The painful stories behind our calling—and the emotional cost of doing what’s right.

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Welcome back! The past two weeks have been fairly quiet. That doesn’t mean nothing has been accomplished or that nothing meaningful has happened. It just means the work has been steady, routine, and a bit uneventful.

I wrote an entire blog but decided not to release it. It was about the sexual abuse committed by a former missionary and the heartbreaking way the organization responded, which ultimately led us to leave our former ministry and start Shiloh Children. Even now, two years later, we are still feeling the impact. The mental and emotional toll continues to affect our home and our work. I’ve set the blog aside for now, but if you’re interested in reading it, let me know in the comments. I might consider sharing it privately or posting it. I’m still not sure what the right thing to do is.

Nevertheless, I’ve been working tirelessly on IEPs (Individualized Education Plans) for all of our kids who need them, and it has truly become a full-time job. Each IEP is 20 to 30 pages long, filled with diagnoses, educational plans, learning supports, strategies, and goals. It’s a huge undertaking, but I’ve been facing it head-on all week.

Shifting back to the difficult topic of abuse, I’ve been carrying the weight of the decisions we’ve made. And when I say we, I really mean me. Once again, I find myself facing a painful situation. Before I share what happened, I think it’s important to walk you through my thought process, the mental struggles I’ve been dealing with, and the shift that has been taking place in my overall mindset.

I think part of the struggle for me is that I don’t fully understand the mindset behind sexual abuse. In my mind, intimacy should be based on mutual consent. I can’t grasp how anyone could find pleasure in something that isn’t shared or wanted by both people. As a married person, I understand that sometimes one partner may be more interested than the other, but that is very different from someone ignoring the other person’s lack of willingness and continuing anyway, even to the point of using force. That idea is something I just can’t comprehend and cannot see how you would gain satisfaction from it.

Eight years ago, I was baptized into this harsh reality while working in a slum in Bangkok. We were helping a fully handicapped, nonverbal girl who we brought every day to our afterschool program, and I found out she was on birth control. When I asked why, everyone told me that without it, she would have already been pregnant many times. I felt sick to my stomach. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. That moment opened my eyes to the fact that, for some people, there is no such thing as going too far.

Then I met another woman in the same slum who had a fully disabled, nonverbal daughter. Her daughter was around forty years old, and the mother was in her sixties. She could never leave her house. We had tried to take the mother to the doctor for the health issues she was dealing with, but she always refused. As I gently asked more questions and tried to understand, she finally said, “I can’t leave. If I leave, they will have sex with my daughter.” I felt sick. I immediately began praying for both of them, asking God to protect them. There was nothing else I could do. I was not safe in that slum myself, and I saw things there that I have never seen anywhere else and never want to see again.

Again, in the same slum, I met my daughter Preaw. I had already met the man she called her father, and at the time, I thought he was a good guy. He was easy to talk to, seemed kind, and appeared to be one of the better people in the community. Years later, I was devastated to learn that he had been abusing Preaw in every way imaginable. I was overwhelmed with rage. I wanted justice. I wanted to go back to the slum and find him, like I was living out a scene from Dexter. We tried to have him arrested, but the cultural pressures were too strong. Preaw believed he had done what he did to protect her, and that belief kept her from pressing charges. Eventually, we also learned that he had abused other girls in the slum, girls we knew and cared about, little girls.

The rage is still there.

The women and girls we have worked with since then, almost all of them, have experienced abuse at the hands of someone close to them, including their own biological fathers and pastors. The calling God has placed on my life is to protect these vulnerable girls.

One of the final turning points came when the leader of the ministry we left sent me an email. In it, he wrote, “I don’t trust the spirit that takes over you. I know you want to protect kids, but you ultimately can’t. If you’re that passionate about protecting kids, why don’t you go to where they’re really abusing them or selling them.”

That message made it painfully clear that we were not walking in the same direction. Our goal was to protect children. That email, along with all the conversations we had leading up to it while trying to address the abuse one of their missionaries had committed against young girls, revealed something deeply troubling. We realized that their goal, whether they understood it or not, was to protect the abusers who happened to be missionaries, not the children he had abused.

