There are two villages two miles apart in Columbia, and between them, they’re raising about 120 children. While the children at Epworth Children’s Home and Carolina Children’s Home don’t have typical family situations, their villages provide them with just about everything else – food, shelter, clothing, education, health care, and guidance on how to live each day. At Christmas, hard-working staffers and a generous community make sure the children are remembered.

There are presents. Holiday dinners. Decorated trees and cottages. But there’s that extra something too, that intrinsic awareness that assures them they’re not alone, even if their parents can’t take care of them, even if they know they’ll never go home again. Here’s a peek into these villages at Christmas. Indeed, they are universes unto themselves.

Epworth Children’s Home
“After Thanksgiving is when the whole fun begins,” says Taylor Perry, 18. Her face brightens talking about it. At Epworth now for almost eight years, Taylor knows that in September she and the other children will compile their wish lists, and many of those wishes will come true on Christmas Day. Cottage Partners – individuals, businesses or groups who’ve adopted a cottage – will have Christmas parties for the children. Hot chocolate and cookies are served December 7-14, when community members drive through the 32-acre campus to drop off goodies and look at the decorated cottages.

“I will sing unto the LORD as long as I live: I will sing praise to my God while I have my being” (Psalm 104:33).

A flash of red satin, a glimpse of a cape and top hat, a gleam of red-berried holly, all of it strolling at 19th-century pace down the halls of Columbiana Centre. Christmas eye candy courtesy of the Carillon Carolers, costumed in Victorian splendor and celebrating their 24th year of making holiday music for Midlands music lovers. In lush four-part harmony, Dana Fore, soprano; Chan Shealy, tenor; Hal McIntosh, bass; and I — Rosanne McDowell, alto and manager — sing the glories of the Savior’s birth to diverse audiences of every level of belief and unbelief in the gospel of Jesus Christ. No matter their faith, our listeners all seem to enjoy it.
We feel the reason we can please so many different kinds of people is simple. The holiday favorites we sing span generational and cultural divides, thereby opening possibly closed hearts to the timeless message of God’s salvation in Christ. We are “evangelists of good cheer,” as carolers sometimes are called, sowing gospel seeds encased in beautiful musical and visual wrappings.

I fell in love with words and the power of words as a fledgling writer in sixth grade English class. I will never forget the comment my teacher scrawled in red at the bottom of my essay. “I like your interesting verbs, Lori,” she wrote. “You are going to be a great writer someday.” Her words cast a lofty goal that I may never attain, but they conveyed the unwritten message, “I believe in you.” Her words were much more valuable than the A+ that followed.

I fell in love with Jesus, whom the Bible calls The Word, as a frightened teenager sandwiched between high school and college. Overwhelmed with the responsibility of making decisions that would chart the course of my life, I eagerly embraced the opportunity to yield my life to Someone much wiser than I. “If any of you lack wisdom,” my pastor quoted to me from James 1:5, “let Him ask of God who gives to all men liberally without finding fault, and it will be given to him.” I asked that day, and have continued to ask ever since. God continues to be faithful to give.

Recently, my son Josh and I were surfing the Internet for a particular charity he was interested in. With the click of the mouse, we made a contribution, and he was off to his next activity. But something troubled me about this. It had been too easy to click and run.
My husband and I had been fairly successful in instilling empathy in Josh for those less fortunate. He understands their plight. But I wondered, does he feel it? Do children today grasp the hardships facing those who are barely getting by? How can they, if their own lives are not impacted by this suffering?
Helping others is simple when you write a check and drop it in the mail, or better yet, go online and donate with a click of the mouse. But our children are easily misled by the instantaneous process of helping someone without physically being involved. That kind of giving makes it hard for a child to develop a true servant’s heart and show Christ’s love to a fallen world.
With so many demands upon working parents, though, it’s difficult to carve out time to physically minister to others. But when we don’t, we lose opportunities for teaching empathy to our children.

