"I'm not loved."

Almost twenty years into this work, and here's the thing I keep coming back to: you can teach a kid anything… a Bible story, a skill, whatever… but if they still believe they're worthless underneath it all, none of that really sticks.

So many of our kids grew up hearing lies. Not just hearing them, but living them through abuse, through neglect, through things that were done to them that made them believe stuff that was never true. Stuff like "I'm not loved." "This is my fault." "I'm broken." "I'll always be this way."

And honestly, you can give a kid a safe bed, a good school, all the right opportunities but if that lie is still running the show in their head, they're gonna stay stuck.

That's why we go after those lies with the truth of God's Word, every single day. Because we've seen it, over and over when kids get surrounded by people who keep speaking truth into their lives, something shifts. Hope stops feeling like a nice idea and starts feeling real to them.

That's the work we're doing. That's what we believe changes a kid's whole future. #DODDsquad