The Plain Values Podcast EP #26 – Nobody Talks About It. Melissa Brown Will Never Stop Fighting It.

Melissa Brown:

More often than not when a girl’s trafficked is by someone for which she knows someone who she knows,

Marlin Miller:

You’ll never know how many semis are going up and down. 77, the freeway not far from here loaded with kids.

Melissa Brown:

It is a topic that people don’t want to talk about. When you go to dinner with your friends, you do not talk about sex trafficking. You do not talk about kids being purchased for sex. You literally don’t. She stood in our chapel and she said, today, I break generational curses off of myself and off of my child. I will follow Jesus and my child will follow Jesus.

Marlin Miller:

Melissa Brown is the founder of an organization called Safe Harbor here in Ohio, and Safe Harbor does some of the hardest work that I can imagine. They take in and work with girls who have been abused and trafficked and have come out of some insanely hard situations. So before we go any further, just use wisdom with your family. Anybody who might be listening to this, there’s nothing explicit in this, but it is a very sensitive topic, so just be aware, please. And on that note, please meet my friend Melissa Brown. This podcast is sponsored by my friends at Azure Standard. A while back, I had a chance to sit down with the founder, David Stelzer, right here at the table, and we had a great conversation. Great. I love the Azure story. They started out as farmers back in the seventies, and I think in 1987 they began a nationwide food distribution company. And guys, they are non GMO organic. They do it right. They do it so well, and you can get a truck to drop food right in your town. Check ’em ou*@***********rd.com and tell ’em Marlon and Plain values sent you. So where did you grow up?

Melissa Brown:

Oh, I was born in Youngstown and then lived in Lewisville.

Marlin Miller:

Okay. Did you go to high school in

Melissa Brown:

Lewisville.

Marlin Miller:

Okay. College? Nope. Okay.

Melissa Brown:

I did a little bit. Didn’t get my degree.

Marlin Miller:

Okay. Same here by the way.

Melissa Brown:

Yeah,

Marlin Miller:

Yeah. No judgment.

Melissa Brown:

Yeah, no, no, no. It’s crazy because specifically with what I do, people ask, so what did you do? How did you get here? Did you get your degree in social work and things like that. And we live in a society where you’re almost looked down upon if you don’t have a degree. And what I will tell people is that what I did do is I gave God a surrendered Yes. And when you give God a surrendered, yes, it’s incredible what he does. I never thought it would be this and you don’t need it. Sorry. God opens doors. God makes a way, and it’s just unbelievable. And so even with what we do at Safe Harbor, I hire the right people who have the degrees, who have the credentials. I have a registered nurse, I have a counselor. I have different people who are experts in what they do to help provide services for the kids.

Marlin Miller:

Can you tell us about your parents?

Melissa Brown:

Well, so I grew up in an abusive household and I don’t really want to go down that road. Our relationship is still not great, and I don’t want it to be something where I want to honor without. Yeah, totally get it. It’s a weird thing.

Marlin Miller:

I totally get it.

Melissa Brown:

So reading that I get that I grew up in household like that,

Marlin Miller:

I love to ask those kinds of questions because often the links and the turns that the Lord takes you down long before he puts you in the position that he’s prepared you for will shape and mold. And

Melissa Brown:

It is no my childhood equipped me for my adulthood and what I do in helping kids. Wow. Absolutely.

Marlin Miller:

Well, one of my questions here later is how do you cope and deal with the work that you do in order to fight the darkness the next day? And maybe we’ll just keep that for later, but

Melissa Brown:

Well, I mean, I want to do it well. Do you know what I mean? So yeah, my childhood, like I grew up in an abusive Christian childhood, so I knew Jesus, but also the household was, so it created in me a level of grit and a level of fight that have served me well.

Marlin Miller:

Wow. How many siblings do you have?

Melissa Brown:

Two

Marlin Miller:

Older, younger. I’m the oldest. You’re the oldest, the firstborn. I love it. And when did the Lord get your attention? Just as overall, not in this work, but just,

Melissa Brown:

I grew up in a Christian household, and so I can’t ever talk about a time where I didn’t know who God was. I grew up as, I’m a Puerto Rican, so grew up in a Hispanic household, and so it was very common. We were at church on Sundays and Wednesdays and we went to a Spanish church. And so my dad was the interpreter, and so the pastor would speak in Spanish and my dad would translate in English, and that’s what I grew up in. And so I always knew about Jesus. I always knew about God. All of that, I would say as an adult is when I really got my true relationship with God. But as a kid, I always knew who he was

Marlin Miller:

And knew the answers to the questions and

Melissa Brown:

Oh yeah,

Marlin Miller:

The Bible schools and

Melissa Brown:

All that. Oh yeah, all the books of the Bible. All the things.

Marlin Miller:

Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Can you tell us about your husband?

Melissa Brown:

He’s awesome. My husband, what do you want to know? That’s kind of what we’ve been married for 25 years. He is an incredible supporter of what God has asked me to do. He will tell the story if you ever talk to him, that God told him that his job was to support me in this, and he has been an incredible, unbelievable, oh my word. I can come home and say, okay, this guy got going on and he’s from a third party can talk about, okay, Melissa, you, I think you are a little bit maybe over the top on this, I think. Really? Yes. He’s been incredible

Marlin Miller:

And he can keep it objective and

Melissa Brown:

Oh yeah. Unbelievable.

Marlin Miller:

Unbelievable. I can’t imagine what it’s like though as the husband of a wife who is dealing with that level of darkness and not get emotionally involved or try to protect you from that. And I’m not even sure if I know what I’m

Melissa Brown:

Saying. He knows that God has equipped me and God has called me. And so God has told him his job is to support, and so he does, honest to goodness, he does. And so we’ll talk through things and he’ll give me perspective. He will help me with whatever. I don’t bring home all the things. So when I hear the horrible thing that I wish I never knew, I don’t then tell that to somebody else because I’m just passing that on. And so what I will do is I’ll start crafting. I’ll start redoing furniture. I’ll start moving furniture. I’ll start whatever. I remember one time I came home and it was getting close to Easter and it was around here. Easter can be cold, and it was rainy. It was real rainy, almost like a snow rain. And it was a day that I had just, it was a lot of stuff and I needed to release it.

So I thought, well, Easter’s coming. I’m going to go outside and decorate. So I started getting all the Easter stuff out, making the house look nice. I mean, I am sure the neighborhood is like, what is she doing outside? Why is she outside right now? Because rainy, snowy, all of these things. I get it all situated. I come in, I get a shower, I sit on the couch. My husband literally looks at me and he’s like, so do you feel better? Because he knows, he knew the family knows if I start crafting or if I bring home this project I want to start working on, they’re like, okay. They just know it works a different part of my brain, but I’m physically doing something and allows me to process the thing without carrying the thing. And so he’s been an incredible supporter. And right now with Safe Harbor being what it is and being recognized and this weird thing, I’m grateful for it, but it’s weird.

People watch this. People see me on social media, they see, and they’re like, oh, that’s her, but I don’t know you. You know me. And so it’s just an odd thing. And so there’s been situations where we go places and people wanting to meet me and I’m like, I’ll look around. Where did he go? And he’ll be, I mean, the one time I had the opportunity, I met with Tim Tebow and his team and we’re at this event, and so I’m talking with them and I’m like, where is he? I want him to experience this. And I turned around and he’s literally right behind me and he’s like, don’t worry about me. I know where you’re at. And I thought that’s, that’s exactly what it is.

Marlin Miller:

Wow, that is very cool. I would love to shake his hand someday.

Melissa Brown:

He’s cool. He doesn’t like the plug. If you make him stand up or recognize him, he just wants to, he doesn’t like it at all, but he is awesome.

Marlin Miller:

So your kids,

Melissa Brown:

Do

Marlin Miller:

You have

Melissa Brown:

Two girls? 25 and one will be 23 in a couple weeks? Yeah.

Marlin Miller:

Okay. I’m trying to imagine just with everything that you do that you and your husband or I mean, you said 25 and 22, 10 years ago, I think I would’ve said, Hey honey, I want to show you, this is a nine millimeter. I mean, not that you have to share. I just think

Melissa Brown:

We’re very wise, very wise about how we do things. Wow. You can’t just Google me and find out where I live. We’re very wise on putting protections in place because the reality is we’re disrupting evil business. That is the bottom line. We’re disrupting an evil business, and that’s it. And what’s crazy is in this space, we have cheerleaders and we have haters, which is odd. You wouldn’t think you would have haters in this space, but people are like, who are you? Where did you come from? How did you get to do this? You don’t have this. It’s this weird, it’s this thing. And for me, I have to focus on the fact that God has called me. I’m doing what God is asking me to do. I’m not worried about what you think or how you feel about it. I’m doing what God is asking me to

Marlin Miller:

Do. That makes no sense at all.

Melissa Brown:

I know

Marlin Miller:

That makes no sense at all. Okay. Can you share the story of the moment that you saw the need?

Melissa Brown:

It was 2013, so I was working for a multi-site church and they were sending a few of us to the Catalyst conference in Atlanta.

Marlin Miller:

It’s Andy Stanley.

Melissa Brown:

Yes. Yeah. He did a conference every year, and so there were sending a few of us, I think there was 13 of us that were going and we were going to go on this road trip to Atlanta to the conference. I remember when we were actually getting ready to leave, we thought, let’s just buy some more tickets and let’s just load up the vehicles. And you couldn’t buy a ticket. It was literally sold out, nothing available. So we get to Atlanta, it’s at the Gwinnett Arena, 13,000 people, and they do it really, really well. I mean, they do an incredible job. And so every time you went into the arena, they had things on the seats. It was first come, first served on seating, so you might find a t-shirt on a chair, a book on a chair, a sweatshirt on a chair. The idea was when they opened the doors, people would rush in to get good seats and then you might get something free.

That’s how it was every single session. So when we came in for this particular session, it didn’t feel any different. Instead of it being one of those items, it was an umbrella on the seats. That was the difference. A lady came on stage and she said, if you have an umbrella in your seat, will you please stand up and open it? I remember that moment like it happened five minutes ago. It’s dim like you’re at a concert. 13,000 people sold out, and you start seeing these white umbrellas opening up and they’re in front of you and there are some people in your row and they’re behind you, and you don’t know how many people you’re actually looking at, but there’s a lot of people

Marlin Miller:

Standing. Did you have an umbrella?

Melissa Brown:

I did not. She said, if you are holding an umbrella, you represent someone who will be sold in the city of Atlanta today. The lady on stage, her name was Mary Francis. She sounds like a nun, but she’s not. She had an organization called Wellspring, and they were working with survivors and they were working with juveniles. And she talked about how when you walk under an umbrella with someone, you walk closely with them. And the reason the umbrellas were white is because they were walking closely to help restore the lives of survivors. And she started to just talk through systematically how it goes down, how it hides in plain sight, how in the criminal industry, the second largest growing crime, the first is drugs, second is human trafficking, whether it’s sex or labor, and third is guns. And just walk through how court records show. It’s been pastors and teachers and previous police officers and different people that have been a part of the purchasing of this. It’s not like we know it’s evil and dark, and we think the people that buy are evil and dark, but the people that buy are people that we know. And so she gets off stage, and I can’t even tell you who came on after her because I’m just thinking, what are you talking about? I would say that I’m someone who’s current with times. I don’t live under a rock, but in that moment, I felt like I lived under a rock.

