Lon Graham, Vice President
My earliest years were spent in the piney woods of East Texas. I grew up surrounded by mature, tall trees, with their branches and leaves providing shade for my backyard. But these trees did not aways look the way they do now. They were first seeds and then tiny saplings. For a season, they would have simply stood with little to no dramatic growth or obvious signs of life beyond the fact that it had not given up.
What these trees were doing, invisibly and quietly, was something far more important than growing branches: they were growing roots.
That is what a safe place does. It grows roots.
Scripture repeatedly uses the imagery of rootedness, and for good reason. In Jeremiah 17:7-8, the person who trusts in God is described as a tree planted beside the water, one that sends its roots deep into rich soil: unbothered by heat, unafraid of drought, bearing fruit even in seasons that would wither everything else. The Psalmist returns to the same picture in Psalm 1.
And woven through it all is a portrait of God Himself as a refuge: a fortress, a shelter, a place where those who trust in Him can be safe, experience peace, and grow roots.
This is not incidental to who God is. It is central. He is, by nature, a maker of safe places.
Here at NMBCH, we believe we are called to be an expression of exactly that.
The children who come to us are not defined by what they have been through. They arrive as individuals; each one curious, capable, and made in the image of God, even if that truth is sometimes buried under layers of uncertainty. A child who has never quite known what to expect from the world around them learns, over time, to spend their energy preparing for the worst rather than reaching toward what is possible. It is a reasonable response to an unpredictable world. But it is costly. and it is not the life God intended for them.
When a child finds a safe place where the rhythm is steady, care is consistent, and they are genuinely known and loved, something begins to shift. It does not happen all at once or with dramatic flourish. Roots do not grow that way.
Slowly, however, the energy that was once spent on vigilance gets quietly redirected. It goes down, into the soil. It anchors. And once a child is anchored, everything can change.
We start to see it in small ways first: a little more laughter, a little more willingness to try something hard. Gradually, we begin to see something more: a child stepping confidently into their gifts, dreaming out loud, and becoming more fully who God made them to be.
This is the work you make possible when you partner with NMBCH. You are not simply providing shelter, though swifter matters enormously. You are participating in something God has been doing since the Psalms were first written; making a place where the frightened can become fearless, where the uncertain can learn to trust in Him and His goodness, and where roots go deep enough that no drought can destroy what is being built.
Those trees outside my childhood home are still there. Their leaves and branches continue to provide shade in the summer and beauty in the spring and autumn. I am grateful for those trees because they remind me of why this work matters, and why a safe place, truly, changes everything.
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