By day, she dug mass graves for the dead. By night, she hoped to lie in one herself. “One night, I crawled on my bed and prayed God would take my life,” Goode said. “Instead, what He did… He didn’t take my life… He gave me a new heart.” Goode found God again, and with it a deep need to help others.

This is Alexandra Goode’s favorite quote:

“I believe in the sun even when I don’t see it.
I believe in love even when I don’t feel it.
I believe in God even when he is silent.”

There was a time that Goode rejected God.

Her family died in World War II. At 13, she was alone, an orphan, and just another number on paper.

Goode was herded in a cattle car headed for Dachau, the German concentration camp.

“They did a lot of experiments,” she recalled. “They did injections. They took out our tonsils without anesthesia… they just yanked it out.”

By day, she dug mass graves for the dead. By night, she hoped to lie in one herself.

“One night, I crawled on my bed and prayed God would take my life,” Goode said. “Instead, what He did… He didn’t take my life… He gave me a new heart.”

Goode found God again, and with it a deep need to help others.

The war ended, she made it to America, and has since rescued more than 250 orphans from Russia.

She brings them to the U.S., gets them medical attention, and ultimately finds each child a mom and dad.

Kids like Mason. He weighed just 8 pounds when he was 9 months old, starving to death and in need of multiple surgeries.

Goode worried he was too frail to live through the plane ride to Dallas. Now he’s a thriving six-year-old in Keller.

His Russian has given way to English, except for one word.

“Babu!”  Mason exclaimed. Short for “babushka,” “babu” means “grandma” in Russian.

Read More [Editor’s note: the original URL (link) referenced is no longer valid, so the link has been removed.]

Editor’s note: Alexandra Goode has PCA connections; a number of her extended family are members of various PCA congregations.