What do you mean kids are being sold? What do you mean? There’s more people that are enslaved today than there was when slavery was legal. What are you talking about? And so I couldn’t, couldn’t even, I just couldn’t. And so she had just released a book called White Umbrella, and her presentation was flawless. She had a whole room full of white umbrellas. She was on stage for 20 minutes just talking about the realities and what they were doing and how we all can play a part in helping. And so she gets off stage and I’m just like, what are you talking about? And so I picked up her book, white Umbrella, and on our drive back home, her book is comprised of her talking about starting it, but then talking about survivors and their experience with treating and helping survivors. But then you had stories from survivors themselves. So it’s one thing for someone to tell you this is what happens. It’s another thing to read. Someone say, this is what happened to me. Different.

Marlin Miller:

How many of the stories that she talked about and that you have lived through and walked through are the stereotypical I was in Walmart today.

Melissa Brown:

None. None, none. That is a big myth. Even

Marlin Miller:

Hollywood. What I thought

Melissa Brown:

Hollywood portrays it as kidnappings and joggings. Why? Which is how it happens some of the time, but it’s not how it happens the majority of the time. Yes.

Marlin Miller:

It’s a tiny percentage, isn’t it?

Melissa Brown:

Correct. Correct. More often than not, when a girl’s trafficked is by someone for which she knows someone who she knows. In my experience at Safe Harbor, it has been a girl who, it was her parents. It was a girl who didn’t have a good family life, and she became part of a gang, and the gang began to traffick her. She was recruited by a friend. Wait, it was her boyfriend.

Marlin Miller:

Wait, you said your parents, her parents, her parents, not

Melissa Brown:

Her parents. Correct. Familial trafficking is growing, and that is the most difficult thing to wrap your head around.

Marlin Miller:

I don’t even know what to do with that.

Melissa Brown:

This particular girl, her parents had a drug addiction and they were very poor, and so they would turn a blind eye and let people spend time with their daughter

Marlin Miller:

And get paid.

Melissa Brown:

They were getting rent paid, they were getting groceries at the house. They were getting goods.

Marlin Miller:

So they’re bartering with that with her

Melissa Brown:

Drugs. Make you talk to people who have been recovered from being drug addicted, and they talk about how they did things that they regret. They did things that they would never actually do had they not been high. We have a girl that she thinks that her parents love drugs more than her. That’s what it feels like. That’s what it looks like. But that’s not true. Mom and dad love her, but their addiction is so crazy. It’s a different girl and it’s just, yeah.

Marlin Miller:

How do you, okay, so Jesus is walking by the disciples, see the blind guy and they say,

Hey,

Did he sin or did his parents sin? Why is this here? How do you see that thin line between a child being safe and not being safe as far as why does God allow this sort of thing?

Melissa Brown:

I can’t explain that. I’ve had girls ask me that. I have had girls. I’ve had girls that struggle with the fact that God exists because if you’re so good, where were you? When I cannot answer that question. I can’t. I can tell her that sin came into the world and all the things. That’s not what she wants to hear. But I can tell her that he was there, that he didn’t want it to happen anymore than she wanted it to happen. And that she doesn’t have to explain anything to him like she would at a counselor because he understands the things she doesn’t ever want to talk about and that God takes things and he makes them beautiful. Not that he wanted this to be a thing. At Safe Harbor, we talk about Isaiah 61, 3. He literally says, he’ll give a crown of beauty for ashes.

And the Bible, I don’t know for you, but for me, sometimes the Bible feels literal and sometimes it feels like a riddle. And sometimes I’m like, which one are you? And so it says, he’ll give a crown of beauty for ashes. And so I started studying Ashe. God, what do you mean by that? What do you mean? What do you mean? And so I started studying ash and I learned a lot of things about ash. So for people who really have a green thumb, they know Ash actually has incredible properties for growth. I did not know that. So if you plant something in dirt with nothing, and you plant something with ash, by default, this other one will be bigger and stronger and more vibrant, have much more blooms, be much more tasty, have all the things because you added ash. If I were adding ash to something, I would think I was killing it.

Because in the world that we live in, ash is the epitome of death. When you have nothing left over, you have ash. Well, ash actually has properties in it for life. And so what it does is it provides nutrients to the roots. And when you water, it actually protects the roots and keeps them moist, and it actually protects the roots from ever getting fungus. It’s so many incredible properties that ash has. And so it made me think, okay, so in Ohio we hear about wildfires, but we don’t have wildfires. We hear about them in California, in Canada, and recently in Hawaii. And so I started studying What does that know that? And so there’s a scientist who is really enamored by the fact that after something’s been completely destroyed, and I mean for miles, you see nothing but destruction, there’s ash. Ash begins to naturally provide nutrients to the ground.

It just does. It does. You have direct sunlight because there’s nothing there blocking the sun. And you add water in the form of rain in a few short weeks. You have what scientists call are super blooms, and what grow are unbelievable, stunning flowers. They actually don’t grow in the wild naturally. They only grow after complete and total devastation. And based on the soil, California soil is different than Canada’s and different than Hawaii. The flowers that grow are different, but they’re beautiful. And the scientist was so taken back by it. He talked about how he wanted his retirement years to go to places where devastation had taken place to just take pictures of the beauty that had now replaced the devastation. What’s crazy is these particular flowers, they are called fire follower flowers, don’t

Marlin Miller:

Believe me. Are they the same in different locations?

Melissa Brown:

They’re different because of the soil, but they’re all called fire follower flowers. Look it up. Wow. The only thing required for them to grow is complete and total devastation. And so the Bible says he’ll give a crown of beauty for ashes, and he shows us in nature. He literally shows us in nature. So what won’t he do? For a girl that has gone through something horrific, girls that show up at safe harbor, it’s like their life is like ash. There are parts that have been burnt down. There are things that they think are just never going to come back, innocent, stolen, all kinds of things. And so I know that when Jesus steps in, everything changes. I cannot answer that question. None of us can answer the question of why this happened. We wonder how could you let this happen? But what I know is that God is

Good. He is good. Even when it doesn’t feel good, he’s good.

Marlin Miller:

I am surprised. And yet I’m totally not surprised that he does something like that on the flowers because the older I get, the more I see that there are no areas of life that he does not do something unbelievable. So you’re sitting in Atlanta, she’s talking about the white umbrellas. What did you do next?

Melissa Brown:

Yeah, so we’re driving back. I’m reading the book. I remember we actually pulled over to a gas station we had to fill up, and I got out of the car and I was sweaty. I’m like, I might even throw up. It was just diving into the deep end of a pool. It’s something that I didn’t even know. And then I’m like, it just

Marlin Miller:

Consumed you.

Melissa Brown:

Oh my gosh. I can tell you I never recovered from that moment. Never recovered from that moment.

Marlin Miller:

Still today,

Melissa Brown:

Still today. Wow.

Because how are kids’ lives being turned upside down and nobody’s talking about it and the resources aren’t there? So I come back to Ohio and I wondered, we all do. We all believe it happens in a third world country. We know that it happens in third world country, and it’s not like we’re okay with it, but we somehow think, well, it’s what happens over there. Then I hear about it happening in Atlanta, and I somehow did the same thing, just different. I thought, well, maybe it happens there because they’re a metropolitan area and they’ve got all these people that come in and out. Maybe it’s just big cities like we think. And so I started doing my own investigation looking up human trafficking in the state of Ohio. And at the time when I did my research, out of 50 states, 50 states, Ohio ranked fifth for the most reported cases of sex trafficking.

Marlin Miller:

And that’s reported.

Melissa Brown:

Oh yeah. So someone’s keeping track, someone’s monitoring how it’s going, who’s doing what, where all of that Ohio is leading the way on how to sell humans. And I didn’t even know humans were being sold. So then I thought, okay, so how does it work? Who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? Who’s actually helping? How does it work? And so I started diving in deeper. And so I started volunteering with an organization that worked with adults, and I started volunteering with an organization that worked with minors. And with the minors. I actually was a mentor for two different girls, a 15-year-old and a 16-year-old. And I started getting up and close to this thing that I had never heard about and that nobody talks about. And so as I’m working at a church on the executive team at a church, I was able to sit on an anti-human trafficking task force.

And so it was up with a county and there’s like 40 people on this team, like teachers and all different people because human trafficking isn’t just a police officer problem. It hits all different places. Teachers are being trained on what you might notice in the classroom. Nurses are being trained on what might come through the hospital. You have stewardess that are being trained. Everybody’s being trained. It is not just a one track kind of thing. And so as I’m volunteering in two different organizations, working with adults and minors, I’m sitting on an anti-human trafficking coalition trying to figure out how do we help? The one thing that keeps coming to the surface is there are no resources available. It’s the second largest growing industry in all of the world, but there are no resources. So when a kid is found, we don’t have a lot of beds for kids.

We don’t have safe places, which everything they need is outside of that. But we have limited safe places. So where kids go is they often go to juvenile detention because they have another charge with them. So maybe she got rowdy when things are going on. She assaulted the police officer, or maybe she stole something because that was what she was doing to get things she needs. So she has a charge or she got violent, whatever the case may be, she has a charge and they can put her in juvenile detention. So she has been raped. She has been sold, she has been abused, she’s been betrayed. She’s gone through all of these things. And what we offer her

Marlin Miller:

Is, is juvie

Melissa Brown:

Is a cage. I did not, sorry. I did not like that. I could not believe it. That’s real. It sounds

Marlin Miller:

Crazy. That doesn’t, obviously you assault a cop, there’s a consequence. Correct. But the trauma that they are in the middle of sometimes or trying to deal with from years ago, that is deep

Melissa Brown:

Stuff. And then you go to juvenile attention and kids are savvy. They figure out how you got here, what you did, all the things. And before you know it, she’s being called a slut and a whore and all things that are not who God says she is, but based on her experience, she wonders if that’s who she is.

Marlin Miller:

And it only makes it a hundred times worse

Melissa Brown:

Because kids make jokes degrading all the things, and she’s carrying guilt and shame because she wonders, how did I get into this? And she’s carrying the shame of the things that have been done to her, which are not things she needs to carry, but that’s what she knows. That’s what she knows. And so for me, I could not believe that we know that this is happening. Statistically, they knew Ohio ranked fist, someone’s keeping track. We’re not talking about it. No one believes it happens. And when it does happen, our resources are lacking. And so when you are being sold as a kid, 12, 13, 14, 15, you have your whole life ahead of you, your whole life ahead of you, and we’re putting you in juvenile attention.

