As a pastor, I get calls at the church all the time to help with this or that. One day I got a call from a program that wanted to give orphan kids from the Ukraine an opportunity to come to the United States for two months during the summer if they could find enough host families for them. I referred the caller to a few places they might find host families, and thought that was the end of the story.

Until a few months later, when I got another call explaining that some of the host families had canceled at the last minute and the Ukrainian kids were already on their way to the United States! Now they needed immediate help placing these orphans for the summer. My wife and I prayed about it and felt led to bring two of the boys into our home. Note: we were in our 50s and the boys were both 15 years old, didn’t speak any English, and didn’t even know each other because they were from two separate orphanages in the Ukraine.

We had a fun summer with those boys, and as it was coming to a close, we started thinking about adopting them. Although we knew we weren’t perfect parents, we just couldn’t bear not having them in our family and sending them back to the orphanage! But we lived in a small house and didn’t have the resources (as a pastor and schoolteacher) to provide for all of their needs.

That is where some friends stepped in to help us provide for the boys, and for us! They even helped us get into a bigger house that would fit four adults (the boys were 16 when we finally got to go to Ukraine and bring them home for good). We thought WE were being generous by taking the boys in, but isn’t it just like God to show us even more generosity by calling a family to come alongside ours so we could care well for these wonderful boys. Generosity begets generosity.