Miyoung Paik knows how it feels to be labeled “different.” The youngest of seven children, she grew up in Seoul, Korea. During early childhood, she developed a degenerative bone condition that required an operation and a six-month stay in a full-body cast. The treatment enabled her to walk again but left her diminutive and slightly deformed.
“I hated elementary school,” Miyoung says. “Children can be very harsh. They called me names. But I loved going to church. That saved me. I had lots of friends there.” Almost a half century later, Paik, 53, is still surrounded by church friends, although not in her native Korea but in Lexington, S.C. The shy little girl has blossomed into a self-assured woman, the Reverend Doctor Miyoung Paik (pronounced me-young pak). When addressing the congregation of the Lexington United Methodist Church, where she has served as associate pastor for 13 years, the petite Paik uses a step stool to see over the pulpit. But what she lacks in size, she makes up for in her enthusiasm to introduce her flock to different approaches to worship, often with an artist’s eye. Paik is not only an ordained Methodist minister but a trained artist who began developing her talent early in life.

A seven-hour drive down I-95 alone makes the mind cavort in strange little ways, unleashed in that suspended state between the leaving and the arriving.
On a trip home to Orlando — no CDs playing, no cell phone to my ear — I indulged in a panoramic replay of my youth. It was as if an old newsreel of my early years flicked images against a transparent screen attached to the hood of my car, and all I had to do was watch.
As I approached Jacksonville, where I attended first through seventh grades, and Orlando, where I finished high school, the images came more quickly, more vividly. But only some, I discovered, had made a difference.
Like stars in a constellation, there are touch points in our lives that, when connected, create a picture of who we are. They’re the little moments that suddenly align the planets for us. The chance remark that ignites a career. The everyday routine that carves the mind of a child and sends it on its way. That day on I-95, it was the touch points I saw clearest.
I saw my grandmother sitting on the side of her bed each night, praying. I always asked what she said and if God answered. What she told me shaped the foundation of my faith.

First place
“Babushkas”
Irina Ponomarev

Irina took this photo inside a Protestant church in the Ukrainian village of Gorodische. Through the Ministry of Outreach to Slavic Tribes, Irina and her husband, Alex, make frequent trips to Russia and Ukraine assisting in nursing homes, orphanages, Bible camps, and village churches. Irina says the women photographed are “incredible prayer warriors and when they sing, I reach for Kleenex . . . Many of these ladies have survived persecution for their faith, loss of their loved ones during war, and the crush of the economy in the 1990s.”
With no formal training, Irina chronicles the development of their ministry’s overseas projects through photographs. She uses a Canon PowerShot SX 110 camera.

Second place
“A Lovely Startle”
Kari Pait

A Wal-Mart parking lot full of seagulls and one adventurous little girl composed just the right shot for Newberry College student Kari Pait. That’s her three-year-old niece, Lily, trying to join the flock. Kari says she’s never without her camera, a Canon PowerShot SX130. “I am always looking around, and in my head, when my eyes pass by something that is camera worthy, it is like the scene just freezes in time.” She uses a Canon PowerShot SX 110 camera.

There’s something about a church with nearly 57,000 members that looks and acts differently from others. Yet the pastor who led the phenomenal growth of Houston’s Second Baptist Church says all Christian churches receive the same calling ─ to extend the love and gospel message of Jesus Christ. There are just different ways to do that, says Dr. Ed Young, former pastor of Columbia’s First Baptist Church. He left Columbia 32 years ago to grow a congregation of 300 into a spiritual metropolis of five campuses spread over the nation’s fourth-largest city.
When asked how that happened, Young says church growth comes down to two things: kids and community outreach.
“I think if churches really want to touch a town, they’ve got to get back into the kid business,” he insists. “Churches across America are dying because they aren’t reaching the kids for Christ. They’re not even reaching those kids brought up in the church.
“We love kids. We do a multiplicity of activities for kids.” Young says almost 20,000 kids 18 and under flocked to this year’s beach retreats, camps, vacation Bible school, missions projects, and ministries the church held in over three states.

