A Most-Valued Experience
Stephanie with her family today
Before Stephanie and her two youngest children came to live at our Gardendale Family Care home, they had been going from house to house, sleeping on couches and in the spare bedrooms of strangers. Stephanie explains, “My husband and I were divorced at the time, and I had custody of our two children. The children and I were homeless, and I was actually in cosmetology school.” She knew this wasn’t the safe, stable environment her children needed.
Stephanie found our Family Care ministry through a Google search and completed the application online. “Once I received a call back, I had actually forgotten about the location and application process but was so excited that God had not. I was finally able to be at ease with where my children would sleep at night and not worry about whose couch would be available and if we would be safe anymore,” she shares.
The Family Care program allowed Stephanie to prioritize her time and finances to eventually be independent. She says it, “…allowed me to stop and rethink a lot of things in myself that needed to be changed…” In a statement of gratitude, she explains that she would not have been able to make these changes without house manager Valencia Pritchett’s support.
Stephanie says she is especially thankful for how smooth the transition into living at the Family Care house was. “It was such an ease on me to be there, that I know I would not be where I am now without the time she [Valencia] put into me,” she explains. She further expressed her gratitude for the positive structure, love, and stable home life she experienced during her time at Family Care.
In addition to having a safe, stable environment for her and her children to live, Stephanie is also thankful for the “selfless” generosity of our donors. One of her favorite experiences from her time at Family Care was being able to see the joy on her son’s face when he opened his Christmas present that year.
“I was able to write down things they [her children] were interested in or wanted to be interested in, and someone was selfless enough to make their dreams come true. That particular year, my son, who was around five or six, had asked to learn French. And that Christmas Day, he was able to open a box of CDs that would teach him that language. You would have thought he won the lottery that day,” she exclaims.
Today, Stephanie is remarried to the father of her two youngest children, and they live a “Christ-centered” life while homeschooling their 12 and 11-year-olds. She maintains that the most valuable lesson she learned while in Family Care was the need for structure and organization, not only for her children, but for herself.
But when asked what her most valuable experience was during her time at Family Care, she answers, “The most valuable thing I experienced was the love of Christ through Ms. Valencia and the other ladies that I met from the program.”
When you give to the Children’s Home, you give stability and structure to children who have often moved from room-to-room. You give a struggling mother the chance to experience the love of Christ, sometimes for the first time in her life. You make dreams come true on Christmas Day and beyond.
If the Lord has laid it on your heart to provide experiences like these to more children and families or you’d like to learn more about Family Care, please visit us here.