That didn’t sit well with me. And so I started just 2013 is when I heard about human trafficking. I’m starting to volunteer, sitting on anti-human trafficking coalitions, learning about all of the things, learning that there is a need and what do we do and how could we do and all the things. And so in 2020 when the world shut down and no one was going anywhere, we started having Zoom calls about what if we did something, what could it look like? How would we do it? Who’s done it well, who has done it? And it didn’t work out well. And so it became this thing of talking to people all over. We had a contact of a place in Texas. We talked with people in Oklahoma and New York and Mississippi all over asking the same questions. What worked? What if you could go back in time, what did you wish you didn’t have to learn the hard way?

What advice would you give me? What was the biggest obstacle that you guys ran into? All the different things. And I was getting a lot of information, but there were a lot of things that were like, oh, they said the same thing. Oh, they said the same thing. And it started creating this. And so it just became this quest of how do we get the best from everybody and what do we do? And so it was in 2020, we started having conversations in 21. It was December 19th of 21, we went public and said, we are safe harbor, and we’re going to build a facility for child survivors of sex trafficking. That’s who we are. That’s what we’re going to do. That was December 19th is when we went public in April of 22. Land was donated in 23, we started building in 24, we opened. Here we are in 25. We’ve been open for a little longer than a year, and we actually had a couple girls arrive since a fundraiser that we just had a few weeks ago. And so we’ve had 15 girls in a year call Safe Harbor their home. All from Ohio.

Marlin Miller:

All from Ohio,

Melissa Brown:

All from Ohio.

Marlin Miller:

Are you full?

Melissa Brown:

We are actually. We’re in the process right now. So what sets us apart, I guess lemme go back. So our campus, so what we ended up building is we built a 30 acre campus. And so what sets us apart is that everything that a kid needs is literally on site. It’s not just a safe house, it’s everything. So in our admin building, we actually have a medical wing, and so we have a registered nurse and we’re able to do with a local medical partner here in town, we’re able to do head to toe primary care. We can manage behavioral health medications. We can do women’s health all on site. We only have to take a girl off site for eye and for dental. Then we have cottages. Each cottage holds four girls each. They have their own bedroom and their own bathroom. They don’t have to share.

They know that they have privacy in the cottage when you walk in, it’s an open living room, kitchen combo, but they have their bedrooms. We have a school building on site. We help kids get caught up when a girl arrives. We’re getting all her credits to figure out where she’s at, but then we’re also doing an assessment to figure out how does she learn? She might be ninth grade, but she learns at a sixth grade level. How do we get her caught up? We have a chapel on site. We are a faith-based organization. I do not shy away from the fact that I know when Jesus steps in, everything changes, but we don’t push Jesus on anybody. That doesn’t work in real life at all. You don’t do that with your friends. You don’t do that. You don’t do that. And so when we say we’re a faith-based organization, it means that everybody that works at Safe Harbor believes that when Jesus steps in, everything changes.

We love kids where they’re at in the messiness, in the brokenness. We show up and then we have a gym on site. We have a walking trail. We just added swings. Soon we’ll be adding a soccer field. We have everything right there, and that’s what sets us apart. And so we have three cottages, and right now, for our first year, we’ve been operating with two cottages. And so with our fundraiser year and giving, what we were doing is we were getting things set up to open more doors. And so to open another cottage so we can bring in more kids, because honestly, I don’t know if I can timestamp this or not, but at the end of December, we’ll actually have a waiting list for kids to come. And so what that does is that puts us in a position where we have to hire staff. So a cottage requires six staff members, two first, two second, and two third to cover 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We’re like a hospital. There’s no days off every holiday. We are taking care of kids

Marlin Miller:

24 7 24 7 365. Correct. What is the average so far?

Melissa Brown:

What

Marlin Miller:

Is the average time that a girl actually stays?

Melissa Brown:

Yes. Well, it varies because our program is 10 months. 10 months to a year is what our program is. But we’ve had different situations. We’ve had a couple of girls that when they turned 18, they wanted to be independent, which is true. They’ve been a product of the system for a while, and they want to make their own decisions. I mean, I know High Acted when I was 18, thought I knew everything. But you don’t have a job, you don’t have a bank account, you don’t have a car, you don’t have anything like you’re going to be homeless. They’ve lived with family members for a little bit trying to get on their feet.

Marlin Miller:

Well, let’s talk about the aging out whole concept. Can I make a few assumptions? Okay. I’m going to assume that the majority of your participants are, obviously they are not living at home. Have they been pulled out of their home? Or if, sorry, from an adoption foster care world, which is often where I hang my hat, what does that look like? Does JFS come in and pull these girls out half the time or

Melissa Brown:

It’s been a combat? How are they coming to you? So when a girl has been identified as a survivor, we are now a resource for survivors

Marlin Miller:

For law enforcement

Melissa Brown:

Or for Homeland Security Police, FBI, everybody. We are now a resource to help restore the life of a survivor. And so we get referrals through that, through usually Child Protective Services, but not always the case because we’ve had private placements and things with Ohio Rise where they’ll cover the funding, where they’re living at home, but they need the resources. And so they’re trying to get her to our

Marlin Miller:

Facility to deal with the trauma and all that. I think maybe that’s the gap in my thought process. How are these survivors being found?

Melissa Brown:

I mean, because it’s hitting different arenas. You have different people that are raising the flag. So you’ll have a school teacher that will say, Hey, something has really shifted with this particular student. And so they get the guidance counselors involved, they get the police involved, they get child Protective services involved. Do you know what I mean? And so it’s all different arenas that kids are being identified.

Marlin Miller:

So then it goes into law enforcement. I mean, typically, and then they would be the ones to make a referral to you?

Melissa Brown:

Well, it would be the Child Protective Services, caseworkers, people like that. But we’ve had referrals from law enforcement themselves,

Marlin Miller:

Yes. Okay. Sorry to ask some dumb questions that No,

Melissa Brown:

It’s not.

Marlin Miller:

Yeah, that’s so interesting. I have a good friend who is a retired judge, and she has told me years ago, she said, Marlon, there is something, any sexual sin, any abuse, any trafficking is a special kind of evil. And I’ll never forget, and I think she said this just kind of off the cuff just in passing, but she said something to the effect of, you’ll never know how many semis are going up and down. 77, the freeway not far from here loaded with kids. And I don’t even know if I totally believe her Still today.

Melissa Brown:

We don’t want to believe it. It feels too evil to really think that it happens. It just does. In Ohio, we just had two different sting operations done by the FBI. One was operations Safe Harbor, which I thought was interesting because

Marlin Miller:

That’s interesting.

Melissa Brown:

I was like, okay. And it was specific to minors where they had FBI agents online talking with people, making it very clear, I’m 14, I’m 15, I’m whatever. And when the men would drive to meet to engage with what they thought was a teenage kid, that is when they were getting arrested in that particular sting, the oldest man that what drove to meet what he thought was a teenage girl to engage in sex was 75 years old, 75-year-old man. The youngest was 23, the majority were in their forties, a few

Marlin Miller:

Weeks, 14, they thought they were meeting a 14-year-old girl.

Melissa Brown:

Then they just recently did another operation called Operation Next Door, because it happens next door. If you followed the Jeffrey Epstein thing, there were over 200 kids involved in that. Every single kid slept in their own bed and went to school. They were not abducted. They were not a missing kid. They were hiding in plain sight.

Marlin Miller:

So talk to how do they gain control over that kid that goes home and sleeps in their own bed and then willingly walks back?

Melissa Brown:

I mean, if you look at domestic violence, so if you have a husband and wife situation where you have domestic violence, she loves him, hates him, loves him, hates him, wants to leave, but comes back statistically in that type of situation, it takes seven tries before she actually breaks free and leaves. So on her eighth time of being over it, she leaves. When you look at a teenage girl who has a relationship with someone who is older, who kind of takes on that boyfriend or father thing for her, the odds are stacked against her on her wanting to leave. And so I know when you look at human trafficking, even like the billboards and things, they show kids or they show people that are bound and they have tape and things, and that’s not really what it is. They’re bound here, not necessarily bound here. This does happen, but more often it’s here. And I listened to a survivor talk one time and she was presenting, and she actually put that graphic that we all know on the screen behind her, and she said, I thought that’s what human trafficking looked like. She said, I just thought I was in a bad relationship. I thought I just had a boyfriend that was abusing me, and he was force me to have sex with other guys. I just thought, I did not know that that is what it was, because that’s what we branded.

Marlin Miller:

Hold on, hold on. She didn’t,

Melissa Brown:

She did not recognize that. She

Marlin Miller:

Literally didn’t think about the fact that she was being trafficked in the middle of it. Correct. She just thought it was a goofy scenario,

Melissa Brown:

A bad relationship. Oh my

Marlin Miller:

Goodness. Okay. So it’s much more of a mind control thing, a dominance thing,

Melissa Brown:

I mean, but it happens in the same way cancer does not discriminate. Young, old, rich, poor human trafficking does not discriminate young, old, rich, poor. It boils down to vulnerabilities someone

Marlin Miller:

And the people who take advantage of it.

Melissa Brown:

Correct.

Marlin Miller:

Goodness gracious.

Melissa Brown:

I mean, I’m not someone who is anti-social media or antiga and things like that, but what that has done is that has allowed people to talk to kids in a space where kids are hanging out and be, your kid could be sitting on the couch next to you talking to someone that’s no good on their device,

Marlin Miller:

And they have no idea. And you as the parent don’t either.

Melissa Brown:

Right? Statistically, it only takes eight minutes, eight minutes for a kid to engage with someone new online that after eight minutes, they view that person as their friend. So it could be two minutes today, two minutes tomorrow, once you have hit eight minutes in conversation, eight minutes of engaging the kid, A kid views that person as a friend, and friends are inherently evil. They think, oh, they’re just my friend.

Marlin Miller:

They have no idea. Eight minutes.

Melissa Brown:

Eight minutes. Do you know how many minutes? That’s nothing. How many minutes kids are on the phone every day?

Marlin Miller:

Oh, it’s hours.

Melissa Brown:

Yes.

Marlin Miller:

Wow. Was this as big a problem a hundred years ago?

Melissa Brown:

I mean, I think that this has always been a problem. I think that we’re able, it’s easier to do now because you’re able to talk with kids, you’re able to build relationships with people that you don’t know all of that in the same way, it moved with the times, right? So yeah, it was happening.

I mean, there’s an adult that I know that after I have done what we’ve done with Safe Harbor, she opened up to me and told me that when she was in school, this stuff happened to her. What? And she just opened up about it. Now she could. And I think she felt safe because of what it is that I do. I knew her as a kid. I had no idea. We don’t talk about it. And there’s shame and guilt, especially as a survivor of something like that. You don’t, and then who believed you? Who didn’t believe you?

Marlin Miller:

And there’s massive risk in talking about it. I mean, before we hit record, we were talking about the Amish communities and some of the struggles that are there. Half the time, I don’t even know what to think, and I don’t really want to think about it. Obviously, it’s not a good time. And so I think we,

Melissa Brown:

It is a topic that people don’t want to talk about. When you go to dinner with your friends, you do not talk about sex trafficking. You do not talk about kids being purchased for sex. You literally don’t. And if somebody brings it up, it’s kind like, and then you guys want to talk about something else pretty quick because

Marlin Miller:

Nobody, how about the game?

