In order to write the chapters of our story with as much accuracy as possible, I am taking time before each to read through my journals from those particular time periods. It has been a very interesting experience, reliving both the joys and the pain of those days. With the perspective that time affords, having seen what God has done in the lives of Ron and me as well as all those with whom our lives have intersected since those early years, I am able to view those experiences a bit differently today. Thankfully, what I share with you now can be filtered through eyes that have seen God’s faithfulness.
This season was one filled with challenges that at times left me questioning once again whether we had truly heard God calling us to leave the safety and simplicity of life and our home in Southern California. As I inferred in the last chapter, this was a period of rapid growth in our ministry – the orphaned and abandoned children were indeed coming, but their addition to our home, as well as all of the other aspects of our work at that time (which included a neighborhood Bible club, trying to help a struggling church, discipling the people God was bringing into our lives, and hosting multiple missions’ teams, especially during the summer) created a balancing act between home and ministry responsibilities that required sacrifice of all of us, including our own kids.
Though as a mom, I was very aware that my first priority was my own family, the reality was that at times my attention and energies were divided as I sought to meet their needs as well as those of three broken children and all the other people God was bringing into our lives. And while I didn’t always get it right, I also had to come to terms with the fact that obedience to God comes with a cost: it is when that cost touches the people we love that it gets complicated. But in the moments where that struggle was greatest, I had to hold onto the certainty that God had, indeed, called us to this, and that our children were part of that package. This was His work, and good His purposes in it were intended for everyone involved, including them. One of the ways God brought encouragement to both Ron and me during that time was through the words of Oswald Chambers in My Utmost for His Highest (a devotional that has played an important role in our lives) : “If we obey God, it is going to cost other people more than it costs us, and that is where the pain begins…We can disobey God if we choose, and it will bring immediate relief to the situation, but it will grieve our Lord. If, however, we obey God, He will care for those who have suffered the consequences of our obedience. We must simply obey and leave all the consequences with Him. Beware of the inclination to dictate to God what consequences you would allow as a condition of your obedience to Him”. Time has proven this true, as despite the sacrifices they were called to make and the mistakes we as parents made along the way, today both of our children are lovers of Christ and are involved in ministry themselves. God has been faithful and so very kind to us all.
But back then, we did not have the advantage of hindsight, and with our own home and lives filled with what we believed were enough challenges, we felt much more capable of administrating a foundation dedicated to caring for orphaned and abandoned children than of doing the very hard work of raising any more of them ourselves. With that in mind, our own house finished and “full”, we began construction on the casitas that were intended to house the Ecuadorian couples God would supply to do the actual parenting of the children we were certain God would bring. Within a couple of years, those couples, along with their own young children, joined us on campus, and God did indeed begin to bring some of Ecuador’s orphaned and abandoned children to our door. Over the period of a year, kids from two separate families, eleven in total, joined us here, and we distributed them between the two casitas. And for the year and a half that followed, for all intents and purposes, things appeared to be going well. The children were in school (a local Christian school) and seemed to be adjusting well to their new “parents” and siblings. We were certain we were on the way to seeing God’s wonderful plan for these and many more children taking flight. And then, almost overnight, all our best laid plans came crashing to the ground.
My desire in recounting our story is to glorify God and to demonstrate how He was at work in the midst of both the joyful and the difficult circumstances, not to dishonor or embarrass those through whom some of those difficulties may have come. For that reason, the details of what happened, at least in this context, will rest at His feet. Suffice it to say that all of us, myself, Ron, and all of the people God has brought alongside us over the years, are human beings who struggle with sin, and at times, that sin creates challenges that cannot be overcome by simply forgiving and forgetting. Discipline is sometimes required, and in this particular case, when choices were made that we did not believe were in the best interests of the children God had called us to rescue, we had to make some hard decisions. We determined that the couples raising the children were not at a healthy place in terms of their own marriages and family dynamics and therefore were not at a place in which they could truly help these new children. That decision was made with much counsel and prayer and, we believe, handled with grace and love for all involved. But the conclusion was that we needed to bring the kids into our home. And so, within just a few days, nine of these children, ranging from 5-12 years old, came to live with us. About this same time, Lorena left us (also a part of the fallout of unhealthy choices) so with Nathan now living with family friends in California, this brought us up to fourteen people living in our home. What had, when we first moved in, seemed to be such a huge house, was suddenly crowded and noisy.
The season of adjustment that followed cannot be fit into a few paragraphs. While we were absolutely certain that God had brought these children to our home (evidenced by the miraculous fact that when Ron suggested it as our only option, I was able to sincerely respond, “Of course they must come”), it was by no means a walk in the park. Melding together six different families under one roof, all with their own set of “baggage”, was no easy task. These kids had been through so much, and this was just one more upheaval in a lifetime of instability, the feelings brought forth by this new change making it difficult for them to feel secure and settled in this new “home” – especially with gringo parents who had no real idea of what they were doing! But little by little, this mix of mini cultures was blended by God’s grace and enabling into something that truly resembled “family”. However, even as that melding was taking place, it was becoming increasingly clear to us that the education the kids were receiving was not at all what we knew they would need if they were to have any hope of breaking the patterns set in their highly dysfunctional family backgrounds. Along with the limits set by the society in which they lived about how far they would be able to go in life, the deck was stacked against them. We wanted so much more for them. And thus began a new season in our lives – one that had never ever been on our radar: starting a school.
