Carl and Anna Streck already had three young children when Anna held a foster baby in her arms and declared that he would become their son.
Doctors said the baby boy would never walk, talk, see or hear. Carl didn’t see how his wife could be serious.
“What I was really faced with was my own selfishness,” Carl said. “When you adopt a medically fragile kid, they’re going to live in your house forever. And that was not the path that I believed my life was headed down.”
Hear the rest of the Streck family’s deeply moving story on this new episode of GPS: God. People. Stories.
You can connect with us through email at gps@billygraham.org or on Billy Graham Radio on Facebook.
Carl and Anna Streck already had three young children when Anna held a foster baby in her arms and declared that he would become their son.
Doctors said the baby boy would never walk, talk, see or hear. Carl didn’t see how his wife could be serious.
“What I was really faced with was my own selfishness,” Carl said. “When you adopt a medically fragile kid, they’re going to live in your house forever. And that was not the path that I believed my life was headed down.”
Hear the rest of the Streck family’s deeply moving story on this new episode of GPS: God. People. Stories.
You can connect with us through email at gps@billygraham.org or on Billy Graham Radio on Facebook.
MUSIC STARTS
Carl Streck:
00:00:01 They had this little baby in foster care that had been born a month earlier, and Anna holds this baby and essentially looks at me and says, This is our son. To which I looked back at her like she was absolutely insane.
Michael Shurbutt: Carl and Anna Streck already had three young children when Anna held that infant—an infant who was “medically fragile.” That means he has medical issues, which require specialized care. In spite of that, Anna was sure this baby boy would become part of their family. Carl wasn’t.
Carl:
00:00:34 When you adopt a medically fragile kid, like they’re gonna live in your house forever, and that was not the path that I believed my life was headed down.
Michael: You’re going to discover “the path” Carl and Anna’s life took as they share the story of adopting three medically fragile children. Welcome to the third installment of our summer series, “The Great Physician.” I’m Michael Shurbutt.
Phil Fleischman: And I’m Phil Fleischman. You’re listening to GPS: God. People. Stories., it’s an outreach of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
Much like Carl and Anna’s story is about the love they have for their children, Jesus Christ’s story is about God’s love for His children. As Billy Graham said:
Billy Graham:
00:01:14 When I look at Jesus dying on the cross, I see written in neon letters that the whole world can see: “God is love. God loves you.”
Phil: We’ll hear more from Mr. Graham later on in this episode. First, though, a reminder to subscribe to GPS so you don’t miss the final installment in this series. Make sure you tap “Subscribe” or “Follow” on your favorite podcatcher.
Michael: And if, while you’re listening, you have any spiritual questions, visit us on our website. It’s FindPeaceWithGod.net. That’s FindPeaceWithGod.net. It’s a great place to go for answers or chat with one of our trained volunteers. Again: FindPeaceWithGod.net.
Intro: GPS: God. People. Stories.
MUSIC TRANSITION
Carl:
00:02:04 Hey, I’m Carl Streck.
Anna Streck:
00:02:05 And I’m Anna Streck.
Carl:
00:02:06 We have six kids. We live in Atlanta, Georgia. I’m an entrepreneur, started a business, and Anna and I have been married 20 years.
Michael: Carl and Anna Streck both grew up in Georgia.
Carl:
00:02:19 I was born and raised in Atlanta. My parents got divorced when I was about 8 years old. My dad moved to Tampa and my mom stayed in Atlanta. She worked many jobs to pay for my sister and I’s growing up.
Phil: His dad’s decision to leave left Carl with a lot of hurt and anger. But something happened in Carl’s heart when he was in the seventh grade, after a friend invited him to a youth retreat called “Disciple Now Weekend.”
Carl:
00:02:46 Me and two other guys had just heard this talk about Jesus. And, we said, This is something that’s real and that we need in our lives. And, I know not everybody has a dramatic conversion experience, but for me it very much was, going from an angry young middle schooler to, you know, somebody that felt like they had purpose and new life.
