The Plain Values Podcast EP #42 – From Foster Care to Ukraine, One Yes at a Time

Marlin Miller:
You sold all your stuff here in the States, right? Moved the whole family to Kyiv.

Jed Johnson:
God calls you to something. He’s working out something much bigger and you just have to obey. We have to replace the thousands and thousands of traumatic experience with hundreds of thousands of experiences that say, no, it can be different. It’s like that ship in the harbor. You can’t steer it until it’s moving.

Marlin Miller:
That’s probably the best answer to that question I think we’ve ever gotten. Well, Jed Johnson, thank you very much for joining us for being with us. I have looked forward to this for a long stinking time. How long ago did you and I first connect?

Jed Johnson:
Maybe 20, six years

Marlin Miller:
Ago.That sounds right. That sounds right. And I should have looked,

Jed Johnson:
But it’s been

Marlin Miller:
1920. It’s been quite a while that room to bloom. Our nonprofit was sharing your story, basically kind of pushing you out to all of our readers and it has just been a real joy to watch your work and your team grow. If you don’t mind, I would love to go back all the way to your childhood. One of the things that I love to learn about, Jed, is the journeys that the Lord takes someone on to bring that person to what they are built to do. You know what I mean?

Jed Johnson:
Yeah.

Marlin Miller:
So can you tell us about your childhood?

Jed Johnson:
I was born in Alaska. My parents moved out there to start a new world back in the ’70s and they were hippies and all that. And they met Jesus out there. And so my dad was a mechanic on oil refinery and then serving in church and then he became a pastor when I was young. And so I grew up as a pastor’s kid. And when I was six years old, he had a stroke. He was getting a chiropractor adjustment and had a stroke. And so that changed everything for him and for me. I got a new dad and everything changed about how he thought and processed. And then after that, we ended up moving to Montana where he started working in his brother’s church being a teacher at the church. He wasn’t able to do as much as he could before. He could only think about one thing at a time and do one thing.
And so that, I think if you want to think about really formative things in my childhood, that was really formative to experience two different fathers. But he’s a great man. I talk to him regularly and I thank him that he continues to follow Jesus because I still need people out ahead of me showing me how to go and finish well. And he’s that example. And so that was probably early childhood is moving around a lot and change in parenting and how that works out. I never really knew what I wanted to do.
I wanted to be an astronaut and a fireman, like everybody, but I didn’t really have a grand picture for what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to play music and be a rockstar, things like that. And I moved out to Oregon to go to journalism school and just trying to figure my life out. And I met my wife Kim here. She had just come back from university and she was a nurse and she knew exactly what she wanted to do and I didn’t really have an idea, but we just became great friends. And I had been working. I took a semester off of college and went in 1999 and helped refugees during the Kosovar conflict when Serbia was attacking Kosovo and there was a whole conflict there in the late 90s. So I went and worked with refugees. And so I started having this kind of idea of a bigger world and ways of helping people in crisis.
And so I was just running a bakery and my dad and I actually got to do that together, which was kind of a fun thing. He had just retired and so we did that together.
So I had kind of this larger world picture. And my now wife, Kim, when she was a little girl, she knew exactly what she wanted to do. When she was eight years old, she was like, “I want to be a nurse and I want to go take care of orphans and I want to be a missionary.”

Marlin Miller:
Hold on. At eight years old, she knew.

Jed Johnson:
Oh yeah.

Marlin Miller:
Okay. Okay. Jed, what is the story for Kim to get there? How did that happen? This podcast is being brought to you by my friends at the Seed to Spoon Summit happening in June in Walnut Creek, Ohio. I’m here with John, one of the co-founders. Tell us about the guts of the Seed to Spoon Summit. If you

Seed to Spoon Summit:
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Marlin Miller:
Tell us when the summit is happening, John.

Seed to Spoon Summit:
June 17th and 18th, and we have an evening premier. So if you can’t make it out all day, please come out to see us Wednesday night and you won’t be disappointed. This year

Marlin Miller:
You have a special new release of your book.

Seed to Spoon Summit:
Yes. I wrote a book for my friends called The Good Samaritans from the Well to Worship and Spirit and Truth and it’s actually debuting. It’s being published. It’s being released on June 17th, I’m going to be there. I’ll be happy to sign your book for you.

Marlin Miller:
Go to seeddospoon.life to get your tickets now. That is seedtospoon.life.

Jed Johnson:
I think she was just in church one day and heard about orphans and things like that and just was really moved and she’s just that kind of person where she knows and goes straight. And that’s why we’re so different, but we’re a great combination. And so when we met and became friends and we just started talking about my experience having done that work and her dream and all that. And so yeah, we just really connected on some of those things. And then we get married and we’re involved in our church. We’re helping take kids around the world on mission trips and things like that, kind of exposing to a wire world. We started being foster parents because we felt like God wasn’t telling us to go anywhere and a friend of ours, an older woman was like, “Well, we’ve got orphans right in front of us.
It’s a foster care system.” And so we started being foster parents. And since my wife was a nurse, we would take medically fragile babies. And so for years our bedroom just sounded like a hospital with pumps going off, but it’s nice white noise to fall asleep too.
Yeah.

Marlin Miller:
Sorry, can you tell us about some of the kids that you guys took care of?

Jed Johnson:
Yeah. So the first little girl, I can’t remember what the syndrome was, she had an NG tube like food going through her nose and she had a form of dwarfism and she had a teenage mom who really wanted to be a good mom but didn’t have the skills to manage the medical things. So we actually, right away we worked with our local foster system. We were like, “Can we mentor this mom and work with her and she can come and be at our house and we’ll show her how to do everything so she can be the mom she wants to be. ” And so we started doing that with our local foster care system. And if there was a parent that wanted to be involved, we would just try to bring them along and that’s difficult because you’re the person that you’re the object of who’s taking your child away.
Even though you didn’t do any of that, you’re there to help. There can be some difficult things. But yeah, so she was the first one. And so we would be in church and during standing up praying or whatever, and I’d be holding a little bolus of food and the baby in one arm with my hand up in the air.
So yeah, she was great. And we had other kids with gastroschesis born with the congenital defects or things like that that just needed medical care. And so when our children now that are in college, they were just our helpers back then. And so we did that. I was a volunteer pastor at our church. We would lead worship together. I worked for a nonprofit working with children and families being a director for programs there. And we were just having this great life until we heard about children in Ukraine. And I can go more into that and tell you how that came about. But these were some of the building blocks of how we got to where we are today was just growing up watching my parents serve Jesus and then experiencing a wider world, marrying a spitfire that is going to change the world and she’s the gas and I’m the breaks.
Let’s think about this.

Marlin Miller:
I’m very sorry to laugh. I could identify with marrying a spitfire.

Jed Johnson:
Yeah. So those kinds of things were the pieces in place. And I kind of always had a deal because I just had a deal with fallen juice. I would say, “God, I’ll serve you. I’ll do whatever you want, but just don’t ask me to go into full-time ministry. I’ll be the best servant ever.” And I just had that kind of always like, “That’s not on the table with me and you, God.” And I just read this book by Henry Nowen called In the Name of Jesus, and this was back in 2005 or six. Have you read this book?

Marlin Miller:
I’ve read quite a few now and

Jed Johnson:
Books.

Marlin Miller:
I don’t actually remember if I read that or not.

Jed Johnson:
Forgive

Marlin Miller:
Me.

