Our Story

My name is Micah Bergen. My wife's name is Kelsi. We got married in June 2011. Before we were married, we both new God wanted us to set apart some time on the missions field completely sold out to Him, before we settled down to have a family and a forty-hour a week job--not that there is anything wrong with a job--God calls us to glorify Him in all that we do and to make disciples where ever we are placed. We just knew that we wanted to have the experience before it became more difficult. I was still in college when we got married--I had one year left--so we began to pray about where God might be leading us.

Kelsi had been doing missions trips to Mexico since she was twelve-years old and spoke pretty fluent Spanish. I proposed to her, while we were on a missions trip in Mexico, so naturally we were thinking South America. We prayed, and then we applied to one missions board to go to South America... we were refused, because I had not been a member of a church growing up. We applied to a different missions organization and did not get accepted because we would not have been married long enough. We then prayed about possibly going on our own and just finding something to do... but we really only wanted to serve for about nine months and then come back to the states to start our teaching jobs, so starting a whole new ministry or trying to find new contacts just did not seem realistic. Basically, God closed every single door that was leading to South America. So we prayed, "God, we just want to go where we are needed. We want to follow You."

My mom had mentioned that we should meet with Mark and Rhonda Benz, who I grew up down the street from in Carthage, Missouri. They were home on furlough from their work in Cambodia. I ignored her at first, because we knew that God wanted us in South America... or so we thought. Finally, Mark and Rhonda were in town, and we decided to at least talk to them, since none of our other options were working out. At the meeting, they poured out their heart for the children of Cambodia, and explained that if we came, we would be teaching and helping transition during a time when they really needed help. It turns out that they were in desperate need of teachers, and more than that, they needed team mates. As soon as Kelsi and I got into the car, we looked at each other and said, "We're going to Cambodia."

We obviously prayed about it, because it felt wrong to just jump into it. That night God revealed to me something important. South America was comfortable. It was something that we thought we could handle. God didn't want us somewhere that would be easy or comfortable. He wanted us to be stretched and need Him. He wanted us to be uncomfortable. We called Mark and Rhonda the next day, after we told our families what God did to our plans. Plans... I used to be such a planner.

We planned on leaving June 1st 2012 and returning March 2013. We planned on spending the time ministering and then coming home to start our family and jobs. When we arrived in June, we immediately jumped into the school room. The plan was for us to teach the older kids, so that the teacher who was already there could get the little kids ready for kindergarten. God pulled the original teacher to another ministry, and I found myself in charge of the school: School Administrator had a nice ring to it.

Kelsi and I were trucking along with school, when God decided to change our plans. Toward the end of June/beginning of July, God brought two little girls into Bykota House. The story was kind of fuzzy at first, but one of them was blind in one eye, and the other was an eighteen month old. I remember the day clearly. I walked down stairs for school, and there was this little eighteen month old baby girl. She looked terrified. As soon as I got down the stairs, she walked right up to me and put her arms up for me to hold her. That day, she took a nap in my arms during school.

That night, I told Kelsi something happened in my heart. We both wanted to adopt--we knew that from when we were dating: have two and adopt two... that was our plan. But we also understood that adoptions from Cambodia were closed, so I told Kelsi that I thought maybe God wanted us to help this little girl somehow. The next couple of days, we got to know Roat with her orange hair, and blue eye, and Niet, the new baby girl of Bykota House. Kelsi and I prayed about what we were supposed to do for these girls, who we now knew were sisters.

As we prayed, we felt more and more connected to them, so we decided to just talk to Mark and Rhonda about the possibility of fostering them... and maybe even adopting them. Since we were short staffed, Roat and Niet were coming over in the afternoon and eating lunch with Kelsi and I, and then taking naps at our house. Rhonda called the mother of the girls in for a meeting, and explained to her that Bykota House was a children's home, and explained that her daughters might be adopted. Srey Ron (the mother) said that she would be ok with that.

