I packed the moving truck, my wife, and three kids (with one on the way) and took one last look at our beloved, turn-of-the-century West Virginia home, the first house Sarah and I bought together. This was the house where we brought our kids home from the hospital, in the town where we had gone to college and fell in love, and where we experienced 13 wonderful years of college ministry, building our life and family together. I snapped a photo as we left downtown: a street with a music venue where I had played open mics across from our favorite restaurant. A place where we had spent many an evening watching our little ones dance to live music. It was a wistful day.

You are known. You are named. You are cherished.

Now nine months later, still in the Appalachian mountain range but nestled in the Great Smokies of western North Carolina in the tiny one-floor home we could afford, researching elementary schools and diving into community in our church, we are involved in a much narrower ministry. We still work with young people but ones who have had everything stripped away and, left unaided, have no shot of attending college or doing anything that most kids hope and dream for. They are faceless and nameless, treated as objects of pleasure, used up and discarded when they’re no longer fit for “service,” forgotten and anonymous, drifting on the dark edges of society like ghosts.

They are sex-trafficking victims. They are children who have been taken away from safety and opportunity and have been forced into horrors that are hard to wrap the mind around.

As I watch my own kids on the living room floor read books and play with trains and draw with crayons and put on costume after costume to make believe they’re a princess or a dinosaur or Thomas the Train, I think about the lost children out there who have none of these comforts and no hope or maybe even little remembrance of what a loving, safe home looks like. I think about what I would do if my beloveds were taken away like them. I think about the great lengths to which I would go to get them back, what effort and energy I would give in the process of their healing, what time and space and resources I would provide for their restoration.

That vision of time and space for consistent safety, food, and shelter in a loving home is what we are building in the Hundred Movement, the nonprofit I now partner with through Reliant. That vision is what caused me to change our whole lives and move away from things comfortable and familiar, to be part of the community of healing for one traumatized child so that we can train other communities to care for a second child, then a third, then ten, then one hundred, and thus to set the example for the other 350,000+ U.S. church communities to care for the estimated 350,000+ U.S. victims of human trafficking.

The Hundred Movement believes that Christ in His Church is the hope of the world. And we believe that a stable, loving, Christ-centered, therapeutic, foster-family environment, supported by a trauma-trained “extended family” in a church community, is where long-term restoration for a hurting child can be successful. If we can marry the power of the church with a trained family and all the therapeutic resources available to us in our community, we believe that the Acts 2:42-47 vision where the early church “broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts” can become reality, and the Kingdom dream of “on earth as it is in heaven” can come true.

As I reflect on my new job and new city and new home, working to build Family #1 and then on to the Hundred, I’m thankful to have this opportunity to learn more about why our hearts long for home, why God gives us homes and what a home really is. We bring in the stranger and speak to them: “You are known. You are named. You are cherished.” And we teach them that even this home which is now theirs is not their final resting place but that we all await our heavenly home and the welcoming feast prepared for us there.

“So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God.” [Ephesians 2:19]