Jed Johnson:
Yeah. I give that book away. I’ve given it away so many times, so I’ll send you a copy, but it’s on Christian leadership and he was giving a talk to new graduates of seminary going on to become priests and they asked him to speak on Christian leadership. And the context is he hadn’t been at the top. He had actually left all the exciting Yale Notre Dame professor writing to go be a priest at a little community for people with disabilities in Canada. And it was after he was doing that for a while, he was asked … And so this was his first time speaking after living in community with people with disabilities.
And so I read this book and he’s talking about Christian leadership and he uses the temptations of Christ as the context for new leaders. Right now, the best ministries are spectacular, they’re powerful and all these things that are really interesting and yet those were the temptations before Christ could enter ministry. And so I remember reading that book and I’m driving to church to practice, help do worship team practice. And you know when God speaks to you and he doesn’t have to tell you everything he say and he just says a word or something and you know everything he’s talking about and he just is like, “Really, Jen?” I’m like, “God, if it can be like this, if it can be the way Henry now would describe, if that can be ministry, I’ll do it, God. And I don’t want to have anything off the table between you and me.
” And so that’s back in 2006, I guess. But what’s fascinating is the context for that was about living with people with disabilities and this whole community of Larsh, which was started back in the ’60s in France, I didn’t realize how close to home that was going to be for us.
And so I would say that was another really monumental piece in forming this person that would do something crazy like going across the world and starting the work that we do.

Marlin Miller:
So can I go back to your dad for a little bit?

Jed Johnson:
Yeah, yeah.

Marlin Miller:
Can you share more what … You said you were six, right?

Jed Johnson:
Yeah.

Marlin Miller:
Jed, our youngest son is eight right now and I’m trying to get some perspective what would happen to Miles’s life, his entire world. He loves nothing more than to be right next to me all the time. And if I would go through that, I’ll just say it this way, I am struggling to imagine how drastically his life would change. Can you speak into that a bit more for me?

Jed Johnson:
Yeah. So he was getting adjusted by a chiropractor and there was a stroke on one side of his brain. I can’t remember which one. And then when they went to, he was Life Flighted to Anchorage and when they were trying to unblock it, he had a stroke on the other side. So he had a stroke on both sides of his brain. So he had to relearn to do everything absolutely everything, walk, talk- Oh my goodness. … everything. But when you have a stroke, oftentimes it affects your emotions and things like that. And so after that, he had been the dad that could do everything and we would be skiing. We would get done with Wednesday night church and he’d look at me and be like, “Grab the fishing poles.” And because in Alaska, the sun doesn’t go down. So I couldn’t wait. My sister and I’d be sitting in the backseat just looking at each other and trying to get his eye in the review mirror, “Come on, come on, say it, say it.
” And we just would do everything and he could do that as well as run the largest church in the Kenai Peninsula and he was just really good at that, all that. And he went from all that to being small and frail. And for Miles, you are, what’s the word I’m looking for? Invincible. You can do anything and you’re the hero. And so to watch your hero all of a sudden not be able to do things is … And as a kid, you’re not thinking about this abstractly. I couldn’t say this then. I can look back at my six-year-old self and talk about that and some of those feelings, but so I didn’t get the whole picture. I just knew he was sick. And then after that, life became a lot more difficult. We were picking up pop cans and doing whatever we could and mowing lawns and whatever.
We were all hands on deck to be able to make it to the end of the month. I think that was one of the things I struggled with when one of the reasons I was like, “God, just don’t ask me to do full-time.” Because I remember reaching up in the cupboard, seeing if there was one more can of beans. And I remember talking to God about this and he’s like, “Yeah, but there always was one more can of beans.” And I was always there, wasn’t I, Jen? And yeah, you were, God, you were always there and it was hard, but life is hard. Jesus didn’t promise that life would be easy. What he promised was his presence and that’s what we have and that’s what I’ve always had. And no matter what happened, my dad always just loved Jesus and the words were scrambled in his brain or whatever, I’d get up in the morning and he would already be up reading his Bible.
I don’t know if that helps shape that.

Marlin Miller:
Well, I think it does. And it’s interesting, Lisa and I were talking this morning over coffee, when someone goes through life and never has the chance to genuinely spend time with those that have a special need of some sort. Two of our kids have down syndrome, there’s a few more on the side and at times I read and I listen to people talking about our kids as though they are just … They don’t matter Iceland has tried to get rid of them and things like that and obviously it just breaks my heart because they’re missing out on so much joy and this beautiful picture into the father’s heart into the Lord’s design. It’s almost like our kids are these little beautiful reminders of what real joy and real peace can look like or should look

Jed Johnson:
Like. Yeah.

Marlin Miller:
Can I ask about your mom?

Jed Johnson:
Yeah.

Marlin Miller:
Is she still here as well?

Jed Johnson:
Yeah. Yeah.

Marlin Miller:
Okay. What do you think life was like for her?

Jed Johnson:
Yeah. She just did a great job of trying to shield us from some of my dad’s challenges and she was just a great mom loving. And I’m really lucky to have great parents that we’re always trying. And she’s one of those smart people that if Jeopardy’s on, she’s always answering before the … She has all those little facts in her head. Yeah. So she was just a rock during those times for all of us. But my dad did, he never fully recovered, but he became very functional and he went on to pastor still and he became after that for the group of churches he was part of, he became the pastor that would go and help clean up churches that had problems. And so if there was infidelity or something, they would bring my dad in to go and rebuild the church up, get everybody healthy and build up a new pastor.
And so another really formative thing in my life is seeing the worst of Christianity and how bad we can be to each other, which sounds really morbid, but it’s true and just watching people hurt people hurt people and seeing that and watching my dad and mom love people. And there’s a story and when we were kids, once again, it’s the drive home from church. I think we were going to church this time, but we saw this three-legged dog in the middle of the road and my dad stops and gets … Because he’s going to help everybody and everything. And he gets out and he realizes that it’s like it’s not hurt. It’d been hit on the highway and somehow its paw got under its collar.
So it’s hurt, it’s bruised up, but it’s paws and it’s collar and he goes out to help it. And finally, I see him struggling and then he gets back in the car and his hand’s all bloody and he’s like, “That stupid dog wouldn’t stop biting me. ” And then he starts crying and then he looks at my mom, I still remember, he’s like, “Isn’t that like people? You go to help them and they just bite you and they don’t realize you’re trying to help them and they’re just biting you. ” And I remember that story as an example of how my dad loved people, that he would still go in and let them bite him and just because he knew that he could be there and help them. And so I think that was probably another formative thing about my dad. I’m very lucky to have parents that are heroes to me because I know that’s not always the case.

Marlin Miller:
Jed, it is something that I think you and I have in common because my dad … Now granted, my dad’s been gone for about 15 years, but Pop was that way.

Jed Johnson:
Pop

Marlin Miller:
Loved everybody. He would cross any room to go meet that family with a child with special needs. Yeah, that’s

Jed Johnson:
Great.

Marlin Miller:
And it is a massive blessing to be able to look back and have those stories of the dog. Obviously my memories are a bit different, but dog gone. I love those. I love those stories because you never, ever forget those moments and they’re so powerful.

Jed Johnson:
They’re things I carry with me when I’m going through something, I remember those things.

Marlin Miller:
This episode is being brought to you by our friends at Azure Standard. My buddy, Spencer, told me a while back about their new program called Around the Table. It is a chance for local churches to partner with Azure Standard. You can learn more at Azurearoundthetable.com. But the cool thing about this is that the church gets to become a drop point and it causes these wonderful opportunities to reach out into the community. The people in the church and the communities get to order their food from Azure. The truck brings it by every month and it actually helps raise funds for the church and any ministry that they want. It is a beautiful program. Like I said, Azurearoundthetable.com and Tell Marlin and Plain Values sent you. Can you tell me a little bit about your own biological children?