The reason Roat and Niet came to Bykota House was because their father, who hardly stayed at home, would come around every once in a while for money. He would beat on Srey Ron, and then beat on the girls, and then take whatever money they had and leave. Srey Ron said that the last couple of times she didn't have enough money, and he threatened to sell the girls, so she did what any loving mother would do, she hid them. We explained to her that there were many ministries in Phnom Penh that could help her stay with the girls and provide for them, but she was persistent that if they were with her, he would find them and sell them. I could not understand how a mother could give up her daughters like that, but now it is easy to see that she was only trying to protect them. Roat was blinded in her eye, while Srey Ron was working one day trying to earn money so the girl's father wouldn't sell them. Srey Ron left Roat with her grandparents, and she fell and stabbed her eye on a stick, while they were taking a nap--she is now permanently blind in her right eye.

Srey Ron was protecting her little girls in the best way that she knew how. We decided that if we couldn't help the girls to stay with her mother, then we would give them the love that their mother was unable to give. We had a meeting with Srey Ron about possibly adopting the girls. We told her that we wanted to take care of them as if they were our own children. At this she said, "You want to take care of just Niet or Roat and Niet?" When we said both, she began to get tears in her eyes. She had been praying for someone to come and take care of her daughters, but in Cambodia, if someone has a disability, they are not considered wanted. She was afraid that someone would split them up.

It turns out that Srey Ron had been praying for someone to take care of them for about the same amount of time that Kelsi and I had been praying for our future children (both the ones we felt God was calling us to adopt and our biological). We wanted her to take time to pray about it, because most Cambodians will give their children up, just because a white person asks. In about five days, she came back.

Rhonda (the director of the Children's Home) said that she was feeling like this whole thing was moving pretty fast, and as she was praying God laid the word "Peace" on her heart. She said that if Srey Ron did not use the word "peace" then she was going to step in and say that we needed to wait. Srey Ron came into the meeting and said, "I have been praying about this, and God has given me such peace in my heart."

From that day forward, we made a promise to her that we would raise Roat and Niet as our daughters, and that we would raise them up knowing the God who rescued them from being sold, and who planned their future to have hope. We gave Roat a new name to match her personality: Abigail Roat (Abigail means "Father's Joy") and Lily Niet (Lily is a symbol of beauty in Cambodia, and she will always be too beautiful in our hearts to ever consider selling her or beating her). It was difficult at first: Abby slept in our bed for two months, because she would wake up in the middle of the night screaming--memories of her father haunted her dreams. We prayed for her every night for weeks, and her Heavenly Father took those memories from her nightmares.

Kelsi and I had planned on having our biological kids first and then adopting, so it was interesting to be the parents of two toddlers so suddenly, but God is the giver of wisdom and joy. I love being a dad, and Kelsi loves being a mom. I could not picture my life without Abby and Lily. When we promised to Srey Ron that we would raise Abby and Lily as our own daughters, we knew that this meant we would probably be in Cambodia for more than nine months.

We had learned from Mark and Rhonda that if you could get Cambodian adoptions, then you could wait two years and get visas for the girls to enter the United States. So we made our plans to be back in the states in about two years. We kept waiting and saying that it was two years and then we would come home. We began to be discontent, and then God broke our hearts. He showed Kelsi and I that we needed to just trust Him and His timing, and we needed to stop holding on to this "two years." We prayed and said that we would trust in God for His timing, and that we were here in Cambodia for as long as He wanted us to be here.

God then poked our hearts and said, "Then why are you still living in the intern housing at Bykota House?" For us, this was our way of holding on to the "short-term" hope. We didn't need our own place, because we might be leaving soon. So we trusted in God, and moved into our own apartment (or ptalavein as they call them here). We let go. There was more though... Kelsi and I wanted to have our kids pretty close to the same age. We always "planned" on having our kids about two years apart, but Lily had turned two in January 2013, and we were still saying, "when we get home, we will start having the rest of our kids."

See, we were still holding on to that hope that we would get to go home soon. We prayed about whether we should have more kids or not, since we thought it might be irresponsible to do so, and decided that, if God wanted us to have kids, then we would and, if not, then we would not. The next month, we found out that Kelsi was pregnant... and we let go of another thing. Melody Roem (we wanted her to have a Khmer middle name like her sisters), our third baby girl was born on January 25th, 2014, and Abby and Lily are the best big sisters ever.

We are now living in Phnom Penh, Cambodia and have Cambodian, court adoptions for our two daughters, and have begun the visa process to take them home to the States. Until then, we are serving God where we are needed, and we are here until He takes us home. That is our story, in case you were wondering. It is one of simple trust in God, and Him proving to be faithful: every. single. time.