Founder's Story
Randy & Tina Kacirek
Tina and Randy Kacirek founded Grace Haven Ministries in 2007. Tina shares how the Lord impressed her with the mission of creating healing environments.
In the summer of 2000, several months after moving to Arkansas, I had a vision of a place where families came to receive encouragement and healing. It didn’t appear as a church or hospital or therapy clinic. There was a sign that said Angel Haven. This vision was unlike a dream and more like a seal upon my heart – it wouldn’t leave. I prayed often and wondered if it was connected to healing in my own life. Within a year my parents separated (then divorced), my grandfather took his life, we had a cross country move to a new place, we became parents to our firstborn son and I was still overcoming chronic pain from breaking my neck in a car accident as a teen. We both had things we needed healing from! While that healing began many years before when we accepted Jesus as young children, the blows of life had been adding up and we didn’t know how to deal with all of it in the day to day. All my years of studying psychology and working with vulnerable populations, I realized that understanding mental problems wasn’t enough, it's the daily walking out of our needs with God's grace that would be our path to healing.
Not long after the first vision a second one came, of a farm and animals and playing with children in the backyard. Soon the visions began expanding to include a red barn and large white farmhouse. I often wondered was this a fantasy so deeply buried in me that it’s coming out this way? Randy and I prayed and three years went by with us growing in our faith, having another baby and thanking the Lord for guiding us to a new and kind community of encouraging believers who not only prayed with us but cried with us. More and more I found my thoughts taking me back to my childhood stays on my Aunt Marietta’s farm. Playing with the geese, collecting eggs, hatching chicks, kneading dough to make rolls, picking in the strawberry patch with the sun shining down. Never had I felt more at peace.
We had our two young boys when we adopted our first daughter Grace in 2004. It was becoming the parent of a child living with fetal alcohol syndrome coming out of neglect that would truly bring us face to face with the depth of our need for Jesus. No traditional parenting method worked. We were praying, traveling to see doctors and therapists and reading everything we could get our hands on. Our compassion was wearing thin in exhaustion. We felt torn. How do we parent what isn’t in us to give? Our doubts led us to discussions about dissolving our adoption. It was the darkest time of our marriage and as parents. One night as we sat on the couch having our nightly visit on the topic, there was a heaviness, an oppression that was so present we both knew we were living in a dangerous state of mind. We made an agreement that night that just as we made our vows in marriage, we would keep our vows to this child and never allow this conversation to happen again. It would take a novel of lessons to express the unfolding years of growth the Lord set us on because it wasn’t fast.
We went on to have five more children with each of them teaching us more about grace and what happens when we live with God's grace as our sustenance. We learned that waiting in faith is where growth happens. Each child required not only time, but an environment of healing, that was balanced in structure and nurture where trust could be developed with care and compassion. There are many truths that have come so alive to us but it’s been best summed up in Nehemiah’s words, “The joy of the Lord is my strength.” When we accept our limits, it doesn’t mean defeat; it means we now live from the limitless power of love that’s been given to us by our Heavenly Father. And nowhere do I find reminders of God's creative and extravagant love than when I gaze upon the beauty of His creations and spend time in wonder allowing my whole self to be ministered to so that I can simply be a vessel to extend love and grace to someone else.
To hear more from Tina check out her podcast interview with Orphan’s No More below.