Jed Johnson:
So we didn’t plan on having kids as early as we did, but things happen. And so I think my wife got pregnant when we were still in our first year of marriage. I think I was 24, 23 when we got married and she was 22. So we were young and so we got started having kids right away. And so Addie, she’s now 21 and she’s going to school in Montana. She lives with my parents actually and is going to university out there. She wants to be an English professor. Nice. Well,
Go for it. She is just like me. She wants to have deep philosophical conversations and she wants to question everything and she will learn by bruising her knuckles the way I had to. I had to make all the mistakes. And I wish that wasn’t the case sometimes for her. I wish that she could learn other ways, but I’m also these are lessons you don’t give up on. Once you learn it, it sticks with you. And I love that about her. And she’s so loving and everybody’s welcome with her and she wants to create community wherever she’s at. And she’s a lot of fun. She’s a great musician and a good writer and she’s just so creative. Whatever she’s doing like crocheting or she would do these rainbow loom things with the rubber bands. You remember those? And she’d just come up with creative ways. She wouldn’t want to follow the pattern.
She wouldn’t want to come up with her own thing. And so she would make little superheroes for her brother Ezra, he’s 20 and he’s here in Oregon with me. He’s going to community college and his heart is for the work in Ukraine. And so he’s been here trying to get some education, but he wants to go back to Ukraine. So I think he’s going to go back for this next year and just do community college online, but then volunteer and work with us there. Ezra’s amazing. He reminds me of my grandpa, my dad’s dad. He’s 6’3″, he’s getting taller and taller and everybody wants to be around him. He’s a great leader. And so when he was in high school, he started a volunteer crew of teenagers going to the mental institution in Ukraine to work with kids, work with the people that were trying to get out of those institutions.
And they would have a wait list and people would be fighting over spaces on the bus to be able to go on a Saturday morning to go and work with Ezra and be with the boys there at that mental institution. So he wants to go back and keep doing that. And so he’s planning to go back this summer. Yeah, that’s Ezra. He’s 20. And then Havala, she is 17 and she wants to be a lawyer. She wants to study international law and prosecute all the war criminals.
She’s super short and just fiery. She’s tough and she loves to play music. She wants to talk about music with me all the time and she loves the old bands from the ’90s. So I know the references she’s talking about. I can tell her what it was like Back then. So that’s fun. Raised

Marlin Miller:
Against the machine. Yeah.

Jed Johnson:
Yeah. She loves all that stuff. And so we enjoy that together and she’s just a great friend. She’s like Kim’s mom in that everybody is welcome around her. If she’s in a space, she’s going to make sure everybody feels welcome and included. And she fiercely loves her siblings with disabilities and all the boys that we’ve taken in and she’s so great with them and so present. She’s amazing. So that is Havila, our 17-year-old. Then we have Seth who we adopted from foster care here in Salem, Oregon. He’s 15 now and we’ve been back in the States for the last year just because the education system fits his learning style better and we’re able to get just counseling and proper medical support and things that we just couldn’t get there. And so him and I have been here for the last year. I’ve been traveling back and forth to Ukraine.
But then in the fall we’re all going to be together here in Oregon and just let Seth finish out his high school and at least be together. And then Kim and I will just travel back and forth. The team we have in Ukraine is really strong. We just put an executive director in place when I was there this last month and she’s been with us all along, but she’s always been my right-hand person, but now she’s running it and it’s great. The team’s doing really great. Anyways, so that’s Seth and he’s our sports guy. He is really good at soccer and he’s been playing volleyball now and he’s always doing sports. So he keeps me young and fit trying to keep up with him. “Come on, dad, you got to kick that better. I need to be a better kick. You got to do it this way.” And so I’ve been improving in my soccer skills.

Marlin Miller:
Yeah. You’re not 50 yet, are you?

Jed Johnson:
No, 47.

Marlin Miller:
47. Okay. I just turned 49, I got a year and a half on you or something. Yep. Okay. Are there more? Are there more?

Jed Johnson:
Oh, there’s more.

Marlin Miller:
I thought so. I

Jed Johnson:
Thought

Marlin Miller:
So.

Jed Johnson:
Then we have our little surprise, Evie, who’s eight, and she’s great. There’s something about each of our kids in her. She’s creative and silly and imaginative and she’s just like her mom, little spitfire, but she’s just … Yeah. And she’s been such a joy to us, especially early on when we took out … So we started taking guys out. We can get more into this later, but we call them our Irish quadruplets because we brought-

Marlin Miller:
Can I … Dude, I got to tell you and I’m sorry. I call my friends dude. I’m a child of the 80s and 90s, just like you. And there’s something so refreshing about the nicknames that you choose. I love it because my wife and I do the same thing in different ways,

Jed Johnson:
The

Marlin Miller:
Irish quadruplets. I can’t wait to hear it. I can’t wait to hear

Jed Johnson:
It. So we brought Boris out. He was our first guy that we were able to get the laws changed to be able to take guardianship of somebody that was already an adult. And so we were able to do the court process and get guardianship of Boris and he came out in December 17. So he came to our house in December 17. Evie was born February 18. Then Anton and Ruslan we brought out in September of 18. And so we had four new people in our house within one year. So that’s our Irish quadruplet.

Marlin Miller:
Okay. I got it. And three boys and then little baby Evie.

Jed Johnson:
Yep.

Marlin Miller:
I love it. Okay.

Jed Johnson:
And that was a really difficult time. And Evie, just this surprise we didn’t plan on was this like, you’d have a difficult night. I’d be up all night dealing with aggression and things like that as our guys learn to be human. And then I would just go lay on the bed and Evie would lay on my chest and I would just take a breath. And it was … Yeah. That’s our Evie.

Marlin Miller:
Jed. So our oldest son, we’re his fourth family and he’s 22 now. When I say that I think I have an idea of what you and Kim have seen and have worked through, I sincerely mean it. I think we have an idea, but I think it’s about that big. And the man oh man, dude, the realities and I’d love to dig in if you’re open and that’s okay. I’d love to hear a little bit about what you saw as those boys came out of the institutions, came out of that into a real family where they were loved and cared for, but they were still biting your hand, probably biting your neck in a way, trying to get back.

Jed Johnson:
No, I’ve got the teeth marked.

Marlin Miller:
You’ve got the scars. Yeah. I can believe it. Literally, right?

Jed Johnson:
Literally.

Marlin Miller:
Yeah. I can identify.

Jed Johnson:
Yeah. So can I ask, how old was your son when you brought him to your house?

Marlin Miller:
He was about three and a half.

Jed Johnson:
Okay. Yes. He was three

Marlin Miller:
And a half.

Jed Johnson:
Yeah. So that in early childhood work, those first three years, if you can start to work with your child and build a relationship in the first three years, the work that you put in will have a lot more effect. It’s the difference, but it’s like if you’re pushing a rock, whereas if you get them in the first three years, you might be pushing on level ground or even downhill, but as soon as you cross that three-year mark, you’re starting to push the rock uphill and you can’t stop pushing that rock uphill or it comes back on. And so you get it. And so you’re replacing thousands of experiences they’ve had that said people aren’t safe, that I don’t need them. And they’re not saying that their body is communicating it. And so you’re trying to replace all those with experiences say, “We are safe, we are good.” And you know it takes an extreme amount of patience.

Marlin Miller:
So how old were the boys? By the way, by the way, forgive me. Dude, I’m going to interrupt myself and ask you a

Jed Johnson:
Different

Marlin Miller:
Question.

Jed Johnson:
Yeah.

Marlin Miller:
Talk about I wrote down you changed the laws to be able to pull Baris out.

