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At Jacobs House we are Protecting Children, Preparing Parents, Prospering, Familes. We see extraordinary results because love never fails!

Jacob's House at Thunder Ranch is a Private Placement children's home, and we are committed to providing a safe haven for abused and neglected or temporarily displaced children. Our vision is to provide housing, loving care, plenty fun, discipline, social skills training, vocational training and education to all children including those with special needs.Jacob’s House at Thunder Ranch is a unique community of family-style homes where children are loved and encouraged to become spiritual and moral leaders with a future and hope.Located just outside Branson, Missouri, on seventy-one acres, Thunder Ranch is comprised of individual homes, each dedicated to serving children to the glory of God. Christian families are selected to provide direction, encouragement, accountability and loving discipline for all children while they are on the ranch. Our house parents are provided a beautiful home on Thunder Ranch. In exchange, they are dedicated to raising someone else’s children in peaceful surroundings. Statistics show an alarming increase in the number of abandoned and drug-exposed children. The recent increase in unemployment and foreclosures present urgent temporary housing needs for children.Children do not have a choice as to the family they are born, and sometimes, throught no fault of their own, face incredible challenges. Jacob's House _ Thunder Ranch steps in to help!

Jacob's House does not receive funding through any Federal, State of Local Government Agency.

James Garrett & Some of His Kids

Celebrating Life

_ copyright~ Jacob's House, Inc.

About Us

Pennys Story

Penny's Story

First God planted Jacobs House at the Garden in my heart in 1989. I never saw myself working with the homeless, much less living in a shelter, after all I was a city girl and as my friend Robert says, a high maintenance woman. Nice clothes, manicured nails, gourmet meals and trips to Europe.I always had a heart as big as Texas. If I heard of a problem I was more than willing to do my share, like send clothes to a mission, visit the sick and pray for anyone who called on me. By 1991 the seed of love planted in my heart for hurting adults and children needing special tending bloomed. It was a crop of hearty wild flowers, all different, all colors and required little prompting to grow.When I got the picture for The Garden/ (and later Jacob's House) I thought I knew just what God expected of me. I had been in International Sales and troubleshooting for many years and helped people start up new businesses as part of my regular routine. I quickly called my girlfriend and told her that God wanted her to take over a homeless shelter in Texas. She laughed, then said words I'll never forget."Penny, if God wanted me to do that He would mention it to me, I think God wants you, little sister." You could have knocked me over. Me, I said, are you crazy? I don't know anything about this. You are from a family who has been in ministry for generations, you know your Bible and you are organized, in fact you are perfect for the job. She laughed and said she would call me later.I started talking to my Father in Heaven right away about His stubborn children. "Can you imagine anything so crazy? I'm the least likely person for this. What could I do, I'm not trained in Social Services, I hate bugs and I can't stand the sight of dirt or blood. How could I help the homeless?"The answer was, JUST LOVE THEM!My friend did call back and she gave me serveral scriptures, but the one I remember most was ...1 Corinthians 1:26-31"Consider your calling, (sister), that there were not many wise according to the flesh, not many mighty, not many noble, but God has chosen the weak - foolish things of the world to shame the things which are strong, and the base things of the world and the despised. God has chosen, the things that are not, that He might nullify the things that are, that no man should boast before God. But by His doing you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption, that, just as it is written. "Let Him who boasts, boast in the Lord."That covered it pretty good and she really didn't have to say much more.Many other things happened over the next few months, too long a story to tell here but I did commit myself to full time service, for one year. That commitment came after much kicking and crying and gnashing of teeth but it was my decision to make. God is so gentle and good. I read this promise in ...Proverbs 4:10-12"Hear, my daughter, and accept my sayings, and the years of your life will be many. I have directed you in the way, led you in upright paths. WHEN you walk, your steps will not be impeded; and IF you run, you will not stumble. Take hold of instruction; do not let go.”"

I am glad I stayed!