Melissa Brown:

Nobody wants to believe that it happens. And if you believe it happens, you believe it happens away from you. You think it happens in that seedy part of town that you don’t go to, that it happens 10 minutes down the road from you happens in that bad neighborhood that you don’t live in. Here’s the thing. Two years ago, somebody that was arrested for soliciting sex with a minor was previously the superintendent of Westlake City schools in Cleveland. A superintendent didn’t live in a city part of town. He didn’t drive a beater car. He lived in the neighborhood that you want to live in. And so, yeah, it hides in plain sight. But so it’s multifaceted. I mean, it is a multifaceted problem. You look at porn, porn fuels this industry. When you look at studies on what porn cells or gets the most views, it’s the ones that are barely legal.

Marlin Miller:

And

Melissa Brown:

We’re feeding the, there’s just so many, I don’t want to go down that road. But there’s a lot of reasons why this is a supply and demand industry.

Marlin Miller:

And I mean, from what I’m reading, porn actually rewires your brain. Correct. And so it just starts tweaking it. And I mean, it seems like you’d go down that track easier or quicker

Melissa Brown:

And just you don’t think you’re going to get where you’re at. You know what I mean? It’s like there was a casting Crown song a while ago that talked about it’s a slow fade when black turns into gray, black and white. It just, someone thinks, oh, I’m just going to look at this thing real quick. And then before you know it, they’re looking at this thing multiple days a week, and then that’s not doing it. And they’re looking at something else, and it’s just, yeah.

Marlin Miller:

And all of a sudden you start drinking a beer and then you’re onto the next and onto the next.

Melissa Brown:

It’s a slow,

Marlin Miller:

Yeah. Wow. Can you share a favorite story, one that has a happy ending? We’ve been publishing plain values for almost 13 years now, and about a year ago, the team and I decided to put together a compendium, a best of, if you will, of our favorite stories, the most impactful stories of all those years. And Invited is what we built out of those conversations. It is 194 and four pages, and it is absolutely a thing of beauty. We do a monthly gathering here where we just simply open our doors. It’s called Porch Time. And the story of how porch time came to be and how our family was invited into that, and how we are inviting you and every Tom, Dick, and Harry, anybody who wants to come, can come and hang out at Porch time here at the office in Winesburg. It was such a natural fit to use the home of the founder of Porch Time, and to call it invited. You can find it on plain values.com on the shop page, and you can now consider yourself invited. I have a feeling you have a whole bunch of stories that are hard and traumatic that don’t necessarily have a very happy ending.

Melissa Brown:

You have both just in life like you and I, we haven’t arrived. It’s not like life is easy going from here on out. So yeah. Oh my gosh. We had a girl that came to our campus, and she had been removed from her home at the age of 10, where she was at home is where the things were happening. And when I meet her, she is now 15. 15. So a lot has happened in five years.

Marlin Miller:

She’s been out of the home for five years.

Melissa Brown:

Correct. So it’s been a combination of group homes, of foster homes, of going to detention centers, all different kinds of things. And everywhere she’s been a different horrible story. And so we had received a referral for her at Safe Harbor, and reading her paperwork was very, very sad, very sad. And so whenever we get a referral and we’re interested in talking with her, I always go to meet her. Whether we drive or we do Zoom call, we go to meet. And so with this particular girl, we go into the detention centers where she’s at, and they say she’s going to come in. And when she comes in, she says, hi. She looks me in the face, and then immediately looks down, doesn’t look up. We start talking to her about, can you tell me about yourself? What do you like to do? And start talking about to her about who we are and what we do.

And if she’s interested in coming to a place like Safe Harbor, and she just looks down the whole time. Every once in a while she might pop up, but then she goes back down and remember, her legs were just fidgety. She was just nervous because you got to think all the things that she’s gone through. She feels like she’s interviewing, am I good enough? Will you like me? Will you even take a chance on me? Is this going to be the last place that I thought was going to do good? And then I didn’t do good, all the things. Do I even want to meet with you, try this again, or should I just stay here?

And so we talked to her about a place called Safe Harbor and all the different things, and she’s excited about it. And so we make arrangements for her to come to our campus. And whenever a girl first arrives at our campus, we’re also identifying who are the good people in her life, because we want to work with them while we’re working with her. Because when she leaves us, we want to make sure that she’s in a good place because she can’t be in a place where she’s worked through all of her trauma and all the things, and she’s in a good place, but she goes to a place where she’s just flounders. And so we’re trying to identify who are the good people. She doesn’t have any people. She has nothing,

Marlin Miller:

Siblings, no one that you can identify.

Melissa Brown:

No one. Her caseworkers are very sad because she has no one, she has half siblings, different places, but they’ve been either adopted or they’re in different places. But there’s no one that would be identifiable that would be like, Hey, I want to help her. And so our program is roughly 10 months. So after 10 months, because still 15, she’s going to be going back into a foster care or residential more of the same. And that had to be so disheartening for her to know that she’s going to be here for a little bit, but then I don’t know what the plan is afterwards. And so we are licensed as a CRC, A Child residential Center. So in the state of Ohio, they only want a kid to be in a residential center for about a year, because the way the system is all set up is that the way it’s ideally is reunification at home.

That’s what it is. And so they don’t want a kid to grow up in a facility for three years. And so for this particular girl, reunification with family is not an option. It is not an option. And so, yeah, the people that would come to visit her were people who were paid to visit her caseworkers, her guardian ad litem, her. And so I remember one particular day, because the girls do have visitors, and when they have visitors, people bring them gifts or bring them snacks and things. And I remember I was in the cottage and a girl had got done with her visit, and she came in and she needed the drawer open to put in her snacks. And this particular girl, she says under her breath, nobody ever brings me snacks. And that was the truth. I had not thought about that. That was the truth.

Kids were getting snacks and putting them in their snack drawer, and she wasn’t getting anything. And so I said to her, I said, what kind of snacks would you like? And she said, oh, I love Reese cups. I said, oh, yeah. And she’s like, oh, they’re my favorite. And so I was just talking to her, just talking to her, but literally gathering information. So the very next day, I went to the store and I bought Reese cups. And so at Meyer, they came in a box and it looked a box of like 24. And so I bought it, and I brought it in to give it to our placement manager. And that next day she was having a visit. And I said, Hey, after her visit, give her this. I don’t want her to know it came from me. I want her to know that she was getting snacks. And so something so small, but not

Marlin Miller:

In those situations. When a kid is in fight or flight for a long time, those little things can be immensely huge.

Melissa Brown:

A lot of the things that we take for granted are the things that the girls at Safe Harbor appreciate the most.

Marlin Miller:

Really, it’s totally backwards because you’d think it would be X. And often it’s something way down here.

Melissa Brown:

They want something. They want to be at home. They want to be with a family. They want a regular life. They don’t want to be in a residential. No kid wants to be in a residential. They all want to go back to that moment where life was good, whatever. That was their mind, in their mind when they were 12, when they were nine, when they were 13, whatever that rose colored moment is, they want to go back to that. And that doesn’t exist. It doesn’t exist anymore. So this particular girl, we were doing the counseling and things, and when you talk about fight or flight, she was a flight girl.

Marlin Miller:

She was a runner.

Melissa Brown:

Oh my word. So at work, we were ear pieces because we’re all on the same page all day long. So you’ll hear so-and-so’s upset or, Hey, so-and-so would like to call their caseworker, or Hey, whatever it is, because all on the same page in real time. And this girl, I’ll call her Bella, that’s not her name, but we’ll call her Bella, you would hear on the radio and Bella’s running,

Marlin Miller:

And you can just look. I mean,

Melissa Brown:

It didn’t matter if she was in the cottage in the school, in the chapel, Bella is running and she’d get upset and she’d just bolt out the, and she’d run to the same place every time. Every time you knew where she was going, it didn’t matter where she was, you knew where she was coming. She would be running up to the hill.

Marlin Miller:

You just had to wait.

Melissa Brown:

Oh yeah. You’d be like, oh. And there she is. I mean, running a track star up the hill to admin. And she would be upset and she’d want to talk to someone in admin about whatever she’s mad about. It could be, I want to watch a movie and has, it could be something like it was important to her. Not necessarily big in real life, but she was mad and very, very common. I mean, she’d be frustrated at school. She couldn’t work out with the math problem. She, Bella is running. I mean, we just knew

Marlin Miller:

Multiple times a day.

Melissa Brown:

Oh, it happened a lot. And so it was kind of funny when you’d hear and Bella’s running, you knew where she was coming. And so I remember one particular day, it was snowy, like snowy, and the kind of snow that you can’t keep up with, if you shovel, you just keep up with and you hear, and Bella is running and she’s running up the hill and she doesn’t have a coat on, doesn’t have anything. And it’s cold outside. And one of our treatment specialists, which is a staff member that works with the girls, she meets her on the hill. And Bella is just yelling, it’s not fair. I don’t want to be here. Why can’t I go home? It’s not fair that I have to. And all these things that she was saying were a hundred percent valid. There wasn’t one thing that she said that we would say, well, Bella, it was all true.

It’s not fair that she didn’t have anybody. It’s not fair that she was in our facility. It’s not fair that she didn’t have a plan and she was just going to be part of the system. It’s not fair that she was ripped from her home. All of that is true. And she just was yelling out. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair. It went from yelling to crying and then just sat on the sidewalk and our staff member just sat with her and the snow was just falling on them. I mean, just falling on them. And our security guys were in the admin building. They’re like, do we have any blankets? What do we have up here? And so they went down the hill and they put one on her and one on the staff member, and they just sat outside in the snow. We meet kids in the messiness of brokenness, and there are no two days that are the exact same because kids are feeling safe and they’re able to really feel the thing that they keep pushing away. And so she kept saying she wanted to go home. I want to go home. I don’t know why I can’t go back to mom. And she would tell the story that when she was removed from home, that she was kicking and screaming and all the things, and she remember just looking out the back window until she couldn’t see the house anymore. That was us

Marlin Miller:

As they’re driving away,

Melissa Brown:

As she’s a 10-year-old kid. And so we know on our end through the case files and the things that mom was part of the problem, that things that were happening were under mom’s watch. But what did they tell you when you’re a 10-year-old kid?

Marlin Miller:

Not that,

Melissa Brown:

Right? Not that. And so our counselor asked her if it would be okay if she would get the police reports and they could really go through and walk through the painstakingly detail of the things of why she was removed. Because she kept saying, we’re lying. You guys are liars. You guys are the ones keeping me from my mom. You guys don’t know you guys. And we’re like, okay, let’s find out together. Let’s do this. Let’s do this together. And so our counselor in her one-on-one sessions every week would go through and you would hear during the counseling session, and Bella was running because she’d run out of the counseling session and then run back down to the cottage and she’d run back down to the cottage and she would sit on the front porch. We have Adirondack chairs, and she would just cry and she would get mad and she would hit her legs. She was just angry. And she’s like, it’s not right. It’s not fair. They’re lying. You guys are lying. We weren’t

Marlin Miller:

Lying. It was a police report. You were going through the, so let me ask you something in those kinds of scenarios, is it, how important is it for that young lady? 15 years old? Okay. And here’s the context of my thought or my question. Brian Post is a leading TBRI practitioner.

