I love my daughter’s enthusiasm and zest for life –on most days! It reminds me of the best of childhood- spending warm summer days catching butterflies and lady bugs, playing kickball, digging in dirt and savoring delicious icy popsicles on the front steps. I also know that these years of innocence can often fade and become years of pain, isolation and rejection without proper parental intervention. I want my daughters to maintain their sense of joy and wonder through the ups and downs of life, particularly during their high school and college years when their identities are forming and are most fragile. I want them to have a healthy sense of self esteem not dictated by magazines or models and I desire that they have a healthy standard of beauty, which is best presented in the pages of scripture not at the cosmetic counter.  As a working mom and as a pastor, that means keeping my faith and my family the priorities in my life. It also means learning from my own past mistakes and listening to the advice of other sisters in the Lord who have raised their daughters successfully. Here are a few things that I have learned make a big difference in raising healthy, godly girls for Christ:

Listen Well-Sometimes as parents we can do more talking and dictating, then listening and learning. Learn to talk less and listen more, particularly when your daughter seems distressed or her moods are changing. These could be indicators that something is wrong on the inside and she is having a hard time naming what it is. Listen without judgment and be slow and thoughtful in your response to what she has to say.  It will open a door to her heart and keep it open for years to come.

Pray with Intention-In her book, Power of a Praying Parent, Stormie Omartian talks about praying with intention.  This includes being still before the Lord and asking Him how to pray for your children, inserting their names in scripture as the Lord leads and using quiet times as a time of journaling and writing a list of prayer requests for each child. Pick up a journal today and get writing.

Remain Available- we all know that time is a commodity these days, particularly for the busy family. Nevertheless, our kids need to know that they matter more to us than our deadlines at work or redecorating the den before Christmas. Find ways to remind your kids that you are here for them no matter how busy life seems. Slip a note in her backpack or under her pillow, text “I love you” to her before a tough test or tryout. Pray with her through a frustrating situation and encourage her to keep her own journal with how God has answered her prayers.

Model grace and humility-Your daughter gets her first cues on how to talk, think and act from you. Beyond being her first standard of beauty, be her greatest model of godly grace and humility. When someone hurts or disappoints you, do you talk harshly about that person with your girlfriend on the phone or do you pray for that person instead? When the house is messy and company is coming do you fret and complain or do you put on your iPod and dance around while you dust and vacuum? Teach your daughters how to press into God and not crack under pressure. And when you do fail, be humble enough to admit your mistake and repent.

It is Saturday morning, and I am off to pick up two of the students I work with for some quality one-on-one time at my house.  At eight a.m. I arrive at Daisy’s house to pick her up, and she is excited and bolts out of the one-bedroom house she shares with her many siblings, mother, and grandparents. I leave my cell phone number with her mother in case emergency, and then we are off to pick up the second student, Jacqueline. Jacqueline’s mom answers the door after several minutes with a toddler in her arms. Jacqueline scoots out the door, and we are off. It is November, and the weather is gloomy. The two girls walk into my house and are amazed to hear the quietness. My husband had a meeting, so it is just the girls. We played Wii for a while; then I popped popcorn and we watched the majority of a movie.

Then it was on to art with some free drawing time. This is when their hearts began to open. I gave them each a TV tray with their own box of crayons, colored pencils, and markers and a seat on the couch. Slowly Jacqueline started moving her way closer to me until we were side by side. She began to ask deep questions about how I picked my husband and why I am married. I answered, and both girls’ ears perked up. Then I got to ask big questions about their hopes and dreams. I got to spend time with each girl and truly listen to her hearts’ desires. Then I was able to affirm their dreams, to give them hope. I will never forget the look in her eyes when I told Daisy that yes, it is possible for her to be a veterinarian. I remember her words to this day. “Really, you think I can do it? But my mother didn’t; she didn’t finish high school, and I just don’t see how it is possible.”

I told her, “It is possible! This dream was placed inside your heart.”

With a huge grin on her face, we took my little dog for a quick walk down the street and headed back home to prepare lunch together before it was time for them to go back home. As I loaded the girls up to take them home at the end of the day, their arms reached out to embrace me and gave me the tightest hug and said a big “thank you.” I didn’t preach a sermon or lecture on how to get into college or even talk about how to not do x, y, or z. I simply listened to their hearts, their dreams, helping them understand they have a voice, they are important, and most importantly, they have a purpose in life.

With a thousand things on my plate as a church leader, I have to make sacrifices and make it a priority in the ministry so that I will have the freedom to mentor students in my home, outside of the day-to-day youth ministry activities. It is in this precious one-on-one time where students become comfortable to articulate the dreams God has placed inside them and recognize their potential and worth as children of God.

We often think, If I stop, what will happen to me? But if we do not stop, we fail to realize the empowering, restorative, and transformational stories of others around us.

A single image can say so much about an individual. I’ve been a witness to uncounted images that portray the third world as a place of despair. Rather than expounding on uplifting stories of humanity, images have been used to capitalize on individuals, families, and cultures. Worth has been shattered and dignity broken.

My goal as a humanitarian photographer and filmmaker is to not exploit but to leverage stories that empower, restore, and transform. I strongly believe that storytelling through imagery must disseminate truth with dignity.

A couple years ago, I produced a documentary film and portrait book series called While Women Weep, which highlights the stories of strength, perseverance, and dignity of women who inspire hope in Kenya. The majority of women who live in extreme poverty lack essential resources and the critical education needed to survive. Young girls struggle to feed their families, afford rent, and pay for their education. Given such limited opportunities, many young girls feel they have no other option but to enter prostitution to pay for daily living expenses. Rape is too common, especially among Kenya’s poor and vulnerable schoolgirls. The Nairobi Women’s Hospital estimates that a woman is raped every 30 minutes.

While working in Kenya, I witnessed the pain and agony of numerous people living in poverty. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t walk away. God was tugging at my heart, challenging me to stop and listen to the stories of those whose voices are silenced by oppression. I then heard the voice of God asking me, Nikole, now that you have seen the brokenness of women in Africa, what are you going to do about it?

As God challenged my heart, I felt called to start an organization to provide spiritual, educational, and economic empowerment for girls worldwide. From that challenge, I developed a nonprofit organization, Freely in Hope, whose mission is to empower women and children to overcome adversity and live freely in hope by liberating young women from sexual oppression, providing opportunities for dignified work, and advocating security through education.

Our programs include a holistic counseling and skills training program for girls who are survivors of or vulnerable to sexual abuse, scholarships for high school and college for students living in slum communities, and a micro-business training program for widows in the Kibera slum. We currently serve women in Kenya and Zambia.

Through this process of working to advocate for those in oppression, God has been conforming my heart to feel the joys and pains of his. Daily I hear stories of suffering, despair, and brokenness. I meet people who are crying desperately for help. It breaks my heart to know that there are so many others who have not yet felt the embrace of God’s love and compassion. I only hope to fulfill God’s purpose for me by being an activator of his love and compassion by leveraging stories of dignity through the ministry of Freely in Hope.

Daily, as I bring my own brokenness to Christ, he completes me with stories that restore.

In Luke 4:18–19, Jesus states his mission: “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

As I strive to execute this mission, the Lord is challenging me to break down barriers of ignorance to proactively initiate love and compassion toward those in desperate circumstances. There, in my brokenness, is where I have been transformed.