The Children Are at the Other Side

How one sentence, spoken by an eight-year-old at a stoplight in Quito, changed a father's ministry — and, years later, ours.

In Quito, like in many cities across Latin America, children work the traffic. They slip between the stopped cars at busy intersections, tapping on windows, selling candy and small bags of fruit for a few coins. Drivers learn not to look. It's easier that way — you keep your eyes on the light and wait for green.

One evening years ago, Dr. David Ramírez was one of those drivers. A group of children came toward his car, and — tired, at the end of a long day — he turned his head to the side so they'd think he hadn't seen them. What he hadn't noticed was his eight-year-old son, Fernando, watching him from the passenger seat.

Then Fernando said the one thing his father was trying not to hear:

"Father, the children are at the other side."

They were. On the other side of the glass, close enough to touch, and easy to drive past. That one sentence did what no sermon had managed to do. It made his father look.

A poverty of not being seen

There's a particular kind of poverty in not being seen. A child who works a traffic light learns early that she is scenery — part of the street, not a person on it. Being seen is the opposite of that. It means someone has recognized you as a whole person, with a name and a future, worth stopping for. The cause Dr. Ramírez would give much of his attention to says it plainly: vulnerable children are not problems to be managed or objects of charity. They are people to be known — and even co-workers in what God is doing. The work isn't only something done for children. It's something done with them.

Dr. Ramírez already had the language for it from Scripture. He often points to Hagar, alone and desperate in the desert, who called God "the one who sees me" — and he adds that God saw her future when all she could see was survival. That is what being seen means: someone looks at a child stuck in the hardest chapter of her life and recognizes the whole story God still means to tell.

A program that outlasted the moment

He couldn't unsee the children at his window. That sentence became a question he couldn't put down, and it reshaped his ministry. He studied how children grow up at risk — hundreds of millions of them around the world — and he championed the 4/14 window: the understanding that the years between ages four and fourteen are when a person's faith and character take root, so that is where care has to reach them. He lent his voice to a wider, global effort to put vulnerable children at the center of the church's attention.

Out of that conviction came something that outlasted the moment. Dr. Ramírez helped build a Holistic Child Development master's program at SEMISUD, the seminary he had founded in Quito — training grounded in how deeply the hardships of childhood shape a child's future, and how the right care can change it. The program proved effective enough that Lee University, in the United States, asked to carry it back and have it fully accredited. For roughly a decade it has trained leaders — hundreds of them — who went on to run orphanages and child-serving ministries across Latin America.

"It's hard to think of something that impacts at-risk children around the world more than that program," says Bobby Lynch, M:25's co-founder — describing students who left with new tools to go back and help children thrive.

Tending the whole child

That program did something else, too. It changed the way Bobby and Tamitha Lynch do ministry. The trauma-informed training, as Tamitha describes it, transformed her whole idea of what caring for vulnerable children should look like — moving away from treating care as fixing a problem and toward tending the whole child: physical, mental, relational, and spiritual. It's an approach that doesn't pretend the hard thing never happened, but hands a child real tools to rebuild.

Tamitha puts one part of the discovery simply: much of what psychologists now recommend for healing, she says, is already in the Bible. Take Joseph — sold into slavery by his own brothers. He doesn't bury what they did to him; he faces it, grieves it, and years later is able to look them in the eye, forgive them, and even find meaning in it: "you meant this for evil, but God meant it for good." Naming the pain, releasing the resentment, making sense of the wound — that's the same path a good counselor would walk a hurting child down today. Faith and the work of healing were never at odds. They fit.

"Our first goal is to be a safe place," Tamitha says of the children in M:25's care. "We want them to feel loved, to feel seen." Seen, Safe, Loved.

Kept in sight, year after year

Today, that way of caring shapes daily life at Agua Viva, M:25's campus outside Quito, and it travels outward through the churches and leaders who carry it home — across Latin America, and, through trainings in places like Chiang Rai, Thailand, into Asia. The proof shows up over years, not weeks. In the community M:25 has walked alongside for two decades, children who not long ago were becoming parents before they'd finished being children are now finishing school and going on to university. That is what happens when a child is seen — and kept in sight, year after year — through local pastors, caregivers, and families who refuse to look away.

What one sentence multiplied into

Dr. Ramírez was no newcomer to ministry when it happened — he was already a pastor, and had founded a seminary in Quito. It still took his eight-year-old son to make him see the children right in front of him. Decades later, that one sentence has multiplied into a training program, a generation of leaders, and a campus full of children learning that they are known, safe, and loved.

And there's a fitting turn to it. Dr. Ramírez — who began working alongside Bobby and Tamitha Lynch soon after they arrived in Ecuador, mentored and supervised them for years, and today serves as Assistant Director of Church of God World Missions — recently visited their campus in Quito to see for himself what has grown up since.

The children are still at the other side of the glass. But because one father finally looked, more of them are being seen.