Okay. He’s fantastic. He was adopted, he struggled through a lot of stuff, had a great family, but now he does in part what you guys do, where he sits and he talks with the kids that have the hardest of the hardest situations. And I remember sitting in a seminar and he said, the way you deal with that kind of thing is you talk about it, you write about it, and you cry about it, and you talk about it, and you write about it, and you cry about it. And over and over and over in that situation, and let’s call her Bella, does Bella have to go through every single thing and deal with each of those things? And in her situation, is it like a thing of processing or forgiving or It’s

Melissa Brown:

All of it.

Marlin Miller:

It’s all of it.

Melissa Brown:

And so our staff, but you can’t do it by herself. Correct. And so our staff, we are all TBRI, that’s how we operate. And so yeah, we sit with her when she’s upset and she’s mad. She’s talking about how she feels. She’s heard this stuff now she’s talking about how she

Marlin Miller:

Feels and you get it out of her,

Melissa Brown:

Get it out. And we’re replacing the lies with the truth. And so it was, I mean, weeks and weeks and weeks and weeks. And how far into her

Marlin Miller:

Stay did this happen?

Melissa Brown:

She’s probably four months in and we start doing this. It took a long time to go through all this

Marlin Miller:

To even build that trust.

Melissa Brown:

Oh yeah.

Marlin Miller:

Oh my goodness.

Melissa Brown:

Because strangers, oh

Marlin Miller:

My goodness.

Melissa Brown:

We were strangers. We’re strangers. We just had a couple girls recently arrive at our campus and we are strangers. And I know that. And so I say it. I know that we are new faces and I know that we are strangers, and you met people that we’re going to help you, that didn’t help you and people that helped you, that you miss. And I said, I want you to know that this campus is designed exactly for you. Every single girl on our campus has a tough story, but every single girl is on her healing journey. I want you to know that we are for you. And I’ll say her name. So if I was talking to Bella, I would say, we’re team Bella. We’re team Bella. And just be prepared to be loved to death is what I say. And I kind of laugh and I say, no, for real. We’re so happy that you’re here. But it takes a while because the reality is she has trusted people in the past that have done horrific things. We are strangers. It takes time. They have to see that what we say and what we do match. If they don’t match, they know. They’re like, okay. And these girls have, because they have survived, they can size you up in two seconds.

Marlin Miller:

I was going to say in

Melissa Brown:

Two seconds. They know if you’re good, if you’re not good, if they like you, if they don’t like you, I mean within two seconds.

Marlin Miller:

Yeah, they’re going to sniff the rat. Oh my goodness.

Melissa Brown:

Because that’s how they were able to survive. Wow. Because when someone walked in, they knew if they were evil, they knew if they were going to be in for something horrific. They knew if this person felt guilty, they knew.

Marlin Miller:

Wow.

Melissa Brown:

So with this particular girl, Bella, she’s doing all the things. What we didn’t know at the time is that Bella’s aunt, mom’s sister had done the work to get rights to find and help Bella. And so she had been doing the work to try to track her down all the things. But Bella is her middle name. So we knew her as Bella, which drives me nuts. It’s like when you meet someone and you know them as Joe, and you find out they’re Daryl. So this girl, she is Marie Isabella, that’s not her name.

Marlin Miller:

And she couldn’t and couldn’t find her.

Melissa Brown:

She’s calling places looking for Marie Isabella. Nope. Everybody knew her as Bella. So she finds out that she’s at safe harbor. And so she reaches out to the caseworkers to things trying to get things in all the ducks in a row to come and visit. And so we let Bella know that her aunt has tracked her down. And that aunt has been looking for you for years, for a kid who thought that nobody cared. No one has shown up. So she thinks she’s just been left to herself to find out. Someone’s been looking for you, gave her hope and touched a part of her heart that nobody could have done. And so aunt comes to safe harbor to visit her, and she’s nervous, but she’s excited. And when they see each other for the first time, they just hug, oh my gosh, just this hug that anybody who saw it just cried.

And Bella was very happy to see her, but at the same time, aunt looks like mom. And so it made her miss Mom, but she was happy to see her. And so aunt’s asking all the questions like, I’ve been looking for you. How have you been? All the things, right. And so aunt wants to start building a relationship with her and wants to come visit often. And so she would come visit every week and they would hang out and they would play board games together. They would talk, and aunt would bring her snacks, would find out what food she wanted, her favorite to go and bring it in. And you started to see a part of Bella Light Up that we hadn’t seen light

Marlin Miller:

Up. It hadn’t had a chance.

Melissa Brown:

No, it didn’t exist. And so this whole time, Bella, she’s still going through the, she had finished going through the police reports and she’s able to ask aunt questions. And aunt is confirming some of the things, which is a painful, hard truth, but it’s helping her. Okay. Okay.

Marlin Miller:

I mean, that’s going to build massive trust for you guys.

Melissa Brown:

Yeah. The police reports are the police reports. And so Ann starts asking questions about, okay, so what’s the plan for her when she leaves here? Where’s she going? What does that look like? And we’re able to tell her what we have, which is nothing the caseworkers are saying because there’s no next of kin. There’s nobody involved. When she’s done at Safe Harbor, she goes to another, hopefully a foster home. She wants to be adopted. But when you talk about adoption people, you often want kids that are younger. They don’t often want troubled youth, especially a girl who’s gone through all of this. If you have other kids of your own, you’re worried about dynamics in the house. And so a lot of times these girls, once they are of a certain age, they get just discarded in a way. I don’t want that one. I want a new one. Which is crazy. And so yeah, so aunt starts asking questions and she’s married and she starts talking to her husband about what if we helped her? What if we stepped in? What could that look like? She starts asking the caseworker questions, asking us questions. And so they start doing the work of becoming foster parents. What could that look like?

Marlin Miller:

Home study?

Melissa Brown:

The whole deal. The whole deal. And because she’s next to kin, she doesn’t have to do the full fledge, they do a partial, which is helpful. And so we start giving Bella the opportunity to go and visit. And so Bella would maybe go for a Friday to Saturday and then she’d come back to Harbor. We debrief how did things go? That kind of stuff. And the one thing that Bella realized pretty quick is that there’s rules everywhere. It’s not just in juvenile detention. It’s not just at some foster home. It’s not just at safe harbor. There are rules everywhere. Because she had an incident when she had gone home, that aunt was like, Nope, that is not how this goes here. And she didn’t like that because I think she just had this idea that she can go do whatever she wants. But aunt was very clear. And so I remember when she came back with just debriefing, all of that was just kind of funny. She was mad at aunt, and it was kind of like, and I think in some ways it a allowed aunt until step into parenting role. You’re not cool aunt. You are a parent. And so it felt funny on that side too because she’s like, I don’t want to be mad at me, but we are not doing that.

This particular girl and all the things, I remember one day at Safe Harbor, she worked, she had a cross necklace that she wore, and she was just really going through it. And she ripped her cross necklace off and she threw it. And she said, I’m not wearing that. He doesn’t even listen to me. Anyway, what she said, and in her mind she said that she thought that he heard everyone else, but he didn’t hear her. And our job isn’t to correct her in that moment. Our job is to sit with her in that moment and just listen. So she’s going to chapel, she’s hearing about Jesus, all the things. And she had accepted Jesus in her heart, which is just incredible. And we do baptism at safe harbor, which is wild. I never thought about, and all the things, I didn’t think about salvations and baptisms. I thought about helping kids restore their lives and learn about Jesus. But I didn’t think about all of the things.

And she was baptized at Safe Harbor and she started to build this relationship with her aunt and uncle and all the things. And she was able to leave Safe Harbor and go live with her aunt and uncle. And the thing she was most excited for was going to high school because since being removed out of her family, she hadn’t really had the experience of middle school traditionally, let alone high school. Her only concept of high school was movies. And so she couldn’t wait to go to high school to go to her first football game. So at say Harbor, when a girl is leaving, when a girl is getting ready to leave, we do a wish circle and we literally put chairs in a circle and she’s part of the circle and staff walks through and talks about, my most memorable moment with you was, and they might joke about something that was like, I remember we’d hear and Bella’s running because what she had done is she gone from running to staying.

Oh, she would tell you how she felt and that she would tell you fiercely how she felt, but she wasn’t running anymore. And then she was able to just talk to you about how she was feeling, and she was able to work through coping skills. And so when she was having those emotions, because emotions are part of life, how do you deal with them? While she wasn’t running anymore, she was able to communicate. And she wasn’t looking like this. She was looking like this. She was looking up at you. There were so many different facets of things that were happening. And you were seeing this girl bloom, just bloom and so on. Our wish circle, you talk about, I remember this or I went, my wish for you is this. And oftentimes staff brings gifts for her. And that was really cool, is that our one security guy knew what school she was going to be going to and had got her a sweatshirt with the team on it

Marlin Miller:

Really?

Melissa Brown:

And when she opened it up, he’s like, so when you go to your game, you blend in with all the kids. That’s your school now.

Marlin Miller:

Wow.

Melissa Brown:

She was, I was so floored. I thought that was such a cool, thoughtful gift from our security guy that had built a relationship with her and was just so proud of how far she had come and wanted her when she showed up as high school, to not feel like an outsider, but to feel part of the crew with a sweatshirt with the team name on it. And so our counselor has followed up with her and she does check-ins. And there have been challenges because every teenage girl, every teenage girl is not a walk in the park,

But she’s been able to support Bella and also support aunt and uncle. And so the story is still being written. What God is doing is still being written. And so safe harbor, I tell my staff, whenever a girl shows up, God is entrusting us with her care. It is not by accident that she has showed up at safe Harbor. He’s trusting us with her care. And the stories of the things that we’ve heard are some of the worst things I wish I just never knew. But God knows her whole story and he’s trusting us. And so our job is to plant seeds. We plant seeds of truth. We plant seeds of hope. We plant seeds of love. We replace the lies with truth. We plant seeds. Sometimes we see them take root, sometimes we don’t. Like I said, we had 15 girls called Safe harbor their home and seven have accepted Jesus.

Not every girl has, but our job is to plant seeds. And God is looking at what do we do while she’s with us? And we’re doing our very, very best while she’s with us. And for Bella, I can say that we’ve done our very best. Doesn’t mean that it’s rainbows and butterflies on the other side of it, but we know that we have instilled incredible things and God’s hand is upon her. His hand is upon her. We can’t answer the question why she went through the things that she’s gone through, but she’ll be a story of how God takes and gives beauty for ashes. It’s a real life story.