There’s nothing like a photograph to extract us from the sometimes metronomic pace of our day and send us shooting off into another realm. You can almost get whiplash from some images that present themselves unexpectedly. Maybe you’re rummaging through a file of business papers and lodged between a couple of old receipts is a photo from your senior prom. Whiplash, indeed.
Maybe you’re pondering what to write in your next editor’s letter. You stop to straighten up a nearby bookcase and a photograph wedged between two books drops to the floor. It’s a picture of you and some friends, one of whom journeyed on to Heaven just weeks after the photo was taken. You lightly run your finger over her image and remember how vibrant she was that night. And that she still is.
Not far from my desk is the contagious smile of a granddaughter. Her image might be frozen in time, but her spirit fairly leaps from the frame and takes me with it every time I look that way.
Sometimes, image is everything. That’s why we perennially paw over pictures neatly framed and album-ed or tossed into shoeboxes we keep under the bed. For the winners of our amateur photo contest, photography is a way of life.

Tall and slender, Leré Robinson is earnest and passionate when she talks about the bodies God gave us and our responsibility to care for them. With her South African accent and model-like looks, she exudes authority and compassion as she educates the Midlands about the importance of good nutrition.

“Everything I do lines up with God’s Word,” says Robinson, a nutritional coach who moved to Columbia more than three years ago with her husband, Eddie, and their three daughters. It was Eddie’s full-time ministry that brought them to the United States. But it’s healthy nutrition that Leré Robinson claims to be her personal ministry, which she now conducts through her Irmo-based company, Alive Again! She speaks, consults, coaches, and provides e-mail education. Clients register for newsletters that include recipes and healthy-living tips. Robinson works with individuals to organize and manage their grocery shopping, pantries, and recipes. Her reputation for combining Christian beliefs and a healthy lifestyle has spread quickly.

Robinson insists that it’s impossible to lose weight and allow our bodies to heal without seriously addressing lifestyle and diet. “I love talking to folks about food,” she says enthusiastically. “Of course, first and foremost, I love Jesus Christ.

“Therefore, be imitators of God as beloved children. And walk in love, as Christ loved us and gave Himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God” (Eph. 5:1-2 ESV).

Desire to imitate your heavenly Father has been growing in your mind and heart since you believed on Christ for salvation, and your passion is for your children to follow. You feel keenly the weight of your God-given opportunity as a father. At times, you shudder to think of the great power you possess in each child’s life – either building up or tearing down – depending on how well you imitate your heavenly Father.

Reading the Bible, you see a profoundly basic truth: God is a Father who desires to be known by His children. It is the underpinning of the entire written Word of God: who He is and what He has done. We need only believe on Him to receive eternal life (John 17:3). Yet God shows us so much more of Himself than the bare facts needed for salvation. As Christian fathers desire to be known by their children, they foster an intimate father-child relationship here on earth and the beginnings of intimacy with God in the soul of a child.

I’ve never been a father, nor a single mother who’s had to assume that role. But I know what a father should be. I’ve lived with two of the finest – my dad and my husband.

I could say it is their love, devotion, protection, and provision that lifts them in my eyes. But those are just words. It’s mostly the visuals, the memories, that define who they are to their children.

I still see my dad arriving home from work each day, calling for me to grab my glove. We threw the softball to each other most afternoons. He didn’t want me to “throw like a girl,” he said, so he taught me a side-armed bullet.

On Saturdays, while many of my friends sunbathed and skied on our Orlando lake, I played golf with Dad, because he loved to teach me things. All kinds of things. He showed me how to cup my hands, form a reed with my bent thumbs, and blow a deep train-like whistle. All these years later, we still signal each other that way ─ through the woods, from one house to another, even across a crowded store, which always draws peculiar looks.