Jed Johnson:
We’ve done a lot of work with making laws or finding … It’s like, you know how when you’re looking at a legal case, you want a decision made in your direction, you need to find legal precedents. Where’s what I’m asking for already happened? And what was that case? And they would bring that before the court and the judge would say, “In this case, so- and-so with so- and-so, the judgment was made for the defendant based on this, ” or whatever it is. And so you’re looking for legal precedent. So we did a big search of any sort of legal precedent where a person was removed from the institution brought into family. Now there was bringing back into their family, but there was a few cases where it was people with significant relationship. And so we started working with this language, significant trusted relationship. And so we were able to use those cases and then create a picture that shows this can actually happen.
And so in that case, the law wasn’t changed. It was just we found a legal precedent that opened the way for others. And then it’s much easier now for that decision to be made because there’s a body of legal precedence where it happens. And so it’s expanding the picture of what that law means.

Marlin Miller:
Did you have to do your searching inside Ukraine only? Yeah,

Jed Johnson:
Because we’re working with Ukrainian law. And so work with lawyers to do that. I mean, we have some other real laws that were changed or laws that were set but never enforced where we were able to demand that they were enforced. So one was children being put into institutions with adults institutions for people with disabilities where children and adults were in the same space. And so we were able to fight for that to be enforced and now you can’t have children, adults in the same space. I’m

Marlin Miller:
Going to pause you again for a second.

Jed Johnson:
Yep. I

Marlin Miller:
Believe you and I both know Darren and Stacy Gagnon, right? From Lost Sparrows.

Jed Johnson:
Yes. I have too many people in my head, but yes, familiar.

Marlin Miller:
Okay. I just spoke with Darren just a couple days ago and man, oh man, they are the one that told me about you. They’re the ones that just came back to me just now. They’re the ones. So Stacy has done a ton of work. Years ago, she’s done a ton of work in the institutional systems of countries over there, Bulgaria. She was in Moscow for a while.

Jed Johnson:
And

Marlin Miller:
Forgive me, I’m not trying to speak for her, but if my memory serves me right, she was working much in the same capacity that you and Kim were where you were fighting to end this whole reality of an institution in the first place and trying to bring in a foster based system, things like that. So something that Stacy told me a long, long time ago was that when you have a child in those institutions, in those orphanages and they turn five, six or seven, many times they are transferred out into adult mental institutions and she said, Marlon, she said 90% of them are dead inside a year.Can you speak to that? Is that still going on? Has that gotten better? What is that reality like?

Jed Johnson:
I can’t speak everywhere, but in Ukraine, as far as I understand, it’s not anymore. It was when we got there, but it’s not anymore. And Ukraine actually has really great laws for the rights of orphans, the rights of people with disabilities, great laws on paper, great laws
But the enforcement of those laws are difficult when you’re dealing with corruption. All these Postsopet countries, you build an entire system around how things will work and it’s not just like an idea or a way of thinking. It becomes an entire structure of compensation, of work, of financial, everything flows and you can’t just change your mind here or change something. Everything has to change. And so that was one of the things, and I don’t want to get into politics, but when Zelensky came in, he was actually really similar to what I saw of our current president here was he was a disruptor. He would just get in and fire people, be like, “You’re not doing your job.” And he was really working hard to create these reforms and start to create the cascade. If you can break that level, things start to fall off. And his political party, everybody did a really good job of getting that started.
And then it started to push on some bigger systems that now you’ve got a war because they’re trying to move towards a Western model and a legal model rather than a corrupt model.
I can’t imagine anybody in politics has clean hands. So I’m not saying somebody’s, they’re perfect, they’re the best, they’re the worst now. But anyways, so to answer your question, there’s so many, you don’t just touch one thing. You have to be complex in how you deal with it. And so going back to the five, six-year-olds being put into adult institutions, how that happened is they were actually children’s mental institution, but there was no system for aging them out the adults out into adult palliative care or nursing homes or whatever it is. There wasn’t enough capacity for that. And so they just stayed there, but you still have to bring people in. And so then you have children and adults in the same space. And so one of the things that changed, and so there’s things that Kim and I have been involved in actively pushing towards change and then there’s other things that have just happened.
And when God invited us to come to Ukraine, we didn’t know there was going to be a revolution two weeks after we arrived.

Marlin Miller:
Okay. I was going to ask you before, and I didn’t get to it, can you bring context to the timelines of you driving to church and the Lord says, “Really? Jad,

Jed Johnson:
Seriously?”
Yeah, so that was 2006, I believe. We were foster parents and just working and motorcycle in the garage and wonderful house, garden in the backyard, all the American dream, but also saying, “God, if you want, we’ll go. ” But he was like, “No, stay.” And so that was 2006. 2010, I come home from work and my wife is crying on the couch holding one of our foster kids and I’m like, “What did I do? ” And she’s like, I’ve learned that 20 something years of marriage, just figure out what did I do? How can I apologize?

Marlin Miller:
I’m sorry to laugh. I don’t mean to do that, but that is so you and me, buddy. I’m telling you, I can appreciate that very, very much.

Jed Johnson:
But anyways, Kim says, “Have you heard about orphans with disabilities in Ukraine?” And me working in social work, I’m like, “Sweetie, have you heard about the kid down the street in the meth house? Have you heard about child soldiers in Africa? Have you heard about child sex slaves in Thailand? Which horrible human injustice towards children do we have to do something about? ” A little bit cynical, but also that’s the way we … I’m all cerebral and I can be cold and calculated and she’s this all heart. And so she’s like, “I don’t know. ” And let’s pray. What does God want us to do about this? If your heart’s breaking, let’s pray. And so we started praying and then in 2010, we started pursuing adopting a boy in Ukraine. So that is how we went from normal, everything’s great in America to like, “Oh, we got to do something.” And so that adoption process fell through.
It was just they were reforming adoption in Ukraine and our paperwork got lost in the process. Something happened. But at that same time, there was a family at that institution adopting a little girl and saw the boy that we were wanting to adopt and they saw that they were good friends, so they adopted both of them. So that boy we wanted, he has a family, he’s great. But it was on the tail. I go out in the backyard, I’m working in the garden. I’m like, “God, why would you do that? Why would you make me fall in love with this kid just to have it not happen? Why would you do that to my heart?” And I had one of those really clear moments where I felt God said, “I needed you to fall in love with this boy because I’m giving you a heart for a lot of people like him.” What does that mean?
Wow. And he said, “Jed, you get an idea and a direction you’re going, but I’m always going to meet you along the journey. I just need you moving so I can steer you. ” It’s like that ship in the harbor, you can’t steer it until it’s moving. And so I go inside and I tell Kim what I felt like God said. She’s like, “Great, because there’s four more kids.” Hold on. Once again,
The gas and the brakes. And I had actually come to a place where by then, by this point, I didn’t believe in foreign missionary work. I was actually against it.

Marlin Miller:
Wait. Okay. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

Jed Johnson:
I’m just ruining any sort of direct line of interview.

Marlin Miller:
Like my notes? No, this is wonderful. What in the world do you mean?

Jed Johnson:
Well, I just felt like, man, if the Bible’s already translated, the only thing I’m going to do by going to some other country and tell him how to follow Jesus is I’m going to tell him how to follow Jesus like a Westerner. I’m going to give him my version that is not always biblical. I would love to say that I’ve got the corner on the theological market, but I’m guessing as much as anybody else.

Marlin Miller:
We’re totally falling.

Jed Johnson:
Right.

Marlin Miller:
We’re doing the best we can,

Jed Johnson:
But

Marlin Miller:
We have no promises that we’re on track.

Jed Johnson:
Yeah. And we can be really loving and make huge problems. It’s like if you study those social science things where there’s a rap problem on Guam because of all the ships coming in and so they’re like, oh, let’s introduce these snakes and then, oh, now the snakes are eating all the birds and we’ve ruined. Now let’s introduce the mongoose. And then the mongoose has fleas and then all our solutions create more problems and it’s all well-meaning. And so that’s how I’d come to this personal belief like, ma, we got to just pray. But what I would say what supersedes any of my opinions, which are just that, everybody’s got them and they all stink if you know the adage. I know

Marlin Miller:
That one. Yeah.