Penny Robichaux-Koontz (click here)

Founder - Executive Director

The Whole Story

Featured Story

"I Thought You Had A Bigger Dream" was written to encourage the faint, compel the complacent, re-fire the retired, and launch the called! What will reading this book do for you? Nothing, unless YOU stand up and say "I Can." I can make a difference in my family, church, business and community. I can change my world, one day at a time. I can use the wisdom I have acquired to help another on their journey. I can let go of excuses and soar like an eagle. I can get back in the race, take my place and make a path for others to follow. I can live in my present, let go of my past and reach to a higher calling. I can forgive and set myself free, I can give love and in so doing, I will receive love so that I can give love again.Penny is an author, (whose story has been featured on national TV, chronicled in newspapers and told in local and national magazines) artist, teacher, inspirational speaker and business woman who traveled nationally and internationally launching businesses and coaching in the health and fitness industry.Completely paralyzed in 1952 at the age of three from polio. However, with her mother's guidance and her own determination, she overcame the first bout of this disease. In the early 1980's she was struck with post polio syndrome and a devastating prognosis ~ "you will never walk again."In 1991, Penny established a homeless shelter in Rosenberg, Texas, receiving the prestigious Jefferson Award for public and community service in 1993. Penny is the founder of Jacob's House, Inc., a home for children that operates outside the norm but inside a circle of love, laughter and discipline, providing a unique environment for the children who call it home.

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James Garrett's Story

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Testimonies

Jason

Jason's Testimony

My name is Jason. I was born in July, 1984. I have two older brothers and two younger sisters. Life for me wasn't very good. It was bad actually or so I thought. My first memory between the ages of 4 and 5 was my mother getting raped by one of her boyfriends. When I was 6 or 7, my mother had moved to The Garden a homeless shelter, where we met Penny. I didn't remember her much but I know she was there.Mom couldn't stay in one place long. So, by 8, I was living with my aunt. Mom moved to Houston where she met a new guy. She came to get four of us kids, leaving one brother with my aunt. This guy was alright at first but then things began to get bad. The arguing, the fighting... it was starting to repeat.No matter where we went or who we lived with, it was always the same, violent. I had no control and no escape from this cycle and no way to stop it. To me this was love; the only love we ever knew. It was painful to see my mom get beat day in and day out and having no way to stop it. My mother started smoking crack, marijuana and drinking again.It was easy to get the crack because her boyfriend sold it right there in the house. You could say we lived in a crack house. Anything else she wanted, she got across the street at the “gang house” which led my brother to gangs and soon he joined one. I was basically stuck watching out for my mom and little sisters because 95% of the time she was on drugs and the rest of the time she was getting beat for stealing the crack from her boyfriend.I started to get angry. Then the shelter cycles began from the Jesus Center to the Salvation Army and Star of Hope. I think we lived in all of them, one time or another but she always went back to this guy. I never knew why and I still don't."“No one thought I would make it but God had a plan for me. He gave me a future and a hope full of good things not bad. I learned that I could choose my anger. I choose LOVE and it works, I choose LIFE!”"So, do you want to know what happened? Now I am 18 years old and I have been living at Jacob’s House for two and a half years. I moved here three months before my 16th birthday. I was in a juvenile detention center for a fight I had gotten into at school earlier that day. I thought my life was over. I had had no direction or discipline in my life and was filled with anger and had no respect for authority.As I sat in that cell for 23 hours, I began to reflect on my life and the things I had done. I knew it was only a matter of time and I was going to become a sad statistic. Hope was dim and desperation began to kick in. I literally could hear the clock tick minutes (which felt like hours) and I thought it was over – that is when the begging began. I didn’t know God but I was begging anyway.A guard came to my cell and asked me to come with him. We went into a room where a phone was lying on a desk off the hook, he told me to pick it up. It was Penny on the other end of that phone. The guard had found her phone number on some old school records of mine and tried to see if she would help me since my parents weren’t coming to get me out.If no one came within that last hour I was going to be in custody for a very long time. I was abandoned. Then I heard Penny say “Jason, are you ready to come home?” I said yes, and that was where it began. I did not know what to expect or even think all I knew was that I was not going to have to stay there any longer.She came and picked me up and I moved into Jacob’s House. A few days later I went over to my dad’s and asked my two sisters if they wanted to come too, but only one accepted the invitation. The first year I stayed at Jacob’s House was the hardest because I had no direction or discipline; I was like a new born baby. The simplest things for a normal teenager to do like make a bed or hang a curtain, were impossible for me.We had never lived in a house long enough to have a room so I really never had a bed, I either slept on the floor or on a couch. I remember one day Penny came into my room and wanted to show me how to hang curtains. I messed up, so I threw them on the floor and ran out of the room in anger. Down she came in the elevator after me."Jason, don'’t you ever run from me son, you run to me!"She told me I was going to be a man of excellence and she only had two years to get me ready.I was surprised, I was expecting her to yell or cuss at me because that was all I knew but instead, I got her kind of love, true love, a love I had never experienced until I moved there. Love to me was fights, arguments and drugs.When I turned 16, I was given a 1991 Aerostar van, and a 100 dollar bill. To me that was priceless because I never got anything for my birthday, I was lucky if my mother was sober enough to even tell me happy birthday. So to me that was more than I had ever received and beyond anything I could have thought up. So, like the misdirected immature child I was, I went out with my dad and brother and got high.I was sure I was going to be kicked out for this (and I wouldn’t have blamed them) but what I got was something I never thought in a million years I would get, mercy. I was lying on my bed thinking of what I was going to do, when Penny sat down on the bed with me – somehow someway, she already knew what happened – she held me tight and said “it is going to be alright.”As I experienced the love and touch of Jesus, something on the inside of me broke and I wept. The next day we talked and discipline played its roll – I didn’t get off that easy. For the next year my van became “yard art” as Penny called it. I could sit in it, wash it, listen to the radio in it but I could not drive it. This was called consequences.I gave my life to Jesus that summer at a convention she took me to in Fort Worth. As the year progressed I thought I was not changing, I was getting into trouble at school still and was sent to an alternative learning center that is a school for troubled teenagers.Penny decided to push the pause button and home school me, saying changing my environment would help me get control. Then in the summer of 2001 I received my G.E.D, and in May I graduated cap and gown. This was one of the best feelings and moments in my life.I was the first in my family to accomplish this. When I turned 17 my van became “street art” that’s what I liked calling it. I was able to drive, and drive I did. September 11, I went in for a job interview and was hired in my first job as a data entry person for a medical billing facility. A lady from my church recommended me for the job.Then I was asked to be a youth leader at my church. Things were really changing on the inside of me and it was starting to show up on the outside. In February of 2002 I got a 2001 Chevy Extreme, that I am paying for and believing God it will be paid for within the year.As I look back on the two and half years of my life I know this to be true, if a lady with polio, a quadriplegic husband and a five year old boy did not open their home to a 15 year old, angry misguided teenager, I would not be the humble happy young man of God that I am today.Words cannot say enough for what Jacob’s House has done in me. I deserve no credit for the person I am today, Jacob's House does. I am a leader there now and I look at the 8 kids we have right now and I see this HOPE, something I did not have when I was their age.I see JOY and PEACE consuming them and if there is anything better to see I would not believe it, because when you can be a part of something that can change a person's life like it did mine, you can’t refuse.So I wanted to thank everyone who has done something – anything. Whether it was giving money or an hour of volunteering, or praying for us – whatever, it has had a big impact on me. For I know no greater love than that of someone who not even knowing a person GIVES to them unconditionally – that is Jesus with skin on.From my heart to yours, God Bless and thank you.

