May 21, 2025 “Can I call you Mom?” 

“Can I call you Mom?” said a voice behind Dr. Kerr.     

Dr. Kerr turned around to see a young girl in her late teens with short black hair, olive skin complexion, and big brown eyes standing behind some of the other students.      

“Not even ten minutes into the first orientation,” Dr. Kerr recalled. “I was talking to our students helpers and introducing myself, and Nat was behind me. She said, ‘Can I call you Mom?’ just like that. And it took me by surprise, and I said, ‘Of course you can.'”      

From that moment on, wherever Dr. Kerr was, you could find Nat close by. Sometimes, they would just be sitting next to each other, just being present with each other. They were inseparable.      

As a team, our goal was to provide those that we meet with the hope that can only be found through Christ. One of the most effective ways to do so is to get to know those we are working and interacting with.      

“I asked her if she has a mother,” Dr. Kerr said. “Nat said yes; I asked if she gets to spend time with her mother, and she said, ‘I go to see her, but she doesn’t have time to spend with me.’ And to me, that sounded so hopeless. It sounded so sad that although she spends two or three days with her mom, her emotions are not satisfied because the maternal love she’s seeking is not there.      

I don’t know, maybe as a kid, when you are deprived of something that you would have loved to have always there, that yearning, that longing, looking, searching, and maybe that’s what led her to me? God made us to love. And when that is absent, our lives are not the same.”      

This situation wasn’t unheard of; several of the teenagers helping us became residents of the orphanage/school because their parents couldn’t be around full-time and provide a solid parental figure in their lives because they were so busy working to make ends meet.      

“How do they get hope out of such a hopeless situation? I see them feel so free, so happy, so unworried. And it’s only because God can do that. Only God can do that. I asked if she had been baptized, and she said yes, she was baptized. And that gives me hope that they, too, have the hope we all need.”      

“I didn’t know that I would be coming home with another daughter when I left home. But the Lord is always putting people in my way to help them. At the same time, it helps me to see how wonderful and wide the love of God is.” 

If you’ve ever had the opportunity to go on a mission trip, sometimes you receive an equal or even greater blessing from those you’re blessing. Blessings on mission trips often go both ways.      

And it’s not always just the lives of people who don’t know Jesus that need to be ministered to; sometimes, we are sent to show the love of Jesus to those who already know Him. We must never pass up an opportunity to share the better hope we can find through Him. And sometimes we meet people who are sent to us so that we may be ministered to. In every situation and encounter, see it as an opportunity to help someone else grow and as an opportunity for you to grow in Him, too.      

We ask that you pray over the special relationship Dr. Kerr and Nat have built together; Dr. Kerr has given Nat her email address because she doesn’t have a phone or social media. Dr. Kerr is patiently waiting for the day for that email to come into her inbox with an update from her new adopted daughter.