The Cost of Kinship: What Twenty Years of Hard Adoptions Reveals About Divine Love

In an era that prizes comfort and curated family narratives, counselor Julie Lowe offers a countercultural testimony. She and her husband Greg have adopted five children and fostered many more, weathering police investigations, emergency psychiatric interventions, and false abuse allegations along the way.

“We’ve been in front of police officers and detectives, and had kids sneaking out of the house at night,” Lowe recounts. “We’ve had the whole gamut of our kids lying about us and making up abuse allegations.” Such honesty resists the tidy redemption arcs that often dominate religious storytelling. Yet Lowe does not frame her suffering as tragedy.

“In Romans 12, we’re all called to be living sacrifices,” she says. “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.”

Her witness suggests that spiritual formation often arrives through disruption rather than ease. For those seeking wisdom, the question may not be whether sacrifice is worth it, but whether comfort has quietly become our substitute for transformation.