Jason 2000

Roxanne's Testimony

My name is Roxanne. I grew up real poor and in a very bad neighborhood.

Roxanne 2002

Stephanie's Testimony

My name is Stephanie, I just had my thirteenth birthday, I wasn’t supposed to have it, but when I took all those pills, I didn’t die .

Roxanne's Testimony

My name is Roxanne. I grew up real poor and in a very bad neighborhood. My mother was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic. My step dad kept going back to jail or prison. So, our family went from shelter to shelter most of my life.We first came to The Garden when a police officer found us living in our car behind the old Kroger store about 10 years ago. I didn't think I would ever be there again. I had to grow up real fast. In fact, that kind of life steals your childhood. My older sister and I had to raise our two baby sisters.By 11, I was angry, smoking marijuana and hanging out with the wrong crowd. By 13, I was already having sex and by 14, I was using cocaine. I got in trouble and was put on probation. That stopped the drugs for awhile which was great.We moved, again and I started a new school. I didn't realize how much trouble you could get into by sounding a false fire alarm and it put me in boot camp. When I got out, I wasn't bad but I was still lost. I ended up with a Christian mentor and a Christian probation officer. They ordered me to The Garden with Penny where my mother was living again.When I got there, it was different and I felt different. Then I met Jason. He started to tell me about heaven and hell and about the Bible. It seemed too good to be true. Penny asked me to help at Jacob's House and the main office. She was always talking about God, had Christian music, a Christian teaching tape or a Christian channel on T. V.You know they say if you start to hang around people a lot you become like them. Well, that is what happened. Now I am like them. I asked Jesus to be my personal Lord and Savior. Since then, I have been happy.We know God sent me here for a reason.

