after i was very performance driven um i was a college athlete i um excelled in academics and in sports and i wanted to carry that over into motherhood and you know with my two oldest my biological children i really was so driven to have a perfect home my kids dressed perfect my kids received all the things that i felt like made me a good mom and made us good parents to them um when we started fostering um when we started fostering i started drowning yeah i couldn't maintain the perfection that i had for myself and the reality is like i believe like foster care and adoption has saved me from from a life of just performance for man and these kids have like they honestly expose some of my ugliest parts and even in our marriage but it's been so beautiful because god has met me in those spaces and saying like you're enough because you're showing up to love them every day and you know my kids are not in every sport we you know we both were full ride college athletes none of our children are athlete athletic and that's good you know like we're they're not in every sport i don't get to make every single production i'm not able to keep up with laundry you know i am one of the worst cooks in the whole wide world thank god i married someone that can cook like and it's okay because i'm enough as a mom in christ teaching my kids about god's love well it's so beautiful because jesus himself was that example of getting involved in messiness you know the woman at the well the woman caught in adultery the tax collector i mean he just kind of went where the the righteous people didn't go and i think it's a great example you know where he's telling you get involved in the mess let's end with the story about your son israel and tell us about israel kind of describe him for us and then tell us how you taught him to become more independent by learning to get into a wheelchair because i think this is a great example of not falling prey to overdoing it to make them so dependent right just to give you a little backstory on israel he um i was scared to death to bring israel home when i met israel he was four and a half living tied to a crib in um eastern europe he had zero language as a four and a half year old he um was on a liquid diet and was size of a one-year-old and so when we brought israel home did not mean it was easy because god had shown me that i i thought i don't want my son to be caged by me and so um he started thriving in our home it was amazing he started talking he started eating normal foods he started getting around and i recognize in him this desire to um overcome and as a mom i had this incredible desire to protect because i know what he had lived for four and a half years and so it kind of all came to a culminating point where um he wanted to get into his wheelchair and i told him israel you're going to get in your wheelchair and he looked at me and he said mommy i can't it's hard and i'm like you can do this and i walked out of the room and i stood at the door and i watched him for 30 minutes trying and falling trying and falling and then came the moment where i just saw him do it and he said mommy i did it and i think that that's our goal in parenting our kids is just saying you know it doesn't matter your past it doesn't matter where you've come from but you you can be independent you can do all these things because you're loved you're safe and worthy wow there's so much in there that you're talking about i don't care if you have bio kids adopted kids i mean that is what the lord you can really sense stacy and darren how the lord has shaped your heart and the things that you've learned through the process are beautiful and you know i think for me the kind of the last point and the thing that i'm so concerned about for the church certainly in north america it may not be true globally but the church in north america we seem um so wrapped up in modernity that we're failing to recognize god's basic call to sacrifice to love those around you and you've demonstrated that in such a beautiful way and we just need more people to say yes and to say okay i'm gonna get messy i'm not gonna live for perfect i'm gonna live for imperfect but good enough and yeah it's such a beautiful story in this wonderful book cowboy joel and the wild wild west what a great expression to help kids understand how some people are different and how do we interact with them and treat them and just like the lord's heart we do that with deep respect and love for that individual thank you so much for being with us today thanks for having us on yeah and we're going to encourage you to get a copy of this great book cowboy joel and the wild wild west for your child for your grandkids your church get copies of this book spread it around help children understand not everybody's made the same and there is some joy in um in the other child that doesn't look like you get a copy from us here at focus on the family the website and our phone number are both included in the episode notes and please send a gift of any amount to focus on the family join our support team and we'll send a copy of the gagman's book right out to you that's our way of saying thank you for supporting our efforts to wrap around foster care and adoptive families on behalf of jim daley and the entire team thanks for joining us today for focus on the family i'm john fuller inviting you back as we once more help you and your family thrive in christ invest in your child's faith all year long keep them engaged and learning christian values with the action-packed fun-filled activities in clubhouse junior and clubhouse magazines from focus on the family subscribe today at focus on the family dot com slash kids mags