June 7, 2018 Show with Heather Watkins on “Guidelines for Adopting Children” AND Mark Lukens on “An Update on the Anti-Christian Discrimination Against Couples Desiring to Adopt in Massachusetts”

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This is Chris Arnson, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this seventh day of June 2018, and I am so delighted that my dear friend of many years, going back to the 1980s, Pastor Bill Shishko, host of a Visit to the Pastors Study, and the director of Reformation Metro New York, which is a parachurch ministry under the oversight of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, I'm so delighted that he strongly urged me to interview my guest today, who is a first-time guest to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and I'm excited about the program she will be on for the first 90 minutes of the broadcast.

Her name is Heather Watkins. She's the mother of three adopted children and wife of Dr. Eric B. Watkins, who is the senior pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church, which is an Orthodox Presbyterian congregation in St. Augustine, Florida, and we are going to be addressing, for the first 90 minutes of the broadcast, guidelines for adopting children.

The last half hour of the program, we are going to be visited by a returning guest, Pastor Mark Lukens, who is the biological parent of six children and adoptive parent of seven children, and he's the pastor of Providence Baptist Church in Norfolk, Massachusetts, and a sponsor of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.

He is going to be giving us an update on the anti-Christian discrimination against couples desiring to adopt in Massachusetts. But first of all, we are going to, as I said, be welcoming for the very first time to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Heather Watkins.

It's a joy to have you on the program today.

Thank you so much.

And I'm going to give our email address out right now for listeners interested in asking questions. And of course, as always, please give us at least your first name, your city and state and your country of residence if you live outside the USA.

And please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. And I could obviously readily understand why a subject like this would lend itself to someone wanting to remain anonymous on certain questions.

So we will grant you that request. But if it's not a personal and private matter, then please give us at least your first name, city and state and country of residence. Well, before I go into your personal background, as we always do with a first-time guest getting their personal testimony of salvation, what kind of religious upbringing you had and what providential circumstances the Lord used in your life to draw you to himself and save you.

Before we go into that, I want to hear something about Covenant Presbyterian Church, which is, as I said before, a member of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church denomination in St. Augustine, Florida. And I know that your husband, as I mentioned just a minute ago, is Dr. Eric B. Watkins, the pastor of that congregation.

Tell us something about that church.

Yes, we at Presbytery planted the church 10 years ago. We just celebrated our 10th anniversary. We were able to particularize the same year that we began services. It was truly what is called a parachute plant.

There was an idea, but no core group whatsoever. And by God's grace, not only do we have a church building now, but we are looking—our intern just arrived yesterday from Canada, and Lord willing, in the next year, we'll be looking at planting a church nearby with another family in our church, planting a second daughter plant nearby as well in the next two years.

Oh, praise God. And we will be giving contact information for that congregation before you leave us today. But now let's hear something about your own childhood, your own upbringing as a child, what kind of religious atmosphere you were raised in, if any, and how you eventually came to know Jesus Christ as your Lord, God, and Savior, and had embraced the gospel.

And of course, I'd also love to hear how you came to embrace the Reformed faith.

Well, I was one of those people that was brought up in a Christian family. It was not Reformed, but I never knew it when I did not know and love the Lord. I am actually a third-generation pastor's wife.

Wow.

My dad was a Baptist minister, and when I was 15, we went over to Barcelona, Spain, where he did one term as a missionary at an institute, a Bible institute over there. And I'm the eldest, my two brothers and my sister below me.

So we are a family of two boys and two girls, just like my husband is a family of two boys and two girls. We were one of the pioneers in homeschooling back when homeschooling was not done. And we just always loved the Lord.

We were very close-knit family, but very not Reformed. And so, which is totally fine. When I was in college, I came home to visit my parents. My dad was an interim president of a very small Bible college.

And I met a man there who thankfully did not tell me that day that he had decided upon first seeing me that I was the one he was going to marry. He played his cards far more carefully than that.

