Since I was a 11-year-old little girl, I have known the Lord was calling me to work with orphans. It happened unexpectedly while watching a news report on Romanian orphanages. His voice was the clearest I had experienced in my short one year of knowing Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior. “I want you to bring hope to kids like these, the kids that have no one else to tell them.”

I knew beyond a doubt that day my life would be dedicated to serving the least of these. I have firmly held onto Psalm 37:4, “Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart.” For 13 more years, I began to learn about global missions while I faithfully served in my local context. I had no idea when my dream of working with orphans would be fulfilled, but I wanted to believe that one day the Lord would show me the right time.

It wasn’t until I turned 24 years old, 13 years later, that I met an orphan for the first time. Amazingly, God had been growing in my heart a desire to go to Africa and work with the precious children on that continent. He used my local path to guide me to a church who wanted to start a partnership in Nigeria. In February 2008, I was asked to go on a scouting trip, alongside another Reliant missionary, to check out an unfinished orphanage with hopes of partnering with them in the future. On that trip, the ministry unexpectedly received their first group of 14 teenage orphan boys. As I stood there holding their hands in a circle, thanking the Lord together for their new home, I was in complete and utter awe. The Lord had fulfilled His calling on my life in such a beautiful and unexpected way.

The Lord’s heart for children in need is clear throughout scripture.

For the next seven years, I traveled to Nigeria 17 times, leading short-term mission trips from my local campus church and serving the ministry who ran the orphanage. My dream of getting to use my photography skills to capture the beautiful faces of these children and bring their stories to the United States came true. I started a child sponsorship program that eventually allowed 40 children to be sponsored and cared for through this ministry. Many of the kids became like my own children, and I even met the love of my life, who was working in orphan care in another city in Nigeria. I was in my twenties and frequently thought, “How can this be my real life?” It was too good to be true.

But as with all good stories, mine too has a dramatic turn of events.

The simplest way I can explain what happened is that the American director of the ministry had some sort of breakdown and let go all of the staff and volunteers who had been serving for years. We were helpless to do anything about it. I had not experienced heartbreak quite like it before. There were days I laid in bed sobbing, trying to understand what the Lord was going to do through these sudden changes.

He gently showed me in ways only He can that He loved those kids in Nigeria way more than I could even imagine loving them, and I loved them as fiercely as a mother could. My husband and I immediately began talking about what orphan care would look like in our lives next because we both knew that was the ministry the Lord desired for us.

We had both always dreamed of adopting internationally and had begun researching that process about three months before the Nigeria surprise happened. We were discouraged to find out how long and how expensive the process was and knew in our hearts we were ready to be parents sooner than that. It should not have surprised us that the Lord had something amazing in store for us that was so bigger and different than anything we could ask for or imagine.

Through a series of divine encounters, we met a man who has a heart for domestic orphan care, something we had never considered before. Once he explained to us why families within churches should be the first to rise up to the need in our own nation, our hearts were struck. We got in our car and immediately said, “The Lord wants us to be foster parents.” We quickly started the process, and within six months, the Lord brought a precious little girl into our lives.

The day the case manager showed up with a scared and sick little 22-month-old, our lives changed forever. We had to allow various government workers into our home to inspect everything from our finances to where we keep our medication, and we began traveling two times a month to a city in Texas we had never even heard of. A biological father and mother who were perfect strangers to us became a part of our lives and our story, intimately woven together. We now had the honor of raising the little life entrusted to our care. There’s nothing that can compare to the experience of a child calling you “Mommy and Daddy” in front of her biological parents. The tragedy and weight of the brokenness of that reality can only be matched by the love and redemption of our Savior.

We are now ninth months into the foster-care process. It has had the most extreme ups and downs of any other experience of our lives. Her case has taken multiple turn of events we didn’t expect, including her biological mother sitting before us sobbing as she recounted her life story and signed an affidavit that she wants to terminate her rights and allow us to adopt her little girl. Why? Because she can see that we love her deeply and she is so happy and well-adjusted with us. Only the love of Jesus can do that.

We dream big. We want to set an example through foster care for others to step up to the plate and become foster parents as well. We want to see our church, and many others, advocate for the orphans in our nation and play the endless roles available to believers, even if it’s not to take in children themselves. Every single believer has a role to play. The Lord’s heart for children in need is clear throughout scripture. We started small. We took one little, scared girl into our home, and she has now flourished into a 2½-year-old who loves Jesus and can count to ten in Spanish. We now have five couples who have expressed an interest in foster care because of the path the Lord has called us to.

It hasn’t been easy — orphan care is hard and long work, but Jesus loves the little children of the world, and we should too.