Roxanne 2002

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Jason, Rocky and Nicky Cruz

Stephanie

Stephanie's Testimony

My name is Stephanie, I just had my thirteenth birthday, I wasn’t supposed to have it, but when I took all those pills, I didn’t die. Instead, I ended up in a hospital on suicide watch crying and wondering why it didn’t work. What was my mom going to do now; was she going to keep me or send me away. My dad was in prison, and he had really raised me most of my life; I just spent a little time at moms every year for vacation, but it seemed like we were fighting all the time, but she was all I had now.My dad had been sexually molesting me since I was a little girl, but I found out I wasn’t the only one. My sixteen year old sister and my 22 year old bother were molested before me but never told anyone. My dad wasn’t in jail because of that; he was in on drug charges. He was also my connection for drugs the illegal kind that I had been on for a long time. Mixed with all the anti-depressants I had been on all my life, why couldn’t I die? My aunt had been to visit my mom and me in Michigan the week before I took the pills. She was worried about my moving in with mom since dad was put in prison. While she was there she told us about Jacob’s House, a place she had visited in Rosenberg, Texas. She told us about the young people who had made a big change in their lives through Jesus. I was thinking, “Yeah right!” Anyway Mom called her sister and asked it there was anyway I could move in with that Christian group. To our surprise, when I got out of the hospital the next day, I was on my first airplane ride to Texas for a thirty day stay.The first thing Ms. Penny showed me was a scripture God gave her for me the night before I arrived. Psalms 18. Yup, it was my story okay and she had written my name by it. She asked me what I thought about finding myself in the Bible. I was thinking that she was pretty weird, and it was pretty unusual to think that any God would talk to someone about me who never met me.The whole family including the 9 teens living there took me right in and treated me like I had always been there. I had chores, was home schooled by Penny and went to Church. Everything was the Bible, and I didn’t get bored, I got born again!...Wow, that was a really great night, and everyday since has been good.I am learning to read; I have my own Bible with my name on it, and in it , plus, I know the real God. I am not as mad as I used to be and my mom promises to go to church with me when I get home. I haven’t been molested, drunk or smoking cigarettes now for over 6 weeks. That is pretty remarkable, and since I am not around cussin’ I have even found myself learning new words.My favorite words are the words Ms. Penny prays over me every night. Because of that, when the twin towers went down I knew how to pray. I led my mom and some other relatives to the Lord over the telephone. In fact, I was able to tell my story to the residents of The Garden, a homeless shelter and they cried – first , because lots of them had it bad like me when they were kids, and then because we have been given a second chance.Now I want to live until Jesus calls me to join Him in the air; then I will live with Him forever.

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How To Help Dark Footer

How You Can Help

Transportation

Consider making a vehicle donation ~ we need a TRACTOR for hilly terrain with a brush hog.

PROJECT CARS! We are having a fabulous time restoring MUSCLE CARS. This is a great training tool and opportunity for others who enjoy these cars to get involved.

Many opportunities to "get your hands dirty", sponsor a car, provide needed parts or buy the finished project thru an on-line auction at the project end.

Your donation to Jacob's House of your used vehicles, would provide you a tax deduction making it a sound investment

Volunteer Opportunities

We need partner development programs.

Jacob's House offers a wonderful family volunteering opportunity.

What is Your Gift ?

If you are committed to helping in other ways, please email your name, address telephone number and Email address to:

penny_jacobshouse.org

Please indicate which you would like to volunteer or sponsor:

Educators / Tutors / Music teacher

Medical/ Dental/ Legal Assistance

Gardening / Livestock / Yard Maintenace

Housekeeping /Meal Preperation

Construction

Financial Donations

If you would like to help us financially, please make checks payable to Jacob's House

and send them to:

Jacob's House at Thunder Ranch