Jed Johnson:
I’m really trying to stay clean. I know I work with builders now. I have a potty mouth a bit after building a few of these homes in the homestead, but now I’m joking. Yeah, I just felt like that was my opinion. But what I believe supersedes that is if God calls you to something, he’s working out something much bigger and you just have to obey. So that’s why I came to a place where you just see all the problems we create and then you go into a country and even thinking when we were thinking about coming to Ukraine, I was having a conversation with God and I was like, “God, let me explain you how this is going to go because it always happens. We’ll go in with really clear vision. We’re local church people, so we’re going to find a local church. You’re not asking us to start a church.
We’re going to go find a local church with our clear vision and our finances and that church is then going to start people are going to start working for us and the vision of the church is going to get pulled into our very clear vision and five years down the road we’re going to run out of money and this church is going to have moved five years in this direction that wasn’t where God was calling them, but they got pulled in because of the financing and the clear vision and everything like that. This is what happens every time. How is that not going to happen?” This was my conversation to God and he’s like, “Well, if you want to run it, that’s what’ll happen, but if you’ll just follow me, maybe we’ll do something different.” And his word to Kim and I was just from the very beginning, put one foot in front of the other and say yes to the next thing.
And Marlon, that has been our strategy since day one. And I would love to tell you that I’m the strategic thinker. And yes, if you looked at all the Myers-Briggs and the StrengthsFinder strategy and big picture thinking and those would be my natural skillsets, but God hasn’t allowed me to be that with this work. He’s reduced me to one foot in front of the other, say yes to the next thing. And I get no credit for where it is today. It’s literally all him. And I will say is that when he’s given me the faith and courage to say yes, I’ve said yes. I haven’t always said yes, but it starts with him and it ends with him and I’m just thankful that I’ve been able to have the courage from him to say yes when I have said yes.

Marlin Miller:
Wow. So now let’s go back to our boys, your boys. Yep. Okay. Dude, that was a wonderful little bunny trail.

Jed Johnson:
That was a freebie.

Marlin Miller:
That was all free. Send me a bill for all the rest. Okay. Barise came out first,

Jed Johnson:
Right? Well, he was the first of the guys we brought out as a guardianship program because they were only adult. We had adopted Vladik, who was 15 when we adopted him. We adopted him in 2015. So he was the first one we got out along with we were advocating for the adoption of all the children at the institution. And so I believe the number is eight or 10 children that got adopted by families in America.

Marlin Miller:
Wow. So hold on. Okay. When you went there, what was the stated super clear vision that you thought you had when you went in in 2010? But by the way, you sold all your stuff here in the States, right? Yeah. Moved the whole family to Kiev.

Jed Johnson:
So in 2010, it started with the idea of adoption. When that fell through in 2012, Kim and I went and traveled around the country to see, because remember, I didn’t believe in missions, foreign missions. So we were going to find organizations that were working to deinstitutionalize rather than removing one child. I mean, I worked in nonprofit, Kim was a nurse. We made great money. I had great experience. We could work with an organization, find them, support them, raise money, whatever. And so when we went there, not that there wasn’t happening, but every church has an orphan ministry in Ukraine and they go and they sing songs and they give candy and they say, Jesus loves you and it’s kind, it’s beautiful. But with my work around childhood trauma and I was just watching, especially the children with disabilities, it was more traumatizing than helpful because these kids have no context for a person being good.
And so if a person’s brain hasn’t developed with the understanding and their emotions haven’t developed because they were just given a bottle and left in a crib their whole life, when a person enters into their space, that’s not a good thing.

Marlin Miller:
Right. They’re basically freaking out

Jed Johnson:
Up

Marlin Miller:
Here because they have no idea, they have no context, they don’t know anything about it.

Jed Johnson:
So that’s what we saw when we came in 2012 was a lot of kind things, but we couldn’t find anybody. Now there were some people starting to work on that. We just couldn’t find them. So I’m not saying we came in as the white knights that had the great answer, but so we spent the next year and a half from 2012 spring until the fall of 2013, that’s when we uprooted our life and started the nonprofit, Wide Awake International. And then we moved in November of 2013 to Jetomer, which is about an hour and a half west of Kyiv.

Marlin Miller:
Okay. Okay. So if I can go back a little bit, you said you saw all the Ukrainian churches doing the beautiful kind work, right? Yep. They would take their kids, they would take families in and they would sing and they would do all that and they thought that’s what these boys and girls needed when what they really needed was a family, right?

Jed Johnson:
Yeah.

Marlin Miller:
Someone to teach them what it means when you get a hug and what skin on skin is all about and all of those things. How old can you bring some context, Jed, to what that institutionalized population at 2013, 14, what was that like from the average ages of these boys? Were most of these children just dropped off at birth? Were they found? Have they just been in a crib tied with a bottle and a diaper a day and that’s it?

Jed Johnson:
All of that at once. And

Marlin Miller:
More.

Jed Johnson:
Yeah, and more. And so for our guys, Boris, his mom died when he was little and she was an alcoholic and he went to grandma and grandma was an alcoholic and it looks, and they just say global disability. There’s nothing specific about it. We did a brain scan. It looks like he probably had meningitis at some point. There’s just a big hole in the middle of his brain, probably infection or something. He’s nonverbal. When we brought him out, he would wear size like seven, eight-year-old boys clothes at 24.

Marlin Miller:
At 24 years old.

Jed Johnson:
At 26, because he’s 34 now and now he wears about size 12-year-old clothes. But anyway, so that’s his story. He was with family, but it was complex. And when the Soviet Union fell, if you were a good Soviet, you didn’t know how to live in the new world. And so oftentimes alcoholism ensued. I have a lot of friends who had great parents. They were good Soviets and then once it fell, they lost their parents because they didn’t know how to live in the new world. So anyway, so that’s one version. Another is they find out their child They have a child born like Vladic, our son that we adopted. He has Apert syndrome, so a lot of deformities in his skull and his hands and feet. And so they saw this disabled child was born and they just left him at the hospital and he went right to the baby house.
And so that is how he came. Another one of our guys on Ton, no, Ruslan, his parents had a domestic fight when he was nine years old and father killed the mother, went to prison and he was sent to the institution at nine. If you ask him today how old he is, he’ll say nine. So he’s locked in at nine. And so it’s every version you can think of.

Marlin Miller:
Wow. Can I just pause and just ask? I sometimes don’t understand how you and Kim, Lisa and I talk and we pray for you guys a lot.

Jed Johnson:
Thank you.

Marlin Miller:
Because we watch. It is an incredible thing how you guys are front and center and you see, like you said, you see what mankind is capable of doing to the most innocent. Jed, what goes through your heart when you see those cases like the new cases today and you think back to what you saw when you first meet Barise and he’s 26 years old and he’s this big comparatively. And how does your heart deal with that?

Jed Johnson:
Yeah.

Marlin Miller:
I mean, it’s an immense pain. I mean, it just has to be.