Marlin Miller:

Yeah, I I think one of the things that just totally blows me away about all just incredible, what’s the right word I’m looking for here? Similarities or an equation from here for the ashes to the flowers and it’s, it is this, just like you guys are not bailing on the girls in the middle of those moments of just utter despair. Why did this happen to me and it’s not fair? And all those, you’re not walking away and saying, I don’t care. Neither does he. And often it’s the stories. It’s the people that have suffered the most that he will use in unimaginable ways

Melissa Brown:

Because they’re able to reach in and help someone in a way that others can’t because they’ve lived it. They can shine light in dark places in the dark hallways. They know the hall,

Marlin Miller:

Right? They’ve been there. This is not near the same, but when I meet a dad who has worked with a kid or a son or a daughter, and I don’t mean that he knows what it’s like to work with a child who was traumatized and he’s laid in bed with his wife in the evening and they’re just thankful they made it through the day. I know. Because we’ve been there. And it’s an amazing thing when you see those connections come out of that suffering and that pain because you know that the other guy knows, and it’s an immediate bond. And I can’t imagine, do you get to meet people like that, that are working in the same trenches, that are dealing

Melissa Brown:

In

Marlin Miller:

The same world?

Melissa Brown:

I have peers that I talk to across the United States that are in the same thing. And so you don’t have to explain it. People ask me, what do you do? Do you know that? It’s like 21 questions before I actually tell you what I do. Why? Because it’s such an odd thing when I say it says, what do you do? Oh, I work with kids. Oh, really? Where do you work? I work in the Holmes County. I work with teenagers. All of these things. Before I tell you what I do, because when I tell you that I’m the CEO and founder of an organization that is a facility for child survivors of sex trafficking and sexual exploitation, it just changes

Marlin Miller:

What happens. And I’m sorry to laugh, but

Melissa Brown:

People,

Marlin Miller:

They get all weirded out.

Melissa Brown:

Yes. Whoa. Oh, and then they start asking all the questions and all the myths that people, oh, so the kidnapped kids, oh, the whatever. And it’s not like that. And so I think sometimes I feel like I have to do a presentation, a little presentation for you on who we are, how it works, what the things, you know what I mean? And so it’s just not because I don’t want to tell you, but I just think people get wigged out by it,

Marlin Miller:

And you’re probably trying to figure them out if they can handle some of those things. Boy, that’s interesting. You are looking for volunteers?

Melissa Brown:

Oh yeah. We have people that volunteer all the time. It’s just incredible because of what it is that we do. There’s background checks, there’s fingerprints, there’s training, talking through, here’s what you do, here’s what you don’t do. Here’s what you say, here’s what you don’t say. Just things like that. We have volunteers on our campus every day. We have people that come in and help cook. We have people that come in and do things in the school. We have a volunteer. He’s incredible in math, and he tutors our girls. He shows up and they just know it is incredible. We have a lady that comes into sports with the girls. We have people that come in and help the girls learn how to make cookies or make pies, true life skills things. We have a gentleman that comes in and he does a financial class with the girls.

When you leave here and you get a job making $15 an hour, that’s so much you make after taxes. Here’s what you’re actually going to be bringing home. You want to live in an apartment? What kind of apartment are you wanting to live? Most apartments cost this. You want a car? This is how much car payments walking through. This is what it really looks like. Plus you want to save money. Truly helping them understand dollars and cents because that’s something we all, unless you win the lottery, you’re dealing with the budget. And so that’s practical application stuff.

Marlin Miller:

Where can people go?

Melissa Brown:

Yeah,

So we’re safe harbor ohio.org. That is our website. On the very top, you have different tabs and one of them says, get involved. And you have the opportunity to volunteer. And so when you open that up, it’ll ask you for your information, Melissa Brown and all the things. And so it’ll have a whole list of things that you can say I’m interested in. I want to do gardening. I want to help baking, I want to help with whatever. You can mark all of them. You can mark none of them. Another tab that says, Hey, have you ever thought about this? I could help with this. And so when you submit it, it comes to us. And then we have a volunteer, a person who oversees our volunteers that will reach out and say, Hey, you said you’re interested. Our next volunteer meeting is this day. And so at that meeting, you’ll learn more about what it is that we do.

And some people when they come to that meeting, they’re like, oh, I don’t know. I mean, really, we have a lot of people that they want to help. A kid that comes from a tough place because they came from a tough place, but you have to be healed enough to do it. If you’re not healed enough to do it, when you do this, it will rip open the scab. And so sometimes people come to the orientation and they’re like, oh, I don’t know. And some people are like, let’s do this. And so then you do the fingerprint, the background check and all of that. And then you come and we do a tour. And then you’re not just left on your own. There’s a whole thing and all of that. But it’s incredible. We had actually, we had a Mennonite lady, lady who came, and when she came, she said to me, she goes, I’m kind of nervous because she wears her hair thing and she has her skirt. And she’s like, I don’t know if the girls are going to like me. And I said, oh my goodness. I said, first of all, that is the devil in your head. He needs to go. Second of all the girls are going to absolutely love you because you’re here to just be with them. And I said, we have a girl on our staff who’s been tonight. It’s not weird for them. I am just walking through that because she’s like all these anxious thoughts, right?

Yeah.

And so she comes in and the girls are like, hi. And she’s like, hi. And she gives her name and stuff and we start playing games and the girls start talking with her and they’re like, I want her on my team. And when she left that night, every girl gave her a hug and we’re walking back up to the admin building and she said, oh, my word, Melissa. She said, it’s not what I thought. And I said, I know. And she said, my presence meant more than anything. That’s so true. Girls know that as a volunteer, you’re willingly coming to show up. You don’t have to be there. You want to be there. That’s different. When they get mad at us as staff, they’ll tell us, you’re paid here. Just because they’re mad. They’re just mad. And they’re saying that You don’t really care about me.

You’re paid to be here. No, we do care about you. But when they have volunteers that show up, we have one lady, she comes in every week. Every week, and she actually, on a certain day of the week, she actually bring a hot meal for lunch that she does. And the girls know Ms. Liz is going to be here today. And they give her a hard time. They love her, all the things. And she came from working in the school so she knows how. So when a kid is getting mad about something, she’s like, okay, you’re having a rough day. She can handle it. She can handle it. And the girls give it to her because they know she can handle it. But they know when Miss Liz comes, like, it’s a big deal.

Marlin Miller:

It’s on.

Melissa Brown:

And she shows up. She’s consistent. She’s consistent. And if she’s not here, she’s going to, Hey, I’m going out of town. I’m not going to be here for two weeks, but I am coming back. So they’re not like, oh, she just bailed on us. Yeah.

Marlin Miller:

Oh my goodness.

Melissa Brown:

It’s incredible.

Marlin Miller:

It’s

Melissa Brown:

Incredible.

Marlin Miller:

All of those stories, we have no idea what our actions mean to that other person. And the times that we have fail. So

Melissa Brown:

A I tell people God has placed something on everyone’s heart, every single person’s heart. For me, I didn’t know that it was going to be human trafficking, but that’s something that God has placed on my heart. And it could be that the thing on your heart is you guys, you foster care or it could be talking to the neighbor that you know is going through a divorce, or it could be helping kids that come from divorced families, like God has placed something on everyone’s heart and he’s done that because he’s equipped you to do something about it. A lot of times we discount ourselves. I don’t know. I don’t know if I can do that or her. I don’t know if they’re going to like me because I have something on my hair and I have a skirt. It’s not about that.

Marlin Miller:

If

Melissa Brown:

God has placed on your heart, he’s uniquely positioned you to go do the thing.

Marlin Miller:

What do you guys need? Wow.

Melissa Brown:

I mean, we’re going into Christmas. That’s real. And so we have girls that make wishlist. Here’s what I would like for Christmas,

Marlin Miller:

Really,

Melissa Brown:

Last year we had a girl that wrote on her wishlist. She wanted a haircut. She understood that Christmas is where you could ask for something special for yourself. And she thought a haircut would be something special she could ask for herself. When I saw her paper,

I was like, haircut, we’ll give you a haircut. That’s not a Christmas gift.

That’s not a Christmas gift. But that’s what she thought she could ask for. And so we told her, REDI, get your haircut. Please put something else on here. And when she got her haircut, she had hair and she got it cut. And when she got it cut, everyone was like, your hair. She’s like, I know. I mean, she walked different.

So we had people that adopt kids and do that kind of a thing. So you’ll get the wishlist and you buy stuff just like you would off Christmas, a tree at the shopping center. We are getting ready to open up our gym. We built a gym, an indoor gym, basketball pickleball, volleyball, all the things where kids can just be kids. We are working, actually girls are girls. They like nail polish, fake eyelashes, a lotion. They like diamond art. They like cross stitch. Anything that a teenage girls into our girls are into, and they do it. They do it. They work on their diamond art and they’re like, once I finished it and it’s hours, but when they go to their room at night, they’re working on it a little bit here and there. And it is very therapeutic and working on something that they’re actually creating.

I mean, it just, it’s wow. It’s incredible. We have a boutique on site. So when a girl arrives, we had a girl arrive. We’ve had three different girls arrive with the clothes on their back. That’s it. Literally nothing else. And so we have a boutique on site where we get donations of clothing items, new items. I like a good like worn out sweatshirt, but I want her to know she’s worthy of new. She’s worthy of new. And so when a girl arrives and she has clothes on her back, we’re like, let’s go to the boutique. Let’s get some stuff she can pick out bras, socks, underwear, t-shirts, pajamas, sweatpants, everything she needs with no strings attached because she’s a daughter of the king. I say that all the time at our campuses for daughters of the King daughters that have survived horrific things that we don’t even want to talk about, think about, don’t want to know about.

They’re daughters of the King and what won a king do for her. And so it’s incredible how people come to the table to say, Hey, I want to help with this. Hey, I want to help with that. I had a guy tell me yesterday. He’s like, what can we bring at Christmas that would just be so incredible for the kids? And I’m like, I don’t know. He’s like, think about it. He’s like, we want to help. We want to help. When you think of, we often have good Christmas memories, we often have good Thanksgiving memories. That’s not always the case. What we’re doing at Safe Harbor is we’re creating core memories for kids where they wake up on Christmas morning and there’s a tree that’s lit and there’s gifts that have their name on them, and there are things that they wanted. They’re brand new, not extravagant. Helping them understand that the whole idea of Christmas to begin with is because of a baby.

A baby that’s changed

Marlin Miller:

Everything.

You had a baby born there?

Melissa Brown:

Not born there.

Marlin Miller:

Not born there,

Melissa Brown:

No.

Marlin Miller:

Okay.

Melissa Brown:

But we do have a girl who is a mother.

Marlin Miller:

Okay?