One of my favorite photographs of my husband was taken the day we took our two young daughters on a long walk down a hot beach.

Dee Dee Parker loves clowning around. Literally. Unlike other pastors and missionaries who put on their Sunday best to address their congregations, Dee Dee’s outfit of choice often includes a curly wig, size-15 shoes, and white face paint. She is a Christian clown.

Dee Dee didn’t grow up wanting to be a clown. Married to a Southern Baptist youth and music minister, she was content behind the scenes, helping her husband, Jim. She remembers brainstorming with him about a youth ministry trip to Myrtle Beach in which they’d visit all the campgrounds and invite people to attend vacation Bible school. While figuring out the best way to promote the school, Jim proposed an idea. “We’ll have a parade! We’ll go through the campgrounds with balloons and music and, I know, we can have a clown lead the parade and give out the invitations!”

Dee Dee responded enthusiastically, “Honey, that’s a great idea! Who will be the clown?”

“Well,” he paused, “you!”

The rest, she says with a shake of her head, was all “a God thing.” Less than excited about the prospect of being a clown, she told Jim she would consider it “if I can find a way to get some training.” But secretly she was thinking, “What are the chances of that in this small..

Bill Jones will be honest with you. When he came to Columbia International University in 1987, he planned to get his doctorate and leave. He was bound for other lands. Missionary material, he believed.

Terri Summers will be honest with you too. When she visited CIU four years ago as a high school senior, she was not impressed. Too small, she thought. Everybody seemed to know everybody. An introvert, she preferred larger classes. “I wanted to be a number,” she admits. That’s what she was used to at Dutch Fork High School, where her graduating class numbered more than 700 students.

Because CIU is a God place, though, He had other plans for Jones and Summers. Jones got his doctorate all right, but never left. Instead, he’s now the university’s sixth president. Summers will graduate from CIU this spring, having discovered who she is, what she wants to do, and that God wanted her at CIU all along. For Jones, Summers’ self-discovery is what makes his job “the best in the world.” He smiles and leans back in his office chair, clean-cut and boyish, looking not much older than the 20-something undergrads he oversees daily.

My dad likes his green beans slightly scorched at the bottom of the pan. My mom could scorch with precision, a master of temperature control and the spoon. As I stirred green beans in a pot the other night, I thought of Mom and automatically did something that caught me by surprise: the ten-count rhythm of the spoon.

Suddenly, I was a kid again doing homework at the kitchen table while Mom prepared the evening meal, a daily rite accompanied by the familiar ten-count rhythm. It went like this: scrape the metal spoon against the bottom of the pot five times, tap it on the rim four times, then plop it onto the old tile countertop for one last resounding count. She did it without thinking. Maybe it was her musical training or her unfailing sense of order. Whatever, it visits me now.

Sometimes it’s the little things we hardly know we’re doing that reveal our roots in a parent. You know what it is. It’s that certain phrase you use to call the kids in from the yard. The way you fold your underwear. Or your penchant for Lawrence Welk reruns. I sometimes find myself chewing gum the way Mom did, with a gusto that can draw a warning eye from one of my children.

It was the only time I saw my daughter cry during our family mission trip to Mexico. Our assignment that day was to visit one of the poorest families in the church. Marta was a single mom and the sole provider for her five children and her mother. Until a missions team from the U.S. built a tiny cinderblock house for them, all seven of the family had lived in a one-room shack made of thick corrugated cardboard walls and a tin roof.

When we arrived, all five of the children met us by the side of the dirt road where they had been waiting for hours. They were neatly dressed in their Sunday clothes. Pati, the youngest child and only girl, had braided her shiny dark hair and tied it with two ribbons. After the introductions were made, each child shyly approached us with gifts. Pati presented her gift to my youngest daughter. She handed her a carefully washed piece of fruit neatly wrapped in a napkin. Knowing that these children had very little to eat, my daughter looked at me with wide eyes.
“Mom!” she whispered, “I can’t take this! What if it’s all they have?”
“Take it,” I encouraged her. “They care more about giving it to you than keeping it for themselves.”