Jed Johnson:
Yeah. I mean, the first moment when Kim and I went into the institution and we were kind of nervous because we’d never been. We were wondering what would it be like and would we be repulsed by it? And we have this heartbeat for this problem and yet it would be too hard to be there. We didn’t know what it would feel like. And I remember we walked into this place and there’s holes in the wall. The kids are covered in wounds and this septic paint stuff and they’re just wandering around slobbers, the smell. It’s a sensory overload and they’re coming up and hugging us. And I look across the room and Kim looks at me, I look at her and we’re just covered in this stuff and we look at each other. And it was like this, these are our people. And it makes no sense.
You knew. Yeah. It was like we found our people. And so that would be what God gave us in that situation. But as far as how do you deal with the human injustice? Because now God said, these are your people and you feel it and you see what’s being done to them. So I guess through a story we’re getting after two years in Ukraine, two years of going to the institution almost every day. And now just a quick backup, our mission wasn’t to make the institution better. The reason we would go to the institution, we would bring fruit, we would wash their hands, we would sing with them, we’d call them by name and we would be with them and improve their situation in that moment. But we weren’t painting a sinking battleship. We’re not going to spend money on gray paint for a ship we see as sinking.
The institutions are sinking and we’re not going to invest in them because this is a big aside, but if I could speak to the Western church, stop funding orphanages, stop funding orphanages. You are propping up a corrupt system that keeps people with disabilities in prison. If you want to do something kind, adopt the children and work with organizations trying to shut them down and bring them into families. We have to do that hard. We have to think. We can’t just be big heart and kind. We have to think. And so anyways, that was my aside. So two years after being at the institution and seeing the worst and you come and you’re cleaning feces, you’re cleaning puke, you’re cleaning wounds and bite marks from other people and you’re seeing you’re cleaning up after child sexually abused or adult is sexually abused, you’re cleaning them, you’re holding them in this such vulnerable space.
Kim and I, like I said, we had led worship at our church. And so we’re getting ready to come back to America and all these, our friends were like, “Oh, you got to come back. You got to lead worship when you come back to visit.” And there’s this song that you guys have to sing. It’s called Good Good Father. Have you heard this song, Good Good Father? It’s probably an old classic now. It’s been a while. You got to sing this song. And so Kim and I listened to it and we’re listening to it and we’re both just angry listening to this song. And I look at Kim’s like, “Why do you think we’re angry?” And I said the quiet part out loud. I’m like, “I just can’t see how God’s a good Father when he allows this.
” I just said it. And I think those are prayers that God’s okay with. He wants the real stuff. He doesn’t want, now I lay me down to sleep. He wants us the prayers that just fall out of our mouth that we can’t even hold in the sigh. He cares about all that stuff. But so I just say it. I’m like, I’m not singing that song. And we go back to America and at that two-year mark, we adopted Vladic and we brought him to America and he needed a lot of medical work. And so Kim actually stayed in the States for a year with Vladic and our other kids and I was going back and forth. And so I’m back in Ukraine and Kim calls me and she’s like, “You’ll never believe what happened.” So at church we were taking communion and Vladik barely had any language at this time and they’re at church together taking communion.
So Kim’s explaining what it is to him and really it’s simple terms. We take this, we’re remembering and that Jesus loves us and that we need to carry his body and his blood into … His life needs to flow through us. But she kept saying that we just know that Jesus loves us and he’s with us. And he looks at her and he starts crying and he uses the, oh, English grammar, like the perfect continuous or what it is. He says, “I know he loves me, but he says that I’ve always known knowing that he will. I’ve always known knowing he will love me is kind of if you translated how he said it. ” And Kim’s like, “How does this kid know that God loves him? He was left an institution.” And Kim just shared that with me and she’s like, “Jed, he is good.
He’s always been with Vladek.” And I wanted to stay the night at the institution on that trip. I wanted to stay the night at the institution because I wanted to see a full 24-hour cycle because I’m trying to figure out how do I improve the life of our guys there at the institution and understand all the phases of their life. And so I’m putting Buris to bed at the institution when he still lived there and Baris is giggling and he’s happy as I’m putting him to bed. I’m like, “Why are you so happy?” And nighttimes are scary. And I just felt God say, “You think you know. ” He’s like, “You sit in judgment of me and you say that I’m not good because of how they’re hurting and what happens to them.” He’s like, “But you’re not there when they’re being raped. I’m there with them.
I’m holding them through that.
You’re not there when they’re being beat up. You’re not there when they’re scared, but I’m there always. You just come a couple times a week and you love them. You think you know what my goodness is like because you don’t see it in this way. You want to be judge?” I was like, “God, I’m sorry.” He’s like, “He can’t wait to go to sleep because we’re going to spend the night together.” And so then I could sing that song and we sing that song sometimes, but he’s a good father. We just don’t get to define what his goodness is like.
So that’s my long answer to when we think about the injustice, how do we stand in that tension? That was the invitation of Christ. That’s what he did. He didn’t stand far off and say someone should do something or wave a magic wand and fix everything. No, he came as a person and stood right in the pain of it all. And he taught us to pray, “Your kingdom come, your will be done as it is in heaven here on earth.” So that’s our job is to stand in those hard places and pray for his kingdom to come and act as he leads us.

Marlin Miller:
You adopt Vlad or Vlad.

Jed Johnson:
Vlad.

Marlin Miller:
Vlad. Okay. That’s what I thought. By the way, by the way, Jed, I absolutely cannot get enough of the videos you guys put online. When you put, I think it was the one after Vlad came back home to Kiev and he had his surgeries, the joy in that little guy’s face and Evie was there with him and your wife was talking to them just to see Vlad’s face.

Jed Johnson:
Man,

Marlin Miller:
There is something so genuinely …

Jed Johnson:
Yeah.

Marlin Miller:
Okay. So for a little bit of context, my dad had a sister with Down Syndrome, grew up … Pop was number 12 of 14 kids. His sister with Down Syndrome was number 14. Oh,

Jed Johnson:
Wow.

Marlin Miller:
And Pop would always say, “You will struggle to find someone that is more Christlike than a child that has Down syndrome or a child that has special needs because of the joy and the innocence and the purity and things like that. ” And that’s what I was referring to back when I said people are trying to get rid of these less thans and they’re missing out on the very best.

Jed Johnson:
They’re

Marlin Miller:
Missing out on the very best of life and it’s such a shame. It’s just such a shame. So now, okay, can I move on to Anton and Ruslan a litle bit? Can you tell us about that?

Jed Johnson:
Yeah. So when we brought those two guys out, that’s when it became very difficult because they were older and bigger and they had been in a different group of boys at the institution. We mostly only worked with boys in, it was called the Isolation Hall. They were isolated because they were more physically vulnerable. But for whatever reason, we felt like God was asking us to take Russell on Antonelle. And so we took them out and the level of abuse they experienced was actually more than the boys in the isolation hall. And so nighttimes were scary. Anton would be up all night wanting to fight. And so I just had to learn judo and just try to keep him safe and me safe. So I didn’t sleep for about a year. Are you

Marlin Miller:
Being serious?

Jed Johnson:
Yeah. Not at

Marlin Miller:
All, like barely at all.

Jed Johnson:
I mean, I’d have to take a nap in the morning, but most of the night I’d be awake all night long.

Marlin Miller:
Dude, your entire family was with you, right?

Jed Johnson:
Yeah. So the boys were downstairs and our family was sleeping upstairs. And so he would want to get up in the middle of the night and walk around the house. He would dump out all the chemicals from every bottle. He would turn all the lights on. He would turn the water on on every faucet and we have a well. So the first time it happened- You ran out. … showers in the morning.
So we had this crazy protocol of before bed, like putting everything away and turning the pump off so water wouldn’t turn on if you tried to … All the things like that. The way you do for a two-year-old, you don’t want to not allow them to be in their space, you want their space to be accessible. And so instead of trying to make rules for them, you just make the world so that the rules that you have are not an option or you’re just setting those boundaries well. And so it was all that, but he would get up and he’d be afraid. I mean, he’s working through to love somebody. There’s a quote from the guy that started Larsh and I wanted to say this. I don’t have to do it from memory. I brought the book.