Phil: Now while Carl was growing up in the suburbs of Atlanta, his future wife, Anna, spent her formative years in a small town, two hours away, near the Tennessee border.
Anna:
00:03:19 I grew up on Lookout Mountain, Georgia, small town. And, my parents are still married, I think now going on like 45 years.
Phil: Anna accepted Christ when she was five or six. She didn’t fully understand what it meant to walk with God back then, but she says she grew into her faith later on.
Michael: Two events that shaped Anna’s life—and faith—were the adoptions of her younger sister and brother. Anna desperately wanted a younger sibling, and when she was 8 years old, God answered her prayers. Her parents adopted a baby girl. Three years later, they adopted Anna’s baby brother.
Phil: God used those adoptions to plant seeds in Anna’s heart that would grow and blossom after she got married. Speaking of which, Anna and Carl met each other in college at Auburn, where they started out as friends.
Carl:
00:04:08 We started dating Valentine’s Day our senior year. Seven months later, I asked her to marry me, in 2002, and we got married June 7th of 2003.
Phil: Five years later, Anna gave birth to their first child. His name: Trey.
Anna:
00:04:24 He just turned 15 and actually just got his learning permit on Sunday. [laugh] So … he’s actually a really good driver, but, Carl’s probably gonna be doing more of the teaching with that.
Michael: Anna and Carl’s daughter Georgia Rose is 13, and their son Sumter, 11.
Phil: When Anna was pregnant with Sumter, she began to think about the possibility of expanding their family in a way that doesn’t cross most parents’ minds.
Anna:
00:04:55 And I really, I can’t pinpoint like what it was. I think Carl thought, Oh, she’s pregnant and this will pass. Because before, you know, when I had thought about adoption, I really had not thought about medically fragile or special needs kids. So it was at that point that I really thought, OK, I think this is the path that we need to go down.
Phil: In addition to getting a front-row seat to the adoption process at a young age, Anna also grew up watching her aunt and uncle become foster parents. It was something they got involved in back in the late 80s as a way of living out their faith and their pro-life beliefs. Anna’s uncle is a doctor, and the family sometimes took in medically fragile children.
Carl:
00:05:42 So Anna spent her whole life thinking about this. It never crossed my mind, either in a positive or negative way. I just assumed that, you know, the path in life or the American dream or whatever it was, you get married, you have kids, you, you know, buy a house, you work till you retire and, you know, that’s just how life was.
Michael: On Labor Day weekend 2012, Carl’s view of life was suddenly shaken up. It happened when the Streck family went to visit Anna’s aunt and uncle.
Carl:
00:06:12 We had a 4-year-old, a 2-year-old, and a 6-month-old at the time. So Anna had just had a baby six months before and we’re up at her aunt and uncle’s house in Chattanooga. And they had this little baby in foster care that had been born a month earlier. He was born in August. And Anna holds this baby and essentially looks at me and says, This is our son. To which I looked back at her like she was absolutely insane. And, even more so, when her aunt proceeds to tell us, Just so you know, the doctor says he’ll never walk, he’ll never talk, he’ll never see or hear. And in fact, probably, the nail in the coffin was he said, I don’t know who would ever want this child—the doctor did. And so Anna was like, I don’t care.
Michael: You can imagine Carl’s surprise in that moment.
Carl:
00:07:00 I, like a good Christian husband, said, Well, why don’t we pray about this? Which was the absolute biggest lie of my life. I had zero intention, full disclosure, of praying about it at all. I just thought, you know, babies are cute, we’ll go home. This too shall pass.
Phil: But it didn’t pass. Carl found himself wrestling with the dreams he had for his life—and what if God had a different plan?
Carl:
00:07:22 What I was really faced with was my own selfishness of my life, that when you adopt a medically fragile kid, like they’re gonna live in your house forever, and that was not the path that I believed my life was headed down.
Phil: In the weeks following Anna’s declaration, tragedy struck their extended family.