Melissa Brown:

Yes. And so this particular girl, her child is in foster care and they bring her child every week to spend time with mom, which is incredible that she’s able to keep that bond, keep that relationship while she’s with us at Safe Harbor. This particular girl was baptized and she asked if she could have her child brought to the campus because when she was being baptized, she wanted to dedicate her child to God. She stood in our chapel and she said, today, I break generational curses off of myself and off of my child. I will follow Jesus and my child will follow Jesus. I never ever thought about baby dedication. I know that what we’re doing is impacting generations. It’s not just the girl that we meet, it’s the kids that we never meet when she is a mom with this particular girl, she already is a mom. And we’re seeing the impact in real time. The ripple effects. Ripples don’t just go forward. They go all out. And we’re seeing generations impacted. We’re seeing family members impacted. We’re seeing caseworkers impacted. It is unreal. What God is doing. It’s a God project. It’ll never be the story about what Melissa Brown has done. Now it’s about what God does. God works in hearts. God restores lives. God redeems things. God makes things whole. Not what I do. All I do is give a surrender, yes,

Marlin Miller:

What happened to or in the other girls when they saw their friend see that

Melissa Brown:

Every girl cried. Even

The girls that struggle with who God is, they cried because they know that He’s real,

Marlin Miller:

Isn’t it? Isn’t that interesting though that our culture is a hot mess, obviously, and every Tom, Dick and Harry can shout from the rooftop, whatever platitude that they’re on that day from any of the wokes to any of the big talking points. But when the crap really hits the fan, they know that that little bucket ain’t going to hold any water. And I think they also know that God is real and that his bucket holds water. How do we delude ourself that quickly? And it seems like we forget this side that he is real.

Melissa Brown:

I mean, but that’s been the story from the beginning of time. You look at the Israelites, when they were in the desert, they ended up making a golden calf. Even though they had been all, they had seen what God had done, they had seen all the plagues. They had seen that they were released, they had seen the freedom, they had seen all the things, but they forgot. We’re all guilty of that. We’re all guilty of that. But when this girl stood in the chapel, there were girls that struggled with Jesus, that just tears running down their face. I think in some ways she was showing them because she knows the hallways, right? Hey guys, this is real. It’s

Real. Look, it’s real.

Marlin Miller:

It’s real. That whole generational curse thing, and I am sure you know this, but there’s so much scientific evidence now that genetically in our DNA, those traumatic events are literally passed down.

Melissa Brown:

So what we say is in the same way trauma can be passed down from generation to generation, we believe so can healing. It says the healing that happens at our campus with the girls that call Safe Harbor, their home healing follows every generation.

Marlin Miller:

How can we pray for you

Melissa Brown:

For wisdom? I know pieces of their story. God knows all their story that God gives us the words to say. One to say them, one, not to say them for wisdom, for favor, favor with the girls, favor with officials, favor with the state favor. What God has built on our campus is a state-of-the-art facility. People from all over are looking at it and saying, how did you do this? And when they come, they learn about it. Wasn’t anything that I did.

Marlin Miller:

Is there anything like it anywhere else?

Melissa Brown:

No. In the state of Ohio, there’s nothing like us at all that has everything that a kid needs on site. We’re literally changing the game. We’re leading the way. I have people from different states calling to want to come visit and learn about what it is that we do, but it’s what God does. It’s a campus for daughters of the King. It’s what God does. And so people who are skeptical, here’s the thing, I’ve never met someone. Whether you believe in God or you don’t believe in God, that thinks that selling kids for sex is okay, nobody, I don’t care how woke you are. You do not think that selling kids for sex is okay. And so when you come to come look at safe harbor to learn about who we are, what you’re doing is you’re getting an up close view of who God is and what God does. And so wisdom in favor and that God would just continue to work in the hearts of kids, that he would continue to work in their hearts and their quiet moments when they’re in their room and they’re crying and their quiet moments where they’re wondering, is that really true? The thing that I’ve been believing is a lie, but this is really the truth that God would continue to work in their hearts. And when they’re ready to hear about him that we’re ready to talk about him.

Marlin Miller:

Wow. I don’t know what else to say. I don’t other than thank you for doing

Melissa Brown:

It’s a God project. I tell people I know it in my knower, which sounds goofy when you say it out loud, I’m like, I know it in my knower, but this is what God has called me to do. Do I know how it’ll work out? No. Do I have all the answers? No. Are there challenges that I face? I’m like, what are we doing here? Yes, but it is a God project. I know it. I know my name. And so on days where I’m like, when things have you talked about when people, you go to bed at the night and you’re like, I’m glad we made it through the day. You know what I mean? When I have things like that and oh man, the devil’s good at are you who? All the things. I remind myself that this is a God project. No one can take that.

No one can tell me you can’t take that away. I know it in my knower. And so I’ll continue to move forward and continue to do the thing that God’s asked me to do. So the one thing you didn’t talk, we didn’t talk about, which I want to tell you about, I brought it with me. So for the story of safe harbor in 2013, I hear about the umbrella. I’m doing all the things, getting involved, all the things, and I’m working at Mite Campus Church on the executive team. And I think that people think that working in ministry is rainbows and butterflies. That’s what they do. You work more than one day a week,

Marlin Miller:

Not the case.

Melissa Brown:

It’s not rainbows and butterflies. Last time I checked, we all fall short with the glory of God. And so we act out of hurts and hangups and different things, and God still uses us to do incredible things. In the midst of all that in 20 19, 20 19 was I would say, my roughest year in ministry. There’s a lot of things going on. And so I believed God for you. I just didn’t know if I believed God for me. And so when I, I’m an executive at a church and I can’t talk about all the things. I just, who are you going to talk to about all the things? And so when things aren’t going well and you don’t know what to do, at least for me, I was good at faking it, putting on the mask, everything’s fine even though it’s not fine because I don’t know how else to do. And so 2019, I described that year as when plastic bends where it changes to a different color, but it doesn’t break. It was rough. It was a really, really rough year. At that time, my daughter, my youngest daughter, her friend had just moved to Mississippi. And that year we were going on vacation. There was four families going on vacation. We’re calling it a tribe vacation. There’s 21 of us. I don’t even know why we thought we could do that, but we did. Did it.

Marlin Miller:

One house,

Melissa Brown:

Huge house. Yeah, we had a whole thing. But 21 people going on vacation together, five families. And so as kids do, my youngest said, mom, what if we go visit my friend Maggie before we go on vacation? And where Maggie lived and where we were going on vacation was only a four hour drive. And in the year that I was having, I thought I could take off two weeks off work. Why not? It was the first time and the only time I’ve actually done two weeks in a row. And so myself and my daughter and I go down to Mississippi and everybody else is flying down. And the plan is we’ll drive over and then we’ll all come home together. And so we are only in town, I don’t know, maybe an hour. And Maggie is 16. Maggie has a car, so she wants to take my daughter and they want to go running around.

She wants to show her around, introduce to her, to all her friends, all the things. And so I’m left to myself and I’m just going to go. I’ll meet them at the house later. And so for the first time in a long time, I didn’t have to wear this mask. I didn’t have to put on a face. I wasn’t an executive at a church. I wasn’t a wife, I wasn’t a mother. I was just Melissa. And I didn’t know how tightly wound I was until I could just breathe. Until I could just breathe. And so I don’t have to act like anything. Nobody knows me. And so I’m in downtown Ocean Springs, Mississippi, I dunno if you’ve ever been there, but it’s really a cute little town. And the whole road, the main road is all brick and they have all these old buildings there.

And I am a sweet tooth girl. So I stop at this place. Literally, I felt like when I describe it, it feels like a Hallmark movie, an executive in a new town, blah. It felt very, very movie esque. I show up at this cafe, it’s literally called French Kiss Cafe. I mean, you walk in, they have the big things and they have these big bakery items and stuff. And so I get a chocolate chip cookie and a bottle of water, and I go and sit outside to have these little tables. And here I am, middle of the week, middle of the day. There’s not a lot of people around, but you can tell that this whole downtown is probably just packed on the weekends. They have live music here, all these really, really cool things. And so I had been having a rough time in ministry. I feel like God has placed human trafficking on my heart. I don’t know what to do. I’m frustrated. I’m in town and I don’t have to fake it anymore. So at this table, I start talking out loud to God, I’m talking to you, I’m sure that I looked crazy because they’re like, who is she talking to?

Marlin Miller:

Were there people sitting nearby?

Melissa Brown:

There wasn’t anybody at the table, but people were inside so they could see through the glass, they could see me. And so I started talking out loud to God. All the things I had never said were coming out. The Bible talks about how he knows, he knows your heart, but sometimes he wants you to know what’s in your heart. And here it comes. I’m saying all the things like, God, I don’t understand why you’re letting this happen and why this is happening. And if I can see it, all the things. And in my frustration I said, and I feel like human trafficking is something that you placed on my heart and I don’t even know what you want me to do with it. I don’t even know. And I was. So I look back on that moment and I’m embarrassed. I feel like I approached God like a bratty kid in some ways. I approached God, I work for you. If anybody should be helping me, it should be you, which is stupid. But that was my posture. I was just like, and in my frustration I said, you need to show me because I’m just done. It was almost like, if you can’t help me, I’m done doing anything for you,

Which is crazy, but that’s where I was. And so I’m sitting there with my cookie and I break my cookie off to eat it. And when I break my cookie off, the piece that I break off falls on the floor and it should fall to my right side where I’m breaking it off. Instead, it tumbles and falls on the other side of the table on the floor where I have to actually get up to pick it up. And I’m just like, I’m not doing anything. I’m just mad. Have you ever been so mad that it doesn’t matter if someone can make it good, you’re just mad. That’s where I was. And so the cookie falls and it takes two seconds that I’m like, I’ll get it later. I don’t even care. I’m just angry. And I’m sitting there just pouting before God. And it probably was like a minute, which a minute isn’t a long time, but a minute when you’re watching the clock feels like forever a bird flies down and starts eating this piece of cookie. The bird is close to me, not scared of me, and enjoying this piece of cookie. It’s the best thing. It’s Seton in a very long time.

And I felt like in that moment, God was saying, Melissa, if I care that that bird is hungry, I surely care about how you feel. Because true, it’s not like when you wake up in the morning and you get in your car, you have to brush off the dead birds. It’s not a thing. The birds do not store food, and they do not die of starvation. God takes care of them every single day. And God was telling Melissa, I care. I care. I care about that bird. I care about you. And I went from being so mad to just crying. Oh, just crying. I cried for a long time. I was almost like when you’re having computer issues and the technician says, well, did you restart your computer? It was, it was the restart button on my heart. I had somehow forgotten that Just because I don’t know what’s going on doesn’t mean God doesn’t know what’s going on. Just because it doesn’t feel good doesn’t mean that God isn’t good. Oh my gosh. It was like the reset button. It was like I woke up and I remember sitting there and I said, okay, God,

I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ll trust you. It doesn’t feel good. I’ll trust you. I’ll trust you.

It was crazy how all that stuff, all that pent up stuff that I’d been carrying and operating out of, were just gone, reset button, gone. I had focused my eyes on who he was, remembered who he was, that he is still good, that he is still a God, that he is still sitting on the throne and he has a different perspective than I do. And he’s working this out. So I finish eating my cookie and I have all day. So I think, well, I’m just going to go this whole long road. I’m going to go up and down and hit all the stores. I guess, what else am I going to do? And so in between these old buildings was an old house that they had made a store. And so when I walk in, it was a bunch of vintage stuff. So when you walked in, what is the living room was filled with old coats and canes and hats for men.

