My Story

Why I do what I do.....

Sixteen years ago I found myself living in Kharkov, Ukraine with my medical missionary husband of 4 years.  He had just finished residency training in Akron, Ohio, and while the other young doctors secured their dream jobs and their wives shopped for new houses, Paul and I packed up 7 tub totes of life's necessities and moved half way around the world to share the love of Jesus.  It sounds very altruistic and noble, but in reality I was the most reluctant of missionaries.  I only agreed to go to Ukraine to keep from having to do the inner city missions work in Atlanta that Paul had been called to.....and I was familiar with the story of Jonah and the whale.  I hoped that offering myself as a missionary to Ukraine would appease the God I barely knew at the time. 

Paul and I had wanted to start a family right away after we married, but soon found that we were facing the struggle of infertility.  We eventually exhausted everything that could be done medically to conceive a child without success, so before leaving the states, we completed a home study towards adoption.  We had both always been open to adoption and it seemed that was how God was going to build our family. 

Although our primary purpose in going to Ukraine was to help set up a medical clinic in a Baptist church, we were soon taking humanitarian aid to Orphanage #1, the baby to four year old orphanage.  It was there in July 1996 that one of the nurses led me down a dark hallway to the 'sick room' where several square cribs held as many as four or five babies each.  Although I couldn't communicate easily in Russian yet, the nurse spoke quiet words I did not understand as she put a dark haired angel with huge brown eyes and chicken pox scabs all over her into my arms.  It was 'love at first sight' and that 8 month old little girl, who the nurses described as 'serious and wise', became our daughter 6 months and mounds of paperwork later. 

At the time, foreign adoption was pretty....foreign.  It wasn't the cool way to add to or start a family, it just happened to be the way God chose to start ours and we are so grateful for our now 17 year old blessing, Natalie, as well as our two "bios", Leah, 15 and Cole, 13.

When we returned to the states our lives became the busy lives of all young families and we settled into life in Athens, Georgia.  Thoughts of the Ukraine, the orphanage and the orphans were few and far between.  We gardened, we homeschooled, we churched, and Paul started the inner city medical ministry God had put on his heart before we married, and life rolled along fairly well.  

In 2008 I had an opportunity to travel with a group from Athens to a city near where we had lived in Ukraine to help build a sensory gym and playground for an orphanage in Zymyiv.  While I was there I became attached to four teen-age girls.  They were only slightly older than Natalie at the time and as I realized that this could have been our daughter, I began to ask questions about what their futures might look like.  The answers to those questions were....there are no words.  I was told that the girls would be escorted to the gates of the orphanage after 9th grade at age 15 with the clothes on their backs and little else and would be given the choice to enter a trade school.  The statistics for these children are staggering.

70% of orphan grads enter a life of crime or prostitution as a means to survive and 10% commit suicide before their 18th birthday

When I returned from that trip, I was emotionally and physically exhausted.  That, combined with the overwhelming hopelessness that I believed for these kids futures and a lack of faith in a God who is able to do immeasurably more than what I could think or imagine, paralyzed me.  I shut my mind's door and tried not to think about those girls and the other children I left behind in Ukraine.

In 2012, a friend of mine mentioned in passing that she was trying to help find a home to host a 14 year old orphan girl from Ukraine for the summer.  I immediately said we would take her and she soon arrived to spend 5 weeks with us.  It was truly a stretching experience as we tried to learn how to love this broken child.  My heart hurt as we put her back on the plane to return to her 'home' orphanage. Although we had loved her to the best of our limited ability, I questioned whether it had had any eternal impact on her life. 

A few months later I was invited to travel with the hosting organization to do interviews with orphans being considered for the program.  I did some preliminary research before leaving to find our what God was up to for orphan grads in Ukraine.  Our travel schedule allowed for me to take some side trips to visit some ministries that were specific to orphan grads.  

When I returned home, I was frustrated by what I had seen and learned, but I was also resolved to DO SOMETHING.  I began praying fervently for God to give me direction and show me how and where to get plugged in.  Through a series of God winks, I got connected to Lifesong for Orphans which just happened to be in the same city we had lived and adopted Natalie.  I loved their model for ministry to orphans that followed them with Ch