Carl:
00:07:41 My brother-in-law, his dad was crossing the street walking home from dinner and got hit by a motorcycle, traumatic brain injury for him, you know, life would never be the same. He survived, but definitely changed his life forever. And when that happened—John is his name—when that happened to John, I just remember thinking very clearly, you know, John had a plan for his life and that plan involved a business he had and places he was going, right? He was just walking home from dinner, and in an instant, that plan changed. And it was like God was telling me in that moment, you know, Carl, you can’t plan your whole life. You just gotta make the right decision with the information you have at the moment and let Me take care of the rest.
Michael: God was changing Carl’s heart, but it still wasn’t an easy “yes.”
Carl:
00:08:32 I went to our church, and I think I was grasping for some other answers that were not that. And I asked a pastor of ours what the appropriate thing to do in this moment would be. Is it to, you know, do nothing and wait for God to open a door, that makes it really clear? Or like start moving forward down the path and wait for a door to shut? I think I was hoping he would tell me the opposite answer of what he did tell me. He said, “Carl, it sounds like your wife is really for this, and the Bible speaks for orphan care.” Like, “I don’t see what the problem is.”
Michael: Carl agreed to take the next step. He and Anna filled out an adoption request for the baby boy, whose name is Isaiah.
Carl:
00:09:12 We met Isaiah September of 2012. We adopted him in December. And so, remember driving home December 14th with four kids in the car. And Isaiah very much changed our life forever. I mean, I think many people would say that—or even the doctor said, Who would want this child? I think that part really spoke to both Anna and I.
Phil: All throughout the Bible, God makes it clear that every human life has innate value. Our culture says our value comes from things like outward beauty, good health, talent, but God says our value comes from being made in His image.
Michael: The Strecks seem to have grasped this radical idea as they became a family of six—and a short time later, a family of seven.
Carl:
00:09:59 We got a call from the hospital in downtown Atlanta, Grady Hospital, that there was a little girl who was left to the hospital. Her birth mother was homeless and she was born with a brain condition called hydranencephaly. So essentially she was born with a brainstem but no brain, which sounds pretty crazy, but, your brain stem does a lot, lots of the things that keep you alive. But essentially above her ears was just fluid. And, the nurses of the hospital had named her Hope, and we had heard about her from a social worker. And it was in 2014 when Anna sent me a text message. I’m sitting at the office, she texts me, she said, “I’m heading down to Fulton County DFCS to file legal guardianship for Hope.” I responded with like, “I’m at work. Is this really how this is going down?” And so, we adopted Hope in 2014 through the state.
Michael: Hope’s birth mother had wanted to have an abortion late in her pregnancy. When she wasn’t able to do so, she gave birth to Hope … but she wouldn’t look at her.
Phil: When it was time for the Strecks to officially become Hope’s parents, her birth mother had to speak in court.
Anna:
00:11:12 After her birth mom testified in front of the judge, she was leaving, and you could tell she was like, she was starting to cry. She was upset. I felt like it was somewhat humiliating for her to have to stand up and say, This is what, you know, I’m doing. And she stopped at us and she said, Can I see her? And so I pulled her, you know, I had a blanket over her and I pulled it off, and that was the first time she’d ever laid eyes on this child she had given birth to.
Phil: Anna said Hope was a beautiful baby with curly black hair, big brown eyes, and long eyelashes. Her birth mother looked at the precious child she was giving up.
Anna:
00:11:58 And she looked at me, and I will never, and I—it always makes me cry whenever I tell this story—but she just said, Thank you so much, and gave me a hug, and you could tell she was just broken.
Michael: Anna and Carl brought Hope home, and she became a part of their family. They gave her the care she needed, but most of all, they just loved her.
Phil: And because they loved her so much, their hearts broke when she left them to be with Jesus in January of 2015. She was 10 months old.
We’re calling this series “The Great Physician” because God is the ultimate Healer. But as we’ve learned along the way, He doesn’t always do the healing here on Earth.
