What follows is Sharon's story as she tells it — her own words, unedited.
The dream I did not want
In April of 2023, I had a dream I did not want.
I was newly married, finally resting after a long and difficult life, and in the dream I was told to open a home for women and children with nowhere to go. Its name would be Mercy Manor. I woke up, thought it strange, and went about my day. The next night, I had the very same dream again.
I need to be honest with you: I had no desire to do this. I was tired. I felt I had earned my rest. But I knew the idea was not mine — it was God's — and I have learned that when He asks, the only good answer is yes. What I could not yet see was that He had been preparing me for it since before I was born.
What I carried
My mother was told to end her pregnancy with me. She refused. I came into the world unwanted by circumstance and chosen anyway, which is the very thing I have spent my life trying to give to other people.
Loss found me early. Before I was grown, a car accident took both of my younger siblings. And for eight years of my childhood, I carried a secret that was never mine to carry. I was being abused, and I was certain — the way an abused child always is — that I was the only girl in the world it was happening to. So I said nothing. I believed that speaking would only bring more harm to the people I loved. I lived, for years, in shame that belonged to someone else.
The day I learned I was not alone, I was watching the Phil Donahue show. A woman on the screen was describing what had been done to her, and all at once I understood: there were others. It was not my fault. And I could finally say it out loud. I told my mother that day. He was gone that day.
For a long time afterward, like so many hurting women, I went looking for love in all the wrong places. What finally saved me was a small church where I felt, for the first time in my life, safe and unjudged — and a faith that has held me every day since.
"I came into the world unwanted by circumstance and chosen anyway, which is the very thing I have spent my life trying to give to other people." — Sharon King
The work that found me
That healing decided the rest of my life. I went to work at one of the first rape crisis centers in the country, teaching schoolchildren the warning signs no one had ever taught me, and sitting in rooms full of grown women who had been hurt as girls. I never had to imagine what they were feeling. I already knew. When I came to Texas, I kept at it — serving as a rape crisis liaison and working in a shelter for women and children fleeing violence.
I will not pretend the years were gentle. I buried two husbands. One of them, in the last months of his life, gave his heart to the Lord and told me I was the one who had shown him the way. I have learned that God can redeem almost anything, if we will only stay long enough to let Him.
Later, I was asked to lead Sanctified Hope, a home for women coming straight out of prison. I had never known anyone who had been to prison, and I was not at all sure I was equal to it. But I fell in love with those women. I built a program to go inside the prison walls and meet them before they were ever released — something no one there had been permitted to do before. We grew that ministry from a small budget into a real one and raised up a building for classes, and by the time I retired we had served forty-seven women. When we still owed money on that building, a donor walked into the office one day and quietly paid off the entire balance. I have watched God provide like that more than once.
So when the dream came, I understood the assignment. I simply wasn't sure I had the strength to start all over again.
Starting over
I began with one question: how many homeless children are there in our own community? No one seemed to know. Then a teacher told me about a little girl living in a car with her mother, and when I called our school district, I finally had my answer. One hundred seventy-two children in our local schools qualified as homeless — living in cars, in tents, in abandoned buildings, or moving from one couch to the next. For a mother and her children with nowhere safe to go, there was almost nowhere to turn. That was the day I knew I could not look away.
The two years that followed tested everything I believed. We earned our nonprofit status and gathered a board, and I stood before every church and group that would have me, telling them about a dream and a need with no building to show for it. I grew discouraged. How do you raise real money on a dream? I decided that if we did not have a firm plan for a place by the first of June, I would postpone our next fundraiser.
And then I read a devotional about faith — the real kind, that trusts God when the thing looks impossible. I decided to hold the fundraiser whether we had a building or not.
Shortly after, we were told of a building for sale. The moment I walked in, I knew it was ours. The owners offered it to us at a quarter of its worth and agreed to finance it themselves, on terms we could truly meet. Our fundraiser tripled our account, and gifts kept coming from people who had prayed over their giving. What I could never have done alone, God did — in His time, not mine.
We are preparing the home now, and by His grace we will soon open our doors to the women and children Mercy Manor was dreamed for.
Why Mercy Manor exists
I have lived long enough to know that shame can be lifted, that a life can begin again, and that no one should have to carry any of it alone. I know because it happened to me. That is the whole reason Mercy Manor exists — and it is why I am asking you to help us open the door.
Why "Mercy Manor"
The name arrived with the dream itself, and it carries the whole conviction behind the ministry in two words. Mercy, because every woman who walks through this program's doors is met without a ledger of what she did to get there. Manor, because the goal was never a shelter or a program in the clinical sense — it was a home, in the fullest meaning of that word: a place with a table, a bed made up for her specifically, and people who intend to stay.
"But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions — it is by grace you have been saved." Ephesians 2:4–5 — the verse Sharon anchors Mercy Manor's mission to
Where the work stands today
Sharon now serves as Mercy Manor's Founder and Board Chair, leading a board that has since grown to include a Hood County Crime Victim Liaison, a nurse who built a women's recovery program in Edmonton, a healthcare governance executive, and others who bring real, hard-won experience to the table alongside her own.
The facility is secured. What used to be a dream she had to justify to herself is now a building in Hood County, being prepared to open its doors.
"We used to say 'if the building comes together.' Now we get to say 'now that it has — what's it going to take to open the doors?' That's a much better problem to have." — Sharon King, Founder