I feel so fulfilled today.  The beautiful library.  This spot for the new school.  Oma Bell here close.  Our whole family.  400 of you here to join us today. Angela reminding me of 800 courageous young people, our graduates, taking their turn now in the world, breaking cycles of abuse and abandonment as they build their own families and careers. 

I think God leads us here each year, to this special place, to refresh our calling even as we mark our progress.  And this is what I hear in this place today: that we are called together to serve a mighty purpose, to love the wounded and the lost, and to hold hope brightly, like a torch, in a dark world.

It is easier to do almost anything than to love like this.  To love those filled with pain.  Even harder for the children.  To turn from disappointment and rejection and to try love anyway.  To believe again.  Only a patient listening can grasp an opening.  Waiting for just the right moment, to perform what may seem at the time an insignificant act, to open a door, to lay a foundation. 

Our Graduates, who’ve been out in the world for a time, tell me over and over how powerful it was to meet the people at the Ranch who cared for them.  Even though they might not have let it show at the time, they had an experience that lifted them up.  Many say they felt safe and loved for the first time, an experience that would later buffer them in times of hardship.

It’s always been clear that we can only help so many. There are over 12,000 Texas children living in out-of-home care.  Oma Bell’s gift in 1996 gave us the chance to help more, but what a huge challenge.  Of course, that’s how it happens.  I need to tell you that my journey over these past 25 years is one of seeing God do what looked to me to be impossible things, bringing together the right people at the right time, weaving us together to serve His purpose.

Five years ago, many of you stood together with me on a piece of ground just across the river, where the Davenport Homestead now stands, with no structures here except Oma Bell’s ranching headquarters about a mile up river.  I said to you then, as I had said already to Oma Bell, “We have a huge task.  Many will have to come to help if this is to happen.”

After all the evidence of grace, I still have feet of clay.  This year marked the launch of our biggest development plan ever.  To double the size of this village in 12 months, add a school, two homesteads, two grandparents cottages, an administration building, recreation facilities.  After September 11, and with people talking recession by Christmas, we stood last winter looking at another impossible challenge.   And this one had a time component.  Dr. Givens had gotten us a state Charter to fund the school’s operation, but there were conditions, like growing to 50 students in five years.  We couldn’t hire the teachers without the students, and we couldn’t bring in the students without the houses, and we couldn’t put teachers to work without the new school.  As we got to February, I confess to wondering if God had turned the spigot off, and maybe the giant step forward to a viable community of teachers and caregivers and children was simply not going to happen in the time allotted.

I was talking about this with Trudy Brune on Wednesday, and she reminded me that God gives us visions of what is not, and cannot be, so that we might witness His making it so.  Hebrews 11:1 asks, “What is faith?” and answers, “It is the certainty that what we hope for is waiting for us, even though we cannot see it up ahead.”

What I’ve learned is to stay at work, doing the next thing in front of me, especially when I can’t see what God’s up to.  So it was toward the end of March. Full of concerns about the year ahead, we were doing our work, but the pressure was mounting.  My inner conversation went something like, “If we don’t get started real soon with this new development phase, it cannot possibly all come together in time, and if it doesn’t, we could lose our Charter, and we can’t move a support team out there to Leakey, and the houseparents are having to do too much without a support team.” . . . I was really worried, pacing the floor at night.

So after working in my Ingram office one morning in March, I’m getting up to do my “management by walking around” tour of the Ranch just before lunch.  Joyce, our receptionist, turns to me and says, “there’s an Ed Brune on the phone for you.”  Well, an Ed Brown had called a month or so earlier, selling discount lightbulbs from a warehouse in California.  “Ed Brune?”  I was on the verge of telling Joyce that I was already headed out, when I hesitated for a moment, felt a check on my impulse, and heard myself say, “Put him through.”  The way Ed and Trudy got through the maze of meeting us to become a part of this family is a story that says, “When God wants to put people together to accomplish a thing, He’ll do it if we’ll just let Him.”  What we needed most, the funding to take us to the next level, has come to us through this down-to-earth couple who love shopping in thrift stores.  What I thought was the Ed Brown call was about a light bulb all right.  A cosmic one.  The truth is, God is working even now in this family on this day to join us into a stronger whole, to stand together, capable of greater things than we had ever imagined, or could ever accomplish, by ourselves.

A thread is virtually nothing, breaks with a pull, but with a rope you can climb mountains.  I love the Phil Jackson commercial.  Have you seen it?  Phil Jackson, coach of the Chicago Bulls during Michael Jordans’ reign, turns to a couple as driver of a taxi cab, and says, “Sacrifice the me for the we, and this will all work out.”

That’s what our Master did, isn’t it?  He sacrificed the me for the we, and taught us the way.  He taught us to become, collectively, His body.  That is what He wants of us, and how He accomplishes his work. 

There’s a line in a Sara Hickman song which goes, “We are each other’s angels, and we meet when it is time.”  I believe we have always been headed to this very meeting on this very day at this very spot to fulfill a purpose we’ve always shared.