Michael: The Streck family has faced that reality and wrestled with it, and they’ve trusted that God is still good. And even as they walked through deep darkness, God used them to be a light to others.
Carl:
00:12:55 When Hope passed away in 2014, at her funeral, Anna and I both got up and spoke. That same pastor that I mentioned, who had given me the advice to, you know, to trust God and move forward with adoption, he captured our statements at Hope’s service in a blog that he had posted. And that blog got shared tens of thousands of times, if not hundreds.
Michael: In her remarks, Anna said, “By all earthly standards, Hope was born with nothing.” No parents, no possessions, no birth announcements, or pink balloons, and yet, Hope was never alone. God was with her every minute of her life.
Phil: Carl said that little Hope “touched people’s lives in her short time in a way that most people can’t in a typical lifetime.” He said Hope had closed her eyes on Earth “and woke up looking into the eyes of Jesus. Her first words may be His name and her first steps may be on the streets of Heaven.” He said she never got to celebrate her first birthday, but that she would experience a celebration unlike anything we can imagine.
Michael: Both Carl and Anna urged everyone at the funeral to keep their eyes on the “hope” of Heaven and not get caught up in empty pursuits that won’t matter in the end. They talked openly about their faith in Jesus and invited people to know Him.
Carl:
00:14:16 And, this little girl born without a brain—God was able to use her and her story and our testimony to impact thousands and thousands of people, that we had people in our neighborhood that we’d never met come up to us that said their family member in some other state shared this blog with them, that told the story, and they felt compelled to get involved in foster care.
Michael: Through the tragic loss of their little daughter, the Strecks were given an opportunity to share their faith in Christ. They lived out their faith and shared the Good News of Jesus through their message.
Carl:
00:14:51 And so I believe that it should be an encouragement to all of us that if God can use a baby born without a brain to further His kingdom, then surely He can use any one of us with all of our faults.
Phil: Today, nine years after saying goodbye to baby Hope, the Strecks have five children in their household—their three biological kids, plus Isaiah, who is 10 now, and Lexi, who is 7.
Carl:
00:15:16 Our youngest, Lexi, we adopted after she was in foster care with us for 10 months. All of our adopted kids have kind of complicated medical issues. Isaiah, our first adopted son, requires total care. He has a trach, a ventilator, feeding tube, hearing impaired, visually impaired, seizure disorder, lots of medical issues that came from a virus that his birth mom had when she was pregnant. And then Lexi, who’s 7, has a complex GI issue that she deals with.
Anna:
00:15:48 So we kind of, we knew when going through all these different adoptions, all their medical needs for the most part. What we didn’t know is that both of our biological boys are also Type 1 diabetics. And then Sumter, our 11-year-old is high-functioning autism. So all that creates pretty interesting family life.
Phil: If all of that makes your head spin, Carl and Anna are used to that reaction. It is a lot—and it’s hard.
Carl:
00:16:19 We’ve spent, you know, many months at a time in the hospital, you know, Isaiah in and out of the ICU, Lexi with her complex GI issue. She has a condition called cyclical vomiting, where she throws up essentially five or six days straight every four or five weeks and kind of renders us homebound indefinitely. You know, she has to skip school and all that stuff. So life is, you know, not easy.
Michael: But is life meant to be easy? Is the goal to be as comfortable as possible?
Carl:
00:16:53 We’re not promised a comfortable life. And I don’t think that’s what God calls any of us to. You know, I know that the times that Anna and I have spent in the hospital with Isaiah, for me at least, it felt, in a weird way, like the most rich times because like, we’re living a life that we feel like God’s called us to lead. And so in those times that it’s been the hardest is actually the times that I feel like we’re thriving in some way.
Michael: Carl and Anna insist they are not superheroes. They’re just regular people trying to live out what they believe—and their children are regular kids who sometimes complain about not getting to do everything their friends are doing. But Carl and Anna trust that God is lovingly shaping each of their children through their unique family life.