Marlin Miller:
What’s the name of the guy?

Jed Johnson:
Jean-Venie.

Marlin Miller:
That’s exactly right. I read the book.

Jed Johnson:
Yeah. So this is becoming human. So he’s talking about a person and this Claudia, she appeared so mad. This fundamental question, how to trust that she has a heart and that she can trust little by little receive love and be transformed by love and then give love. And so we recognize we have to replace the thousands and thousands of traumatic experience with hundreds of thousands of experiences that say, no, it can be different. And so every time he would attack me, I wouldn’t attack him. I would just redirect his body and speak kindly and tell him he’s safe. I know that he’s scared, but he’s going to be okay. And all while he’s freaking out and grabbing me and biting me and everything, and I just have to stay calm. And God gave me that grace to do that. And my personality is in high super stressful situations.
I just get calm and focused.That’s just who I am however God made me. And so we just worked through that over a year. And then ultimately the best situation was for Anton to live in another place. And so we had set up an apartment with one of our first caretakers, which was the model all along. If we were going to expand and grow, it couldn’t just be keep adding boys to the Johnson house. And so if we were going to be able to take more boys out, we needed to get these guys. And so we got him into a smaller space and we’re able to work on medication and just get those hundreds of thousands of positive experiences in a safer environment for him that didn’t put our kids at risk and also let me sleep at night.

Marlin Miller:
That’s a good thing. How is Antone doing today?

Jed Johnson:
He’s great. He lives with Masha and Aleg. Masha is our executive director and Alieg, he runs our … Actually, we’re just getting it off the ground, but he’s done everything, but he’s managed the property, he’s been an assistant, but right now he is working on building our remodeling our shop, our wood shop for the boys where we’re just doing basic job skills and teaching them to build with wood and sand and paint and things like that. And so he’s just making it a little more accessible and him and Vladik have been working on that. And so they are houseparents for Anton and Sasha. Now they took guardianship of Sasha. They were the first Ukrainian family to take guardianship of Sasha, which is cool. That’s the goal, right? Not that a Westerner does it, but that locals do it. And so they have legal guards, Sasha and they have Anton and they live on the homestead in the duplex and he’s great.
He feels his space. We are able to discover dietary issues that this poor guy’s dealing with all these diet problems and he rarely has an aggressive outburst anymore. A lot of it is now we know the signs when he’s starting to feel stressed and we know what helps him to regulate and we’re able to get in earlier. And it’s not just about him learning, it’s about us growing closer in relationship and knowing and how powerful it is to know and be known. When someone knows you, it’s like your wife, when she sees your stress, she knows that there’s some things she can do that’s going to help you like, “Hey, whatever it is, why don’t you go take a walk? I got the kids,” or whatever it is, the things we do for each other in loving relationships. And so as we’ve gotten to know Anton, we can enjoy him and he can enjoy us.
Yeah, he’s funny. He’s so musical. He sings all the time and he has a great melody. It’s actually one of the markers of his syndrome, William syndrome is that often they’re very musical.

Marlin Miller:
Our family has a friend, Ryan, who has William syndrome and I can identify. He is the happiest, most musically. He’s always singing. He’s always clapping. He’s always singing.

Jed Johnson:
And actually, Ton was on the cover of Plain Values Magazine when you ran an article on us.

Marlin Miller:
Yep, I remember. I remember. So now can I ask if I remember right, did you guys not have to say goodbye to a few boys a couple years ago?

Jed Johnson:
Did they pass away?

Marlin Miller:
Yeah.

Jed Johnson:
No, we have an antibody pass away in our homes. At the institution, yes, we’ve had a lot of boys die.

Marlin Miller:
Okay. Sorry, Jed. That’s what I meant.

Jed Johnson:
That’s

Marlin Miller:
What I meant.

Jed Johnson:
Yeah.

Marlin Miller:
Because I remember getting the email and you talked about, I believe, two that actually passed away within a day or two of each other, right?

Jed Johnson:
Yeah. So I mean, they die in these horribly painful ways, stomach infection. Imagine dying from an infection, stomach infection.

Marlin Miller:
What do you mean by a stomach infection?

Jed Johnson:
I

Marlin Miller:
Mean, is it that simple?

Jed Johnson:
Yeah. They get an ulcer that’s not treated or they get some sort of infection and then they just internally bleed to death.

Marlin Miller:
Because they have no chance of getting healthcare.

Jed Johnson:
Well, they have healthcare, but their needs aren’t as important. Oh, that person always cries. What’s the difference this crying? Yeah, they have a fever. Okay, we’ll take them to the hospital, but then if we do that, we have to take one of our nannies to be with them at the hospital that leaves one less here, all the reasons or a bedsore that becomes septic or whatever and they die from a bedsore, the blood infection from that, whatever. Yeah. Wow. All sorts of painful ways, but yeah, we’ve lost a lot of boys we’ve been planning to take out and then they pass away. Yeah. It’s a weird feeling because you’re so sad because you wanted to be able to spend time together and you wanted to see who they would become on this side of eternity, but you’re also just relieved that they’re not in pain anymore.

Marlin Miller:
Yeah. Wow. Okay. Can you talk about the homestead itself a litle bit?

Jed Johnson:
Yeah. So when we came to Ukraine, we were trying to think where would be a good place? Is it like, do you build an apartment in town and have a couple story apartment with homes in it? Culturally, what would fit? And yeah, you could do an apartment, but the cities aren’t accessible. They’re starting to become more accessible with better sidewalks and ramps and things like that, but at the time it wasn’t. And there’s also the stigmatism around people with disabilities. But what we noticed after being there is that Ukrainians all have … When the Soviet Union fell and it was privatized, they were all given an apartment and it’s called a Dacha. It’s a little plot of land where they can have a garden and things like that. And so everybody is out in the summer. Every kid has childhood trauma from picking potatoes and bugs of potatoes, whatever it is, they all talk about it.
But the grandmas are always out there working in their garden. And so the garden and the land is the heartbeat of Ukraine. And when you’re wondering, why are they fighting so hard over this land? It’s not land. It’s their heartbeat. And that black Ukrainian soil, it’s called black earth.
Everything grows. And it’s like when everything else fails in your life but you have one thing that won’t fail, you know that when you put a seed in the ground it’s going to come up, you’re going to put a seed in the ground. That’s

Marlin Miller:
A big deal.

Jed Johnson:
Yep. And so we just thought, let’s make the garden the center of what our home is. And so we bought a piece of land outside of town about two miles outside of Jitomar City. There’s a little village. And so we bought a plot of land and we remodeled an old home. And that was our home where we brought Baris, Anton Ruslan and was already with us when we had remodeled it and stuff and had a garden. And then we bought the neighboring land and we put the duplex on there and then we started building the foundation for what it will be, our community center with a kitchen as well as a meeting hall in all our offices. Right now the foundation is standing there. We need to build it, but need money for that. So someday we’ll get there. Right now we are remodeling another plot of land we bought next to it.
And so we have about a hectare of land. And so duplex, that’s two homes. Our home, then we have A- frame apartment that’ll be Vlad’s apartment. We’re using it as an office right now, a temporary office, but it’ll be Vlad’s apartment. And then two little outbuildings that we use for little separated classrooms for our guys and things and office space temporary. So that is the homestead with a big garden. And then we have a barn and we have horses.
They’re called hootzel horses. They’re from the Carpathian Mountains. They actually came over with the Huns when they came and took over everything way long ago.

Marlin Miller:
Wow.