And when you went into the dining room, it was dresses and broaches and purses, but they were things that you just don’t run into at your run of the mill antique shop. It was things that, what do you imagine someone wore on the Titanic? Cool, unique? Where did you find this stuff? And so the house, you walk in a circle, and so it was men’s stuff in the living room, women’s stuff in the dining room. You went into the kitchen, they had a bunch of kitchenware stuff. Some of the stuff, I didn’t even know what it was. Some of it you recognize like, oh, I remember grandma had this. And so you walk around in this circle and you come into the foyer. And in the foyer he’s got two. The guy that was working had two metal bars and there’s jewelry hanging on them.

And so in pure shopping fashion, I’m touching all the things, touching all of it. And what I see hanging is this. And it literally says on one side, Dottie’s House, poverty Hill, California, one screw. And on the other side it says, good for all night. I’m like, what is this? And so as this is hanging, this thing’s a little angled, here we go. It’s hanging there. I’m reading this and I run my hands up the chain and there’s a little tag that says Brothel coin necklace. What they had done is they had found a brothel coin and I put it on a necklace, but we live in a sexualized world. So somebody would buy that and would wear it and make jokes about how you get one screw or you get me for all night. They had put it on a necklace because the world that we live in would wear this. I just had my most honest conversation with God. I said, I feel like human trafficking is something that you placed on my heart and I don’t even know what you want me to do. You need to show me.

Marlin Miller:

And he brings you that

Melissa Brown:

Within an hour and a half, I’m holding a brothel coin in my hand. I didn’t even know brothel coins were a thing while they’re out doing their stuff. I started doing research on brothel coins. Brothel coins actually date all the way back to Roman Empire days. If you find a brothel coin from that timeframe, there were so many people that came into Rome that spoke different languages. It was more cost effective to have the coin that had the sexual position for which you wanted than to make coins in different languages. So you would go and you’d pick out the coin that you want, you’d hand the money, and then the guy would go to a place wherever this girl is who doesn’t even speak the same language, but he gives her the coin. And when he gives her the coin, she knows what it is that he wants. And in her room, she could have a bowl full of coins and never be robbed because you can’t find with this, it was just reinforcing the fact that she was worthless. God was telling me, Melissa, I have placed this on

Your heart. Do not shake it. I’ve cared about these girls since the beginning of time. Don’t shake it. Did I ever think it would be this? No. But I told God I would do what it’s he’s asking me to do.

And so our logo is a circle in opposition to this coin, something that was meant to destroy.

We’re going to restore. And so our logo is a circle because of this. This is how I know. And in my nowhere that God has asked me to do this, I do not have the education, the degrees, the bells and whistles that qualify me, but I’ve given him a surrendered yes. And I’ll do the thing he’s asking me to do and step in dark places and shine light. She’s a daughter of the king.

Marlin Miller:

She is the daughter of the king.

Melissa Brown:

So in our logo, I should have brought something with our logo. In our logo. Actually I do. I have my card. We have, it’s a circle in opposition to the coin, but right above the letter E right there is when I had the logo design, it said, I want it to be a circle and I want a beach wave incorporated. And I didn’t want it to feel beachy, but I wanted a wave. And you can see right before the letter E, there is a wave. I told God, I’ll get out of the boat and do what it is that you’re asking me to do. And so that is a reminder to me to get out of the boat. And you would think that getting out of the boat today is easy because I got out of the boat yesterday. Getting out of the boat is hard. There are days where I just want to stay in the boat because the waves got me yesterday and I’m banged up a little bit. But every day I get out

And do the thing that God says me to do. And God shows up in an unbelievable, wild, crazy

Ways. I could talk to you for two more hours and tell you, and then God did this, and then God did this, and then God did this, and then God did this because it’s what

He does. It’s what he does. It’s what he does.

And so what we are doing is changing. This doesn’t exist in the state of Ohio. We’re changing how you care for kids. And honestly, I think it’s bigger than what our campus is right now. I think God is going to use this

To showcase what he can do. He will work things out in unbelievable ways, but it’s all to show what He does

Marlin Miller:

Because

Melissa Brown:

He cares about that.

Marlin Miller:

And it’s out of the worst situations. It is out of the worst imaginable circumstances.

Melissa Brown:

These girls are often discarded, often set aside, often talked about as a troubled kid, unseen, overlooked, but she’s seen by an almighty God.

Marlin Miller:

Thank you for being open to what he showed you. And I mean, I feel so. This is so trite. I’m sorry.

Melissa Brown:

It’s not at

Marlin Miller:

All.

Melissa Brown:

It is not at all.

Marlin Miller:

I have said many times that there’s nobody that I enjoy talking to more that I love getting to know than someone who is exactly where they were built to be. And they know it. They know it, and you know it, and you knower. Why is it so hard for us to go there and to allow him to do that for us like he did for you?

Melissa Brown:

I mean, it was painful. I wasn’t just talking nicely to God at that table.

Marlin Miller:

You’re being real.

Melissa Brown:

It was painful.

Marlin Miller:

All of it came out.

Melissa Brown:

All of it came out.

Marlin Miller:

And then on the other side was this healing and this assurance that just hang tough. I got you. Oh man.

Melissa Brown:

And it is not, I mean, I could talk to you about the challenges that we face and the things that, but I know that this is I know it. I know it. I know it in my nowhere. You can’t shake that. You can’t take that away from me. I know it.

Marlin Miller:

And then that just powers everything else that you do. And then he brings you the team and he brings you the money and he brings you the board and he brings you the land. It is what everything. Yes. And it just confirms it all along every time.

Melissa Brown:

Yes. Because nothing that God can’t do, and even meeting with you, the people that I’m meeting with, the people that are talking to me, I say, when God knows everybody, he can connect anybody. There’s no, how do I get to that person? It’s what God does. I had yesterday a company come to the table that would like to provide, it sounds wild. I’m telling you, and I can’t even wrap my head around it right now, a turf soccer field for the girls. Turf, turf. There are many high schools that do not have turf. They have to fundraise for turf. They have to do all these things. Turf isn’t even something in my mind, turf sounds like over the top, extravagant, all the things. This company, this company came to me, talked to me about it earlier in the year, and they actually met with me yesterday and they said, we have some ideas we’d like to show you. And I’m like, okay. And in my mind, I’m thinking, A one turf field. No, they came to the table with two papers. Here is a soccer field we would like to do for you, and here is an outdoor volleyball, everything we would like to do for

Marlin Miller:

You. The whole soccer field.

Melissa Brown:

We have a soccer field.

Marlin Miller:

I mean, soccer fields are huge.

Melissa Brown:

A decent sized soccer field on our campus and a volleyball area. I was like, what? And he talked about how he went to the headquarters and talked about what it is that we’re doing and how we’re restoring lives and how this would be an incredible area for kids to just be kids, and they’re donating all of it. Yesterday we walked out there and we literally marked with Little Flags Field one and Field two, and I was just, I’m talking to you, telling you right now, but I just can’t even wrap my head around that.

But it’s a campus for daughters as a king, so it makes total sense. It doesn’t make sense at the same time. I mean, yeah, a place where kids will just be able to have fun and just be kids playing the competition with staff, getting their favorite staff member out, the one that they don’t like very much out. It’s both end. It’s all the things. We just recently had Grace Church in Worcester. They wanted to do something for us, and so they did an outdoor pavilion for us in swings. You think swings are just, what’s a swing? Here’s the thing. Swings. You don’t outgrow. You can get on a swing. I can get on a swing. You didn’t age out of a swing. The girls were able to get on the swings for the very first time two weeks ago, and you could hear the giggles and the laughter and all the things because we were the earpieces.

We hear attention, admin, staff, the girls are requesting everybody to come down and swing with them. So staff puts on their coats, goes down. All the staff is down there with these kids swinging. They’re laughing, they’re giggling. They’re not thinking about why they’re at safe harbor. They’re not thinking about the hard thing. They were thinking about who could swing the highest and laughing. Those swings are getting so much traction because when a girl’s upset, she can go and just swing and she sits with a staff member and sometimes she says nothing and cries, and sometimes she starts opening up. Those swings are not just swings. They’re a place where healing happens.

Marlin Miller:

Wow. That still freaks me out.

Melissa Brown:

It doesn’t freak me out. It makes me, it is a very, Melissa, you do hear from God, Melissa. God does see you, Melissa, what you think. It is confirmation for me that I know that God hears me and I hear him.

Marlin Miller:

Wow.

Melissa Brown:

Again, it is not rainbows and butterflies. There are days I don’t want to get out of the boat. I’m telling you, God shows up. It’s a God project. It’ll never be about what I do. It’s about what he does.

Marlin Miller:

Thank you. I know that we have to end it at some point, and it is painful. It is painful and exhilarating at the exact same time to listen to you seriously, because we know a little bit about trauma. We don’t know anything about trauma. Not like that. And I don’t even know. I don’t even know what to do with it. I just love the fact that you are doing it. I almost said I’m really glad that he called you, but I know that he prepares and gives those, he calls every single thing that they need to do it. And so I’m not surprised. But I know I’m going to pray for you a lot because I know that it’s hard and I don’t even know how hard it is, but I know it’s hard. Is there anything else that you want close with or that you want to share that I missed or that we should mention? Safe harbor ohio.com.

Melissa Brown:

Dot org.

Marlin Miller:

Dot org.

Melissa Brown:

Safe harbor ohio.org. No, I think this is incredible having the opportunity to come in here and speak and talk about what God is doing, but for people that are listening that are hearing it, oh, that’s pretty cool that Melissa does that. I’m glad that God uses her for that. But the reality is God placed something on everybody’s heart.

Marlin Miller:

We’re a part of a body,

Melissa Brown:

Everybody’s heart,

And there’s always something you can do to move forward in that. For me, when I learned about it in 2013, I started investigating, is it even real? And started, who can I volunteer with to kind of learn more about it? And so the devil will often discount you, and the enemy will get in your head about why you can’t. You’re too busy. You don’t have time, you don’t have this, you don’t have that, but you can just take one step forward in the thing that God’s placed on your heart. It’s unbelievable what God will do with a surrendered. Yes, that is evidence of what God will do with a surrendered. Yes,

Marlin Miller:

I love it. Thank you.

Melissa Brown:

Thank you.

Marlin Miller:

My wife loves Jill Winger’s, old Fashioned on purpose planner, and this year’s is better than ever. It has all sorts of tabs from your gardens to your animals, to your meals. Anything and everything that you can imagine that needs planning, Jill has built a spot for it in here. You can find th**@*************ng.com or yours today for 2026. In his book, Rembrandt is in the Wind. Russ Ramsey says that the Bible is the story of the God of the universe telling his people to care for the sojourner, the poor, the orphan, and the widow, and it’s the story of his people struggling to find the humility to carry out that holy calling guys. That is what plain values is all about. If you got anything out of this podcast, you will probably love plain values in print. You can go to plain values.com to learn more and check it out. Please like, subscribe and leave us a review. Guys, love you. Thanks so much.