Children often endure long waits in foreign orphanages before coming “home.” It takes the dogged persistence of their adoptive families to bring them safely into the fold. The following accounts track the long road home for two Eastern European boys who found new lives in Columbia: Ivan Cabiness from Ukraine and Vlad Wokurka from Russia. Both adoptive families claim it was Christ’s undergirding of strength and perseverance that saw them through the grueling, frustrating journey of international adoption.

Although Gennie Cabiness had wanted to adopt for many years, she still set parameters. “I said I would never adopt an older child, adopt from the Ukraine, or adopt after I’m 40,” she admits. Never say never.

Gennie, who will be 40 in June, and her family fell in love with Ivan, 12, when he visited them last summer through New Horizons for Children, an international hosting program for orphaned children. For five weeks each summer, the program brings Eastern European orphans to the United States where they experience life in Christian homes. But that wasn’t long enough for Gennie and her family: husband Barry, a pediatrician, daughter Gracen, 11, and son Brooks, 10.

Easter is coming! Though it has never left us, not since an empty tomb declared us free of death. Not since a neatly folded and discarded burial shroud declared the promise of life reborn and immortal. But can we grasp that with our mortal minds? At the moment we must lay a loved one in the ground, do we grip that promise for all it’s worth, as if all of life depended on it? Because it does.

Over a nine-month period years ago, I lost four in my family who helped hold my world together. Though stricken, I clutched the promise of the empty tomb even tighter ─ for their sake and mine. In the past four weeks, two of my friends have departed this life, and even though a visceral pain lines the faces of those who loved them, the promise grows louder. Can you hear it?

Three days after the mutilated, lifeless body of Jesus was laid in a tomb cut out of rock, Mary and Mary Magdalene arrived to anoint the body with spices. But it wasn’t there. Something had happened inside that tomb that made no earthly sense. It wasn’t supposed to. There had been a quickening that defied natural law, that proclaimed new law. New life.

Imagine a huge field with hundreds of one-room shacks made mostly from sticks and scraps of tin and plastic. Imagine families with two, three, four and more children all living in such places, even sleeping on the muddy ground. Imagine being surrounded by these children, some of whom haven’t eaten for days, can’t attend school because they can’t afford a uniform, and seem trapped in this life of poverty. This is the scene of the barrio in Nicaragua where I lost my heart to these children and their families.

A 12-year-old girl named Catherine asks me, “Mr. John, will you buy me some shoes for school and some food for my family?” A 13-year-old boy named Angel tells me that for the past two weeks, he and his three sisters and mother have had nothing but rice to eat. Anna, who is 12, and her mother break down in tears when I offer to buy her two notebooks, a uniform, and a pair of shoes so she can go to school.
Why should I care so much about these children? Despite the many answers I could give to this question, there is really only one that matters.

Photography by Patrick Wright

She laughs and calls herself “chicken-liver” and “city slicker,” but somehow Ginny Dent Brant found the courage to go to Yemen to visit hospital missionaries working in a dangerous land. She laughs again, recalling herself as a stuttering, introverted child, so shy she couldn’t look up to greet even those she knew. But now this bubbly and forthcoming woman sings and speaks in churches, describing how God worked miracles for her and her family. In fact, Ginny Dent Brant laughs a lot, testament to a faith that saved her despite her awkward introversion, her mother’s depression, her husband’s cancer, and her famous, frequently absent father who later descended into severe dementia. Now, at 55, this Columbia native, former teen model, and new author looks back over her life and marvels at how God was in charge all along.

“I’ve learned not to make plans,” Ginny says, affirming that God’s plans are always better. That’s a lesson she learned the hard way. Of course, life wasn’t easy for the four children of Harry S. Dent, the St. Matthews native and lawyer who worked the inner circles of Washington, D.C., for years.