That could be kind of a scary thing I'm imagining. I'm talking about the other way that God told me I'm going to marry you.

And Eric had grown up in a non-Christian family, a military family, and had gotten saved following the Grateful Dead cross-country. A person had given him a Bible and his brother's name was Mark. And on a bus trip, he opened up the Bible, read the book of Mark, and by the time he got off the bus, he was a saved young man and very desirous to learn more about the Bible, to preach or tell people about the Bible, which turned into a desire to preach the gospel.

So, we got married and then immediately went out to California. He had heard what the dispensation Armenian background had to say and wanted to see what the other side had to say. He wanted to learn biblical languages and really study the Bible.

And that kind of narrowed it down to him at that time to Westminster East or Westminster West, and he's a surfer. So, we went west. And I remember the day and the place that he came home and confessed to me that he had become a Calvinist.

Confessed to you as if this was something horrible that he was hiding from you.

Yes. Well, it was a difficult year for us. It didn't matter as much to me whether I emotionally felt that Calvinism was the proper way to look at the scripture, but I had been raised in a very strong hermeneutical background, meaning the way that we read the scriptures was through a lens of a non-reformed framework.

And it wasn't until we were in a wonderful church out there, Harvest OPC, that the love and care and just fellowship of the people out there really wrapped their arms around me, helped me wrestle through all of the questions I had, and it was actually on my way home from becoming a member that I realized that the same God that for some arbitrary reason had saved me, had made me a female, had me born in the 20th century, had me born in America.

He also was the same person that gave me that grace completely apart from myself and any works or anything that I could perform. And it just began that transition to a more covenantal view of scripture, and that was my first step towards Reformed Theology.

Well, I'm looking forward to having your husband, Dr. Eric, on my program. I did speak with him earlier this afternoon after I spoke with you, and he said that he would be delighted to be a guest hopefully very soon on Iron Sherp and Zion Radio to discuss the book that he wrote, The Drama of Preaching.

So that is something that is a very compelling title, so I'm looking forward to exploring that with him. And that was also by very strong recommendation of our mutual friend Pastor Bill Shishko, formerly the pastor of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church of Franklin Square and now running Reformation Metro New York.

I probably made a mistake in the way that, in the title I gave him, I don't know if he's director, I don't know what, I know that you Presbyterians always have these weird and fancy names for everything.

I have a friend who is the, the, what do they call him, the stated supply of Knox Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and I said that's a horrible name. It sounds like a, you know, one of those warehouses where you buy lumber or.

Licorice, you know, I mean it's just... Well, the ongoing joke is so is the term Orthodox Presbyterian Church, but you know that's the name that we ended up getting stuck with and we've learned to love it.

I'm assuming that because of the confusion many people think it's somehow connected to.

Eastern Orthodoxy maybe? Yes, yes, that is a standing joke with people within the OPC.

Because of the confusion there, yes. Well, I have grown to love it because I've grown to love so many brothers and sisters in Christ from your denomination, and I look forward to having many more as guests on this program.

They always seem to prove to be excellent guests when they're from the OPC. Thank you. But, well, now you've told us about how you met your husband and the area of your lives that is directly connected to our subject is obviously adoption.

You are the adoptive parents of three children, and why don't you tell us about those circumstances, how this came to be, why this came to be, any kind of battle you may have been going on in your minds on whether or not to do this, any kind of anxiety or fear over this, etc.

If you could tell us all about this.

Story. Definitely. It is definitely my pleasure. My husband and I very much so wanted to have two boys, two girls. We wanted to have at least four children. We wanted to be able to experience the blessing of burying children biologically, and so we began trying to conceive a couple years after we were married, and as time went on, realized that there may be issues, and as we explored our options and what may have been causing the problems, we discovered that when I was 11, I must have had appendicitis, and my appendix exploded, and my body walled it off and absorbed it, and that's what caused my infertility.

