Before we built a ranch, we built a bigger family.
Three boys and a girl sleep in our house tonight. Six years ago, none of them were ours. The Ranch we are building is for the ones still without a family like ours.
It started at a kitchen table.
Heath and I had been married for six months. We were reading Scripture in our own corners of the morning, separately. Neither of us had said anything to the other about where our reading had been taking us. We had not had to. We had landed in the same place.
"Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation." Psalm 68:5.
The conversation lasted one sitting. By the time the coffee was cold, two things were true. We were going to adopt every child we could get our hands on. And we were going to build Bethesda Ranch for the ones we could not.
We moved to Texas, and we did not wait for the Ranch.
We were living in Southern California. Beautiful, expensive, and the wrong place to build what we had just said we were going to build. We came home to Texas because the need was overwhelming, the land was actually affordable, and the state had a working relationship with the kind of institution we wanted to build.
The Ranch was going to take years. The fatherless were not. We had told the Lord we were in. So that fall we started the adoption process. If we could not yet build the institution, we could be the institution. One house. Our address. The lights on. The table set. Whatever children came, the door was open.
What we learned in our own home.
Over the next three years, our home became the classroom. The first teenagers who came to us had been living in a motel under Texas's "Children Without Placement" system, sleeping on roll-out beds in CPS field offices. The four siblings who came next, and who we adopted, had been through everything together. We sat through court. We sat through silence. We watched what saved them.
It was simple. It was hard. It was a man in the room, every day. A woman in the room, every day. A table that did not move. A faith that did not flinch. Real food. Real consequence. Real love. Adults who stayed.
We are not waiting until we have the language of foster reform to tell these stories. We are writing them down. The first ones are below.
When they belonged to us, we asked them what they wanted to be called.
Three boys and a girl. They chose their own names. The four names they chose are not coincidence. They are a sermon.
Seth.
Appointed
Ezekiel.
God strengthens
Malachi.
My messenger
Noel.
A new birth
The vision we said yes to in 2021 is the work we are doing now.
For three years, we asked the Lord to keep showing us. We raised the four. We watched, day by day, what kept saving them. We took notes. We know now, because we have lived it, what it takes to raise four children out of the worst that Texas can do to a kid. We know what it would take to do this for hundreds.
The plan that has been in our pocket since 2021 is no longer in our pocket. Fundraising has started. Land is being searched. The Legacy Club, the funding engine that will keep the Ranch running without depending on a fundraising season ever again, is being built alongside it.
Help us build the room for the rest.
Seth, Ezekiel, Malachi, and Noel have us. The Ranch is for the boys whose mothers turned away at the counter, who are sleeping in motel rooms tonight, who will, with God's help, one day stand in a courtroom and tell the truth.
