It started
with one yes.

"Whatever, God."

In 1997, I went to a conference for children's ministers, and at the closing service I went through the prayer line and then off to the side to pray by myself. I was overcome with grief for children who were hurting and had no hope. I had never been near mission work, and I did not personally know a single child who was hurting like that. God put a burden on my heart that day that I can still feel, and it stayed with me for years before I knew what to do with it.

I had been teaching children at church since the day I graduated from children's church myself. Bobby grew up in a devout family, deeply involved in church. His dad pastored for several years, then took an outside job out of necessity. Bobby likes to say he was born on a pew and slept under the pews, but he was also a third-generation machinist who had been sweeping the shop floor since he was twelve. He earned his mechanical engineering degree for that shop, and everyone expected him to run it one day. He says the whole church cried the day we got married, because I was marrying such a heathen. (His words, not mine.)

When our twins were toddlers, the doctor found a growth on our daughter's back and told us it was dangerous. Of course, I went into Mama Bear mode, looking up everything I could find on Google and asking whether we should trust this doctor. We were ready to do the surgery. It was a medical procedure, so let's take care of it. We always did a prayer circle with the twins at night and read the Bible, and one night I said maybe we should just pray for a miracle. I think my mindset was that this was too trivial to bother God with, which sounds crazy to me now. We explained it to the twins the best we could, and one of them put a tiny hand on the other's back and prayed. The next morning I happened to look at her back, and I had to look twice. It was half the size, so I called Bobby at work. The doctors agreed it was smaller, but they still wanted to do the surgery.

Something was moving in Bobby during those months. We joined a Sunday school class whose theme was that if you want to walk on water, you have to get out of the boat, and he could not shake it. He fasted for three days, for our daughter and for whatever God was asking of him. One Sunday night he was alone in our bedroom, struggling with God, and he came to the point of surrender with the only word he could think of: whatever. He says it was like blinders coming off, and he heard it clearly: I have purposed your steps for this time, and you are to be trained to train others.

I was sitting on the couch working on my computer when Bobby came out of the bedroom, a bawling mess. I had no idea what had been going on in there. But God had already put it in my heart that this was my husband's call, and mine too, so when he told me what he had heard, I did not need time to think about it. "I know. Let's go." The next morning I saw that it was gone, completely gone, and I was not ready for that. I called Bobby at work again, and the doctors told us they did not know what had happened. We had not even prayed for her that night. We were too busy with this other life change.

Sell Everything

Around that time my cousin sent us off to read Amazing Grace by Jonathan Kozol, about children growing up in the South Bronx. I grew up in a sheltered bubble, in a Southern Christian family five generations deep in our faith, and I knew these problems existed, but I didn't really know. I sat on the couch and wept for days. Then we started driving to downtown Atlanta, an hour from our house, to visit my cousin's son, who was doing inner-city ministry there, and I saw it lived out. It wasn't just in the pages of a book. These children were neglected, left to fend for themselves, and their childhood ended before it ever got a chance to begin. After several weekends in a row, we had bought into that vision.

Within a year, we had sold the house, the truck, the bass boat, our artwork, some of the furniture, and even the dog. We had earned good salaries and spent more than we should have, so selling it all meant we left Anniston out of debt, with a reserve in the bank, for an apartment in a housing complex in inner-city Atlanta. I put my diamond ring (which wasn't even that big) in storage and wore a plain band, because the goal was to keep a low profile, which is kind of funny when you think about it. We were one of maybe two white families in the neighborhood, and we walked in with blond-haired, blue-eyed three-year-old twins. A lot of our family thought we had completely lost our minds. But there was no doubting that this was what we were supposed to do, and that kind of confirmation is a rare thing to have.

For five years we served as inner-city missionaries with City of Refuge. We were there when the building it uses now was donated, back when it was grungy and full of rats and robbers. We took food to people who lived under the bridges and helped them find a place in rehab, we worked with troubled teenagers and undocumented families, and our apartment became a safe place for the children of the housing project. That is where our hearts were birthed for the least of these, as Bobby puts it. During those years he drove up to seminary in Cleveland, Tennessee, and earned his Master of Divinity in missions.

