I can give you a short version, however. It all began with a photo: a photo of a little girl on a website dedicated to finding adoptive families for orphaned children. I knew she was mine, but I had no idea where she was. So began our quest to find her.
Countless phone calls and internet research led me to an orphanage in Sierra Leone. We had made it through court! We celebrated, thanked God for our breakthrough. Three days later, the embassy called saying all of our paperwork was fraudulent. We had been scammed. They told us to grieve and find a new country to adopt from. At this point, there was no way I was about to walk away from this beautiful little girl a world away. We pulled up our boot straps and entered the fight of our lives.
After multiple trips to Sierra Leone and 13 trips to court, on December 12th, Two years went by. Everyday I watched my daughter blossom and grow and was haunted by the images of the thousands of children we left behind.
We tried hard to move on with our lives. We knew we were called to do more. It was time to step it up. In our family started The Raining Season: a nonprofit organization whose focus would primarily be protecting the family unit, in order to help control the number of children abandoned. We took our first mission team during Christmas of That trip uncovered the ugly face of child exploitation.
We visited an orphanage home where the conditions were deplorable, where the children were abused and neglected, many starving. We came home broken trying to decide what to do next. We knew we were being called to something more… something extreme. In we opened The Covering, an orphan care center focused on serving the broken and the orphaned Protecting the exploited, orphaned child is messy work. The journey is dark and winding. We knew we were up against so much.