Anna:
00:17:38 When we were in the process of adopting Isaiah, we had family members saying, What will this do to your other children? And, you know, my answer and Carl’s answer was always, Hopefully make them more selfless, compassionate human beings, ’cause the world needs that.
Phil: The world sure does need that. And the world also needs real hope, for today and for eternity. Christians have that hope, but it can be hard to talk about it with other people. Carl and Anna recognize that, but one of the benefits of having a family like theirs is that sharing their faith becomes a very natural part of life.
Carl:
00:18:18 For us it’s like, it’s almost like, how don’t I share my faith? Because when people start asking, “How many kids do you have?” It’s natural to say, “We have six.” They’re like, “Oh my gosh, you have six?” “Well, we have three biological, three adopted.” And then naturally people say, “Adoption? How did that happen?” And, for me to tell the story about our adoption of Isaiah and leave Jesus out of it, like, it’s just not the story.
Phil: Regardless of what people believe, whether they are pro-life or pro-choice, believers or atheists, they tend to stop and listen to the Streck family’s story.
Carl:
00:18:52 And, so I think that’s the entree into talking about our faith, you know, sharing what’s God’s done in our life. And they might not agree with our faith, but you’d be hard-pressed to find someone that doesn’t think adoption’s a good thing. And so that’s always made it so much easier, and maybe God knew that we needed it to be easy for us to share our faith and that’s why He did this.
MUSIC TRANSITION
Phil: You’ve been hearing from Carl and Anna Streck, an ordinary couple that has allowed God to use their family in extraordinary ways.
Michael: If Carl and Anna’s faith is attractive to you and you want to learn more about what it means to really follow Jesus, head to that website we mentioned earlier: FindPeaceWithGod.net.
Phil: You’re about to hear a word from Billy Graham, and then we’re going to introduce you to the final guest in our series, “The Great Physician.”
Voice-over: You’re listening to GPS: God. People. Stories., a podcast production of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
MUSIC STARTS
Billy Graham:
00:20:00 I remember a little 12-year-old boy was at an orphanage.
Voice-over: Billy Graham …
Billy Graham:
00:20:05 And some people came out to the orphanage and they had decided they were going to adopt him. And they said, “Young man,” said, “do you have a bicycle?” He said, “No.” They said, “We’re going to buy you a bicycle. Well, do you have roller skates?” “No, I don’t have any roller skates.” “Well, we’re going to buy you roller skates.” And they went on a list of things like that. And then when they were about ready to go, he said, “I’ve changed my mind. I want to stay here at the orphanage.” They said, “Why?” “Because if all you’ve got is roller skates and bicycles and things to offer me, I’d rather stay here because what I need is love.” You see, that’s what you need … is somebody to love you and I want to tell you that God loves you. And we’re to love one another in the same way! And when I look at Jesus dying on the cross, I see written in neon letters that the whole world can see: “God is love. God loves you.” But what do you have to do? You have to, by faith, receive Him. You have to be willing to repent of your sins and receive Him as Savior. And tonight is the moment.
Phil: You can learn more about receiving Jesus Christ as your Savior by going to our website, FindPeaceWithGod.net. And if phone calls are more your thing, you can call our 24-hour prayer line. The number is 855–255–PRAY. That’s 855-255-7729.
Michael: Next week we’ll hear from Andrea Herzer, who suffers from what’s known as Chronic Regional Pain Syndrome. It’s a condition that affects one’s arms and legs. She’s going to share how she’s using her life experiences to spread hope and compassion to others.
Andrea Herzer:
00:21:47 I spent eight years, mostly homebound, having to use a walker just to take one step out of my bed and having to use a scooter. And at that time, I didn’t know what the Lord had planned for me.
Michael: Be sure to listen to next week’s episode to find out just what God did have planned for Andrea Herzer. In the meantime, thank you for listening to this week’s installment of our series, “The Great Physician.” I’m Michael Shurbutt.
Phil: And I’m Phil Fleischman. This is GPS: God. People. Stories. It’s an outreach of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association—Always Good News.
CLOSING MUSIC
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