Following the Open Door

We knew we were headed overseas, and we had looked at opportunities in Kenya and Jamaica that never quite fit. Then one day Bobby was on the phone with Rick Waldrop, who had been his professor and mentor at seminary, and Rick mentioned the Church of God seminary in Quito, Ecuador, called SEMISUD, which trains pastors and missionaries for all of South America. I could only hear Bobby's side of the conversation, and within five minutes I was asking where we sign.

Before we moved, we made a scouting trip. We did not know any Spanish yet, but we sat in the chapel service at the seminary while Dr. Munguia preached. There was a powerful response from the students, a special time of ministry, and I felt a heart connection, as if I were understanding what he was trying to say, when I could not follow the words. It touched me deeply, and I took it as one more confirmation of our call.

We were appointed as missionaries to Ecuador in May 2007, and the whole family moved to Quito in January 2008. Bobby taught at the seminary. I expected to help the local churches rather than start anything of my own. In many of them, children's church was mainly a babysitting service, so I started where I always start, with the children's teachers, giving them simple tools and ideas for teaching the Word of God to the children in front of them. One thing grew into another while we learned Spanish and learned Ecuador. One of the first friends we made was Dr. Juan Francisco, a doctor who spoke English while our Spanish was still a struggle. We had no idea what his family would come to mean to this work.

The Hill

A friend told us about a huge piece of land outside Quito with houses already on it, for sale really cheap. It had been an orphanage, and it had closed when its government funding stopped. Bobby wanted me to come look at it, and I told him we had plenty to do and did not need another project. On January 23, 2012, he dragged me up there anyway. We had no appointment, so we drove around the neighborhood, then up the hill, got out of the car, and stood looking down over the community and the campus below us.

That was when the God moment happened. I could immediately see children running and playing on the green grass of that property, before a single one of them was there. Bobby saw a community with no evangelical church at all, and a place ten minutes from the seminary where his students could practice what they were learning in the classroom, like a laboratory. He thought he was going to have to convince me, but God had already done the work.

The neighborhood sat at the far end of the bus route, where families came from the countryside because rent was cheap and Quito's jobs were within reach. Many of the children were not getting enough to eat or clean water to drink, and the only school was a two-room schoolhouse, so a lot of children simply stayed home. At least one family we know of, leaving for work with no one to watch a toddler, tied a rope around the child's ankle and the other end to the leg of the table. It was a desperate way to keep a child safe, not neglect or cruelty, and it broke our hearts.

We knew we were supposed to buy it. We did not know how in the world we were going to. The price was $150,000, which was cheap (our realtor said comparable land in the area was going for about $350,000), but cheap is a different thing when you don't have any money. Bobby had never asked anyone for $150,000. He had never asked for $15,000, or even $1,500. We called Dan Moore, the pastor of Living Waters Christian Fellowship in Southern California, a church we had met while Bobby was studying at Fuller and that had a heart for Ecuador, and we told him about the opportunity and what we felt God was saying. Dan said, "I think we can do that." His church forwarded the money before the funds were even raised.

Four months after that morning on the hill, the property was ours, and we held our first outreach for the children of the neighborhood. We named it Agua Viva, Living Water. It was where our two passions finally met: my love of children's ministry and Bobby's of training ministers.

When it was time to start Agua Viva, Rick and Jan Waldrop were the mentors we wanted beside us. Rick was the professor whose phone call had brought us to Ecuador, and decades earlier he and Jan had founded a children's home in Guatemala. They came to live on the campus with us for about two years. Jan, a retired teacher from Tennessee, ran Sunday mornings with a handful of seminary students and gathered the women of the neighborhood twice a month for cooking classes, exercise, and art projects, while Rick kept traveling and teaching at the seminary.

That first year we did not take children under five, because we had no one to care for them. A girl named Evelyn, seven or eight years old, started coming in the afternoons by herself, before we knew that most days she had to look after her two-year-old brother. On those days she would come at Kids Club time and sit outside the gate with her back against the fence, close enough to hear the other children and the laughter, participating vicariously, I guess. She could not come in because of him. Obviously that was not going to work, so we figured out a way to begin caring for preschoolers.

That first year was also when I had my own crisis of faith. We would bring the children in, have a big party, tell them God loves them and everything is going to be okay, and then they went home to whatever was waiting there, and some of what was waiting was not okay. I asked God what I was even doing here, and whether I was making any difference at all. What God showed me was that we would be changing a generation. It would be slow, but it would make a difference in each of their lives, and their futures would look different for their children.