And at the time, it was a true Jacob wrestling with the Lord. Why me? Why would this happen? My greatest dream in life to be shot down, and there's just a beautiful section in one of Gerhardtus Voss's books that talks about learning to kiss a striking Lord, and what I mean by that is, from a Reformed perspective of understanding God's sovereignty, to be able to come to the point where you say, God did this to me, and I wouldn't have it any other way, because He knows best, and I trust Him.

And when we finally got to that point, we were finally ready to be the parents that God was calling us to be, and I truly view our family, our adoption story, as a calling now. If I had to do over again, I wouldn't change a thing, not just because of everything that we have learned about God, and about each other, and about ourselves, but because of how hard we have worked for each one of these children, and the particular children that God has sent our way,.

Each with their own broken stories. Well, praise God for that. Yes, Gerhardtus Voss phrased that quite beautifully. Can you repeat that phrase? Because I can recall having a fascinating interview on Gerhardtus Voss a number of years ago, many years ago, on the old Iron Sherpins Iron radio broadcast, broadcasting out of New York.

I did a couple of programs on Gerhardtus Voss, actually, and I know one of them was with an OPC author. In fact, it was Danny Olinger. I.

Believe Danny's in the OPC, is he not? Yes, yes, he's the one that makes the joke about our name.

How did Gerhardtus Voss phrase that? Well, actually, I just remembered that particular.

Phrase was by Samuel Rutherford. Gerhardtus Voss has a very similar one. Samuel Rutherford is to learn to kiss a striking Lord, and Gerhardtus Voss talks about when Mary entered into the tomb, the darkness of the tomb, that we can only truly see his face and the glory and the beauty there by walking through those dark places.

It's really the same concept with different phrases, and they're both just very beautiful. I have found that different hymns have spoken to me at different times, and there's a hymn that falls right in line with this that says, Whatever my God ordains is right, and there's this one part that says, Though now this cup in drinking May bitter seem to my faint heart, I take it all in shrinking, because my God is true.

Wow, praise God. Well, you realized that because of your medical condition that you could not have children. Now take us to the next step. Was adoption something that you both, both Eric, your husband, and you said, We have to do this.

This is a necessity. This is something we absolutely must move forward on, or was this something that you had to really pray for God's will, even though you knew you could not have children, that you still weren't certain, perhaps, that this was going to be the move you made?

I'm not sure what happened in your life.

God was very gracious, and we had actually wanted to adopt even before we found out that we could not conceive any of our children. So it ended up being a smoother process for us. And yet, one of the things that is just so ironic to me is we're still human.

We have three, they may not be perfect children, but they are perfect children for us. And yet with each adoption, and you may not know, we are actually on the list to try to adopt one more time, and pray very fervently every day for that.

We're hoping to adopt a girl some day soon. And with every adoption, we still struggle with fear. And something that has really been driven home to me this year is the verse that says, there is no fear in love.

And just learning that even though we love our adoption story, and we love our adopted children, and we see so very clearly God's hand in each one of their stories, yet we still fear and forget that our God owns a.

Cattle on a thousand hills, and that He cares for us. Well, you said that you already knew that you were intending to adopt or that you wanted to adopt before you even realized that you could have not biological children of your own.

So as far as other couples out there, what do you think needs to exist in a couple's lives, and in their individual lives as people, and in their home, for such an idea and such a very beautiful and wonderful thing?

A thing that mirrors in many ways the adoption of God the Father, adopting His children, meaning we who are His elect, we who are His children born again believers in Christ. But obviously, this is not something to enter into lightly.

It's not something for every single couple, or individual, or family, or home. So why don't you start telling us about what you think any couple and family needs to seriously consider before even treading into these waters.

Right. So the first thing I would say is the same piece of advice that we received before getting married, is that one has to love the Lord more. One of the things that can be a huge struggle for a couple, especially a couple struggling with infertility, is trying to juxtapose the God-given desire to have children and the struggle that involves making that desire into an idol.