Jed Johnson:
They were left over from that and now they’re their own breed after a thousand years or whatever it is. Oh, sorry. I hit the camera. They almost look like a pony, but they’re short, super surefooted, super calm. And so we’ve got four of those and we do therapy with those. We have a German lady, Diana, who lives on the homestead and she does horse equine therapy with them. And then we’ve got goats and chickens. We’ve got a little forest with a pond. We’re going to clean it. We haven’t developed that part, but we want to clean it out and put fish in the pond so the boys can fish and …

Marlin Miller:
Oh man. Okay. I’ve got a handful of questions here around that right there. This episode is being brought to you by my friends at Kentucky Lumber. Recently, I had a chance to sit down with Derek and his wife, Lisa and their whole family. And let me tell you, they are wonderful. They have stepped into some of the hardest situations with fostering and adoption. If you care about the least of these and the kids that are coming out of really hard places and you want to buy from a family who gets it and cares about those kids, they are living on the front lines of some of the most unimaginable situations that I’ve come across in years from siding to trim to flooring, they have it all. You can find them at drywallhaters.com. Number one, what have you seen as far as the equine therapy goes?
Number two, what have you seen when you bring boys out of the institution and they get to go walk through the woods and they get to go jump in the mud and go play in the mud and just be boys. How have you seen that impact them and you?

Jed Johnson:
Yeah. Well, for me it’s good. I had a very wise friend tell me once, he said, “Jed, you work with people and people never finish. So if you’re going to be able to do this for a long haul, you need projects that you can finish in your life.” And so working in the garden, I like to do woodworking, so building benches or whatever it is, building things. When you have something you can finish, I don’t know, it’s just therapeutic for me. And so chopping wood, whatever it is, those things are therapy. I mean, it’s hard work and you got calluses and it has to be done, but it’s like if you choose to just view it as a pain or drudgery, then you can be annoyed by it. But if you choose to see it as therapy that gives you the strength to be emotionally present for the hard emotional work, then it’s great.
So that’s what is for me. For our guys, yeah, they love it. For horses, I’ve always just felt like horses are hay burners. Unless they’re working, what is the point? They just tear through the hay, right?

Marlin Miller:
Right. They also destroy pastures in a hurry.

Jed Johnson:
Yeah, in a hurry. But when we were in Germany, so when the war started, we took 40 people as refugees about almost a month after the war started. We left the country when the Russian military was about 50 miles from our house. I was too close and we got them out of there and we were there for a couple months until the West got involved and then we came right back. But Diana, a German woman, their church where we stayed, every Thursday she would invite the boys to her corral and she would spend time with the horses. And I watched how the boys regulated, especially on Ton, he learned to regulate his emotions. These huge animals that are just calm helped him who was dysregulated and stressed, just breathe because they give you this thing. And so I was like, “Yeah, I’m sold.” Yeah. But yeah, one of my rules for if we’re going to try a therapy or introduce something into the homestead, it has to complete a full circle.
It can’t just be therapeutic and it can’t just be something for the boys. It has to be something with the boys. So the horses need to serve a function to the community, not just therapy. And so yeah, Diana’s working with them and I think we’re going to start working more on learning to haul things so they can haul wood from the forest and things like that. And we can collect deadfall and things like that. But anyways, and turning the soil and stuff like that. But I just watch the impact they have on the boys and it’s great. It’s amazing. So it helps them regulate, helps them develop muscles, helps them become more stable in how they walk because they’re developing stomach muscles to ride the horse and all that stuff. And Blade loves mucking the barn. He loves a clean space. M, he gets in there, gets it clean.

Marlin Miller:
Oh man. I love it. Well, as of right now, well, our three youngest go to a local place to … I mean, they each get to ride a horse for an hour and oh my goodness. The stories that we hear the things, I mean the kids just looks … Oh, they long to be with their horses. The one is Chester and then there’s another one named Fatty and it’s just a riot. They just adore them.

Jed Johnson:
Yeah, these are great horses, but they’re great. Bring the kids out. Well, they can come ride our horses.

Marlin Miller:
That’s a bit longer than a half hour road trip to go.

Jed Johnson:
Yeah. Let’s wait till the drone stops flying over. Once the drones stop flying, please come.

Marlin Miller:
Yeah. Well, thank you. So I love to do a couple bullet point rounds of questioning just really quickly and then we’ll land the plane with one final question. Okay?

Jed Johnson:
Yeah, sure.

Marlin Miller:
If you could chat with one biblical character other than Christ, who would it be and why? And have a cup of coffee or something.

Jed Johnson:
Yeah. Maybe there’s so many good ones. That’s so hard. The first one that came to me was David because he is a fighter. He wanted to be in the temple, he wanted to be worshiping, but he had to be out fighting and just learning from him, how was he able to be strong and fight, but also come back and be present in the presence of God and things like that. And he just wanted to be what Solomon got to be. He wanted to just build the temple, but he had to clear way for it.

Marlin Miller:
Yeah. Wow.

Jed Johnson:
That was my quick one.

Marlin Miller:
Well, it’s a great answer. My goodness. What advice, Jed, what advice would you give your 16 year old self?

Jed Johnson:
Don’t smoke that.

Marlin Miller:
Extremely practical. That’s probably the best answer to that question I think we’ve ever gotten. I think-

Jed Johnson:
I’m not as holy as all the other people that you have, Ana.

Marlin Miller:
Oh man. Okay. Last question. How can we pray for you and Kim and all your boys? I mean, your entire family.

Jed Johnson:
Yeah. Just pray for peace in our country. We’re moving into a new season where Kim and the girls are in Vlad are going to be heading back here and we won’t be present on the homestead as much. I’ll be trying to travel every other month, but just that transition will go well. I want our team to feel supported. Our team’s amazing. I would say the most exciting thing about the work right now is that our Ukrainians are running it and we don’t have to be … I haven’t been there. I mean, I go every other month or even less for the last year and a half has been my rhythm while I’ve been in the States and it just runs. It goes because we’ve got a great team of Ukrainians that are so passionate about it. But pray for them that they’d be able to hold close to the vision and the mission of what we’re trying to do.
And then yeah, financing, just pray that God will continue to provide that the cost of everything is going way up. And most of the financing we get is just a lot of people giving a little that they can, but that’s more and more difficult as the price of things go up and the world changes, but we can’t grow without that. So yeah.

Marlin Miller:
Yeah. I hope you know how much I have just … I told you that I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time. Jed, your work, your heart is so doggone inspiring. It’s ridiculous. And it is just a joy to know that you guys are out there doing it.

Jed Johnson:
Thank you.

Marlin Miller:
And I know that we’re going to put this in the show notes. I know that, but I’m just going to ask you just to tell the folks where to find you. I mean, if I’m not mistaken, I think they can send checks to someplace in Oregon or

Jed Johnson:
Something, right? Yeah. So our nonprofit’s based out of Oregon. If you go to wideawakeinternational.org and be in the show notes, you can donate through online portal or send a check to the PO Box or set up a transfer and a check and your bank will send it straight to our PO box.
And then I think our Ukrainian nonprofit is called Deem Hedonisty, which is Dignity Homes. And they actually run social media. We went off social media quite a while, I think in 2018, just because we’re fools and no nonprofit should go off of social media apparently. But we just felt like God said too, and I don’t know if that’s forever or just for a season, but we didn’t want to play the game anymore. So Kim, we put out a newsletter instead of posts, we put out a newsletter every week and it’s just what you’d probably get on a post. It’s pictures, it’s stories. And so sign up for the newsletter if you want to know more, because that’s going out all the time and there’s always fun stories.

Marlin Miller:
Well, I can attest to that. I read almost all of them and I know that our team here does and it makes for a blast for 10 minutes just to read through it. You guys do a great job.

Jed Johnson:
Thank you.

Marlin Miller:
Thank you very much. I love you. Keep up the great work, man.