The early days were not glamorous. The houses had flat roofs that held water, and Bobby spent a good many afternoons up there sweeping leaves out of the drains so the rain would not pour into the classrooms. One day, in a bad mood and asking himself why a seminary professor was scooping trash off a roof, he looked over the wall and saw a little girl from Kids Club in her front yard, doing the motions to that afternoon's song by herself. He says that is when he knew the work would reach past the children to their families.

500 Cupcakes

That December we hosted our second Give Christmas, and our first at Agua Viva, with three groups of children from other foundations coming to celebrate with ours, about 500 children in all. As always, I had a grand idea. I wanted every child to have a real US-style cupcake with thick frosting, something they do not often get in Ecuador, and I had seen a Facebook post from Sophie Moncayo, Juan Francisco's wife, about her cake and cupcake business. I did not know her well, and I was trying to build a relationship with someone in a language I was not yet comfortable in, but we struggled through. She said, "Sure, how many do you need?" I said 500. I don't think she was expecting that number, but in typical Sophie fashion she said, "No problem." She made all of them for $200, giving up her own margin because she loved the kids.

She showed up at Agua Viva for the first time with a carload of 500 beautiful cupcakes, and she was blown away. When you walk onto that campus, there is green grass, children running on the playground, the mountains ahead of you, and the blue sky that only Ecuador has every day. Then I realized that many of our kids had never had a pizza, so I thought, what if we had a cooking class and made pizzas? Sophie to the rescue again. That became the pattern of our friendship: crazy tasks that seem unrealistic until they end up helping people.

She kept showing up, volunteering more, hanging out more, until she was simply part of it. Sophie is a chef, and over the next years she planned the meals, organized the teachers, and stood beside me as a director of Agua Viva. Eventually we convinced her to come work for us at a ridiculous salary, because we could not pay her much, and she did it out of passion more than anything. There has never been a day when Sophie does not smile.

The Night They Came to the Gate

We started Kids Club, our after-school program, right away, and 30 or 40 children came every afternoon. Then, all of a sudden, attendance dropped by half, and we did not have a clue what was going on. When we finally asked around, we found out that the principal of the local school was taking points off children's grades if they came to us, and that he and the Catholic priest were telling every parent in the neighborhood not to let their children go there, because we were going to brainwash them. To understand this, you have to know that there is a long history of conflict in Ecuador between Catholics and evangelicals, and we had walked straight into it. Our philosophy was to be the hands and feet of Jesus, keep doing what we could with whoever showed up, and let them see our faithfulness.

It got worse before it got better. It happened over several weeks, and I am telling the short version. A teenage girl in the neighborhood went through something terrible that had nothing to do with us, and some of the parents decided we were to blame. They sent word that they wanted to talk to the pastor. Bobby is always ready to talk, so he said yes. He did not understand the way they wanted to talk. That night, 20 or 25 family members came marching down the street to our gate with machetes, axes, a tire, and diesel fuel. In that neighborhood, community justice meant putting a tire around a man in the middle of the street, filling it with diesel, and setting it on fire. "I was the one they said they wanted to burn," Bobby says. That was a bad day to be a missionary.

I was at home with our kids. Bobby met them at the gate with Jan Waldrop; her husband, Rick, was out of the country that week.

The crowd got louder and angrier, and then two families stood up. One was the father of three boys in our program. He had not wanted his sons to come either, for all the same reasons, until they begged him. "I'm not going to let you run them out of here," he said. "I've seen a change in my sons. Their behavior is improving. I didn't want them to come here either, but I can't deny that what they're doing is good." A couple of other people stood up and said the same kind of thing: that this place was a blessing to the community, that their children were more polite and doing better in school. The crowd calmed down and went home. We paid for the girl's care, and it soon became clear to everyone that we had never been the cause. But the principal still did not like us, even after we brought a team and painted his school.

One of the loud voices in those weeks belonged to a woman who runs the store on the corner, where everybody goes. Her child started coming to Kids Club, we put a water filter in her home, and she became one of the leaders of our women's ministry. Today she tells every new family that moves in to send their children to Agua Viva. Several of the women from those years now volunteer in our kitchen and cook lunch for the children.