As it says in Amos chapter three verse three, can two walk together except they be agreed. We knew then it was time to take a different path.

That was another deeply shattering realization. This missionary, someone I had known and trusted, had been secretly abusing girls. Even more disturbing, the organization had known for years and chose to do nothing except defend him. How does that happen? How does a Christian organization allow this to go on without consequences? How is it possible for the abuse to continue while the missionary remains in his position?

How could the other missionaries, people I had respected and looked to as pillars of faith, make excuses for the perpetrator? How could they show so little concern for the girls he abused? How does something so serious remain hidden, with no one willing to speak up or confront it?

Walking with the kids on a dreary day.

It left me questioning everything. Had my decision to join this ministry and promote it contributed to the abuse? Had I unknowingly helped create space for it to continue? If I stay will it happen more? We had to leave and cut ties with everyone who knew and did nothing about it.

Since then we have taken in many more girls who have been abused by their own fathers, pastors and family.

Recently, after I thought I had come to a place of peace with all of this, I was confronted with another harsh reality. Thailand is filled with unfaithfulness. Thai people are among the most unfaithful in marriage in the world. It took me thirteen years to realize that many of the people around me were cheating. Thais, westerners, and even missionaries. Not everyone, but more people than I ever expected. I was shocked, and it led to a strange and overwhelming mental spiral. I struggled to process what I was seeing and what it meant for everything I thought I understood.

In the middle of this breakdown we made a bad decision. We allowed one of our daughters to go back to her family. She had gone back many times and had no problem, we knew the family, we knew the mom and she said everything was good for her to come home. But this time it seems to have been different.

When she came back, she wasn’t the same. She went from being bubbly and happy all the time to withdrawn and distant. She used to spend her days coloring, singing, and dancing. Now she stares at walls, stays quiet, and urinates constantly. Something is clearly wrong, and now we have to find out what happened. We took her to the doctor, spoke with our social worker, and are now looking for a forensic investigator. Everything is pointing to the heartbreaking possibility that she was abused by her biological father.

Now all of this is horrible! Every situation I have told you about is horrible.

Now I am having a mental breakdown. I can’t trust their parents, I can’t trust pastors, I can’t trust missionaries, I can’t trust anyone! If I mess up and trust someone, someone gets hurt.

crabs, rice field, winner, thailand, chiang mai, san sai — *Crabby patties from the rice field*

I have always been the kind of person who trusts anyone and everyone until they give me a reason not to. But I can’t think that way anymore, because when I do, people get hurt. Do I feel guilt? Yes. I carry a heavy weight of guilt for trusting people I should not have, and others have suffered because of it.

Now the way I have lived my whole life has to change. The way I have operated, the way I have approached people, all of it needs to shift. The trust I once gave so freely can no longer be given without caution. I need to stay away from situations where I am required to trust others. I need to keep my kids out of the care of other people. I need to avoid any circumstance where their safety or well-being depends on someone else. Not even the people who are supposed to be upright members of society.

This might sound like a small thing, but it is causing a lot of turmoil in my mind. How do you live without trusting people? How do you turn away those who genuinely want to help? How do you protect your kids in situations like youth groups and church, where trust is expected? What does it really mean to trust God with the protection of your children? And how do I let go of the guilt that comes from making a wrong judgment? These questions have been weighing heavily on me, and I don’t have easy answers. I just know that I am wrestling with all of it, every single day.

A million things run through my mind, and it feels like you don’t have to be in jail to be doing time. It feels like I am a prisoner of my own thoughts, locked inside a cycle of doubt and questions that I can't escape. I keep knocking myself down, second-guessing every decision, every moment of trust I’ve given. I want peace, but it feels like I need answers before I can find it. I long to walk in freedom, not fear. I want to lead my family from a place of clarity, not confusion. Please join me in prayer as I seek the wisdom to know when to trust and when to hold back. Pray that I will grow in discernment and find the strength to protect those I love without losing the tenderness and compassion God has given me.

This is just a glimpse into my mind and the struggles and responsibility that I am sometimes overwhelmed by.

Ninja turtles in the temple — *Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles at the temple by our house*

Choosing the Children

Three Little Birds and One Big Prayer