And if you cannot lay down at the cross of Christ all of that pain, and all of that desire, and all of that hope, and say, your will be done, it's difficult to be prepared to truly appreciate and be ready to handle the unique struggles that adoption brings.

So go further into that concept. You know, you have families that are perhaps, they want children to be added to their home, not only because they perhaps have no children of their own yet, but sometimes they just have a heart of compassion.

They have a heart to see underprivileged children, children who are orphans, children who may even be not on the top of the list at orphanages. They may be minority children that are overlooked, they may be handicapped disabled children, and I know that in this day and age you got to be careful how you phrase things because there's politically correct language that we're supposed to use.

But there are all sorts of reasons that people want to adopt, but there are also inherent things in certain individuals and couples and families that may remove them from the loop of being appropriate candidates to do this.

Right. Many people romanticize adoption. I cannot tell you how often I'm at a store and it's mentioned that my children have been adopted and the cashier will say, oh I've always wanted to adopt, I'm planning on adopting, which is a noble thing to say.

But I think a lot of people romanticize the concept, almost a Hollywood glamour about it, and it is a wonderful calling that without the grace of God it is a very difficult road to follow upon. A lot of work, a lot of heartache.

I always say adoption is the life that follows death. It many times is the death of the reproductive body, the death of innocence, death of dreams, families, of ties, and yet through that death is born a family that grows stronger because of that child.

And I cannot stress enough if it is a calling to not only really wrestle whether or not you have an internal calling, but also seek the counsel of wise people both in the church and people that have gone on before you in the adoption process.

We have people that have, as you said, they have biological children and they've adopted as well from foster care situations, internationally, infants, older, any different kind of situation. And in each one of those, one was not better than the other, but it was what God had particularly planned for their lives as being best for them.

And one of the ways they were able to determine.

That was through counsel of wise people. And before we even go any further, I think something that I should have asked you in the very beginning, I'd like you to tell us about your own adopted children, their ages and names and so on.

Yes, so Kira is 11. We say that she's 11 going on 30. She is very firstborn, loves to read, and has an incredibly maternal heart. And our son Carl is 10, and he's the gregarious joker of the bunch. He actually has special needs.

Um, we did not discover that till later on, but we wouldn't change him for the world. And we have an amazing church that just loves him exactly the way he is and a great support network around. And then we prayed and wrestled and prayed and wrestled for several years.

And we had been on list for close to three years. And one morning I was upstairs doing laundry. I said, God, can you just give us a hospital drop off? I'm ready for my William. And half an hour later, we got a call.

We were the fourth people on the list. He was a drug baby. And yet in God's providence, he has completely healed and is just our little joy. He's now 19 months old. And as I said before, we're hoping to be chosen someday soon for one last girl.

So this was just as you said, it was a hospital drop off?

Yes, yes. DCF was standing there ready to take him. And we had 30 minutes to decide.

Wow. So on those circumstances, this is something totally new to me. In those circumstances, this can totally remove the long waiting periods of adoptive parents?

There are no two adoptions alike. Some people wait for 10 days after their home study has been completed, and they're immediately placed. Some people wait for five, six years, and some people are never placed.

Now this gets into the different kinds of adoption that there are. All three of our children are what are called private adoptions. Two of them were through an agency, Catholic Charities, and one was through a lawyer.

And so if there were an adoption such as a foster-to-adopt situation, or an international adoption, or a personal familial adoption,.

Those would look different. And when we come back from our first station break, I'm going to have you go through some of those differences. Sounds great. And if anybody would like to join us, we do have a couple of people already waiting to have their questions asked and answered, and we'll get to you as soon as possible.

Our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com, chrisarnson at gmail .com. Please give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the USA.

And please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. So don't go away, God willing, we will be right back after these messages with more of Heather Watkins and guidelines for adopting children.