The neighborhood changed slowly, one family at a time, and much of that trust came through Ecuadorian leaders: Sophie, who had been with us since that first December, and the local leaders working beside her, who earned a trust that we as foreign missionaries could not earn on our own. Armando, a carpenter from down the road, was known in the neighborhood for drinking, and for what that drinking did to his family. Jan hired him to build the kitchen cabinets for the house she and Rick would live in, and Jan is not a person who slows down. She talked with him every day he was there, and he began asking questions about this Christ she followed so passionately. He gave his life to Christ, and the free time he used to spend drinking he now spends studying the Bible. He is a carpenter by day and an evangelist by night, and when we started our first water project in that community, he went home to home with us as a chaplain to the families.

In 2015 our family had to go back to the United States for a while, and it was Sophie who stepped in and made things run. I was destroyed at leaving my baby, Agua Viva, which was on its way to being a real community effort, and I had no choice but to let go of the reins. Guess what? It became much better and different than I would have done it. We had to trust them, and they made us better. Sophie, to me, is a founder just like us.

When the Ground Shook

On April 16, 2016, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake hit Ecuador's coast. More than 670 people died, thousands were injured, and over 30,000 lost their homes. Church of God World Missions was there within hours, and our team helped deliver food, water, and supplies, and installed water filters in churches so they could serve their neighbors.

Once the basic needs were being met, we started asking what could be done for the children. I reached out to Dr. Heather Quagliana, a psychology professor at Lee University, for advice on helping children heal from trauma, and she put her whole department behind it. She and her husband, Dr. David Quagliana, gathered a team and wrote a manual in a matter of weeks. Four weeks after the earthquake, the Lee team was on the ground with us and with our seminary students, who were studying holistic child development through Lee's program at the seminary, which Bobby directed.

It was tough work, especially those first two weeks. People were still living in makeshift refuges. Everywhere we drove there were crumbled buildings with bodies still inside, and a stench over the city. When it was time to hand out the food bags we had prepared, people were in such a frenzy, out of scarcity and necessity, that I got smashed up against a wall by people begging for more, for this person and for that person. Everyone's story was terrifying, and they told it to me so I could translate it for Heather, expecting some miracle fix to come back, when we had no words to say other than "we love you and we're here with you." We had come to teach coping skills, but in the face of that much loss, to be looked at as the one with the answers is very moving. The aftershocks went on for months, strong enough to feel at our house in Quito. One night, with Bobby and the rest of the team on the coast, we had to sit outside for an hour in case the house came down, so I took out a blanket and told our five-year-old we were going to look at the stars, and he thought it was an adventure.

Together we were a team of 25 people from seven countries. On Saturdays we trained the pastors and Sunday school teachers of eleven churches in the hardest-hit area, and on Sundays we led programs for the children in those churches. We also helped the teachers of a Christian school with 250 children, who had been told to spend their first six weeks back on nothing but the trauma. We delivered 2,000 trauma care packages, and by the end of the year at least 3,000 children had received trauma care. That was when I saw how the psychological practices Heather taught could make a practical difference for a child who was hurting, side by side with what I had always called children's ministry. A light clicked on in my head. Heather later joined our board.

Born in the Field

I had already gone back to school through Lee University's online undergraduate program, eighteen years after I first left, so I finished my bachelor's degree and enrolled in the Master of Science in Holistic Child Development at Lee. We had no idea how much what we learned would change the way we do ministry, but it changed everything. I had been in children's ministry my whole life, and I had to learn a whole new method. Keren Cortes went through the master's program too and learned the method with me. Sophie learned it alongside us and brought her own contributions, and together we grew from an after-school program into a trauma-informed holistic care ministry. My thesis was on using the Bible in trauma healing for children, and every week I tried what I was reading with the children at Agua Viva. A note I wrote at a conference in 2016 still sums up the lesson: teachers, don't be so busy with your lesson book that you ignore the child who wants to talk about her dead puppy. That conversation is the most important.

What came out of those years is the THRIVE Model™, which is trauma-informed care applied to the whole child, across four connected domains: Physical, Mental, Relational, and Spiritual. It grew through daily practice with real children and families at Agua Viva, and it was shaped in partnership with Lee University's Holistic Child Development program.

Today Sophie leads our programs. More than 80 seminary interns have trained at Agua Viva and taken the model home with them. We have trained 471 churches, nonprofits, schools, ministries, and leaders to use it where they live. On a weekday afternoon at Agua Viva, about 130 children come in from the neighborhood for a meal, help with school, and adults who know their names. Some of the women cooking their lunch are the same neighbors who once wanted us gone.