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We bring biblically faithful pastoral ministry to you and we invite you to visit the pastor's study by calling in with your questions. Our time will be lively, useful, and I assure you, never dull. Join us this Saturday at 12 noon Eastern Time for a visit to the pastor's study because everyone needs a pastor.

And that was my aforementioned friend, Bill Shishko, a mutual friend of my guest and mine. He is the host of a visit to the pastor's study and he is a dear friend that I've known since I was a very new Christian.

I strongly urge you to listen to this program as often as you can every Saturday from 12 noon to 1 p .m. Eastern Time on WLIE540am .com, everywhere in the world, or if you live in the New York Tri-State area and parts of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Pennsylvania, you can hear it at 540 on the AM dial during those times, 12 noon to 1 p .m. Eastern Time.

So we ask of you to please, if you call into the program, tell Pastor Bill Shishko that you heard about his program, a visit to the pastor's study, from Chris Arnsen on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and I know that my guest Heather Watkins and her husband, Pastor Eric Watkins, can give just as glowing a report about Bill Shishko as I can.

Yes, definitely. He was at.

Our house earlier this year and we had a lovely time with him and his wife. Great, and if I.

Remember, hopefully I'll be able to give you all the website for a visit to the pastor's study where you can hear archived interviews, including the one that he conducted with my guest Heather, and I'm assuming that he also interviewed Eric.

Am I right on that? He has not had the chance to yet. Oh, okay. Well, he strongly urged me to interview Eric, but I'm sure he will eventually because of that. Yes. But you enjoyed yourself anyway on the show.

Very much so. So there are different types of adoption that people should be aware of because there are misconceptions about adoption and there are closed adoptions and fully open adoptions and so on, so why don't you describe them in more detail so our listeners know exactly what we're referring to?

Definitely. There are two.

Sections here. One is the avenue of adoption and the second one is the level of openness. So with the level of openness, there are three main categories. There's closed adoption, and a closed adoption means that there is absolutely no identifying information on either side.

A safe haven baby, in other words, a baby that has been dropped off at a hospital or maybe at a fire department with no information on the birth mother whatsoever, this would qualify. There are other adoptions.

This was very common 50, 60 years ago and before where everything was conducted through the agency completely anonymously and the adoptees usually had zero information on their birth parents. The birth parents had zero information on the adoptive parents.

That form of adoption is much more rare today. It becomes more of the standard in an international adoption where the child may be in an orphanage with unknown background, but it is pretty rare today in the United States.

The semi-open adoption is where some identifying information is known. For instance, first name, maybe some medical social background. This became very popular a couple decades ago and the goal of this form of adoption was that the birth family and the adoptive family would both keep in communication with the agency or lawyer where they were moving any medical information so that when the adoptee became 18, they could petition through the agency to meet their birth parents.

If there were medical necessity and more information were needed, there was a recourse for that. Or for instance, in the beginning months after placement, the birth mother was able to see a letter, see a photo, maybe even meet at the agency just to be reassured that she had made the right decision in placing her child with this particular family.

Agencies began to realize that this was very helpful not just for the healing of the birth family. For the adoptive family, it gave more of the heritage and story to their child that they realized after the fact, they really desired.

And even more importantly, it gave a foundation, a grounding, a story, a reason to the adoptee. I was adopted because and really gave a lot of peace to the adoptee. The last form of adoption is what's called fully open adoption.

And to be honest, in today's day and age, where you have Facebook, Twitter, everything else, it's a misnomer that there are semi-open adoptions. If you type in Eric, Heather, Kira, and nothing else on the internet, our information pulls up.

And we do not have Facebook, we do not have Twitter, or any of the other standard social media programs. But it's a fact of the matter that in today's day and age, there is no such thing as true anonymity.

And in fully open adoption, it does not mean that people are in each other's homes all the time, necessarily. But what it does mean is, you know, identifying information on the other part of the triad.

Triad is the common term used nowadays to describe the relationship between the birth family, the adoptive family, and the adoptee. And what they're beginning to find out is, in a fully open adoption, the most healing can occur for the birth family,.

The adoptive family, and the adoptee. And can you repeat that? The most healing can occur.

Specifically in... Go ahead. In the fully open adoption. What's ironic is that most adoptive couples are afraid that the birth family will be the ones knocking on their door, eliciting a greater amount of interaction than they feel comfortable with.

And yet what tends to happen most often, and agencies will attest to this, that it's actually the birth family that closes the door. And it's the adoptive family that end up wanting more of their child's history and heritage and story.

But in the birth mother knowing that she can ask via email, or maybe a phone call, or a meeting in a public place, in the next couple months after she has made the most difficult decision of her life, to be able to see, I made the right choice.

My child is safe. He's happy. He's well nourished. He's loved. That gives so much healing to the birth family. It gives healing to the adoptive family because they are able to personalize a real part of who their child is, what has made their child.

This birth family who have the same freckles and dimples and eye color as their child, they now can see more of that picture. And for the adoptee, it gives them so much more confidence that I am where I am because of love and sacrifice, because my birth family believed this was the best for me, because my adoptive family were not afraid.

It just gives so much more healing to each part of this triad.

Interesting. Now can you, I don't know how much you know about the data as far as all the different kinds of reasons why biological parents or biological mothers specifically, probably more often than not, don't want any contact from the child they put up for adoption or from their families.

I'm guessing here that two of the primary reasons might be shame that they had this child perhaps out of wedlock and then gave it up for adoption, and also a fear of having some kind of financial responsibility that they didn't want attached.

But that's just a guess on my part. Well, I can attest to two different stories. One of our children's birth mother, she so very much so wanted to make sure that her son had a father. She actually took care of her child for two whole weeks, nursed him to give extra antibodies to him, slept with him, taking care of him, and still had that strength to place him in our arms, kiss him, and tell him that she loved him and make the choice she knew she had to make.

And I know one birth mother very closely had said as much as she thinks about her child, her birth child, every single day of her life, there is a need to be able to move on and to start a new story. There's also a fear many times of interfering in their birth child's growth and development and stability in the family.

But again, every single adoption is unique, and every single adoption has its unique story. And so there are any myriad of reasons why each part of the triad may make the decisions that they make. The desire always is that each one of them make the decision based on love and in trust in God's sovereignty.

How much can you tell us about the individual stories of your three adopted children?

Each one of them have very unique stories, and I can tell you this, that with each story, there was a lot of love put upon them. Even in the one story that involved more addiction, this is something that's becoming very common these days.

Professional people becoming entangled in heroin and cocaine in such a vice grip that they cannot get out of the cycle. Our one child was born and had to go through three weeks of detox in the hospital, and that's just the fact of the matter.

And yet she gave him life and chose to give him a better life than she knew that she could give. So some of the birth mothers were younger, um, some of them were much older, had grown children of their own.

Some birth mothers, it was for relational or financial, emotional reasons. Each one had their own story, and the next thing that we're going to talk about is different avenues of adoption. With two of them, the two that we met through Catholic Charities, they received excellent, excellent counseling.

They wrestled through this question with someone that could, without pressuring them, could answer their questions, could pray with them. We're not Catholic, um, but we have a wonderful relationship with Catholic Charities, and we think they do wonderful work.

We actually, we sized out from being able to work with them, so now we're working with another amazing agency in Florida called Christian Family Services, and both of those, as well as many other agencies such as Bethany, really take the time to counsel the birth mother and walk her through reasons why she may want to choose a parenting plan of her own or may want to choose,.

Um, adoption as her parenting plan. We do have some listeners, uh, waiting for their questions to be asked and answered. Uh, we have Bebe in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, who says, how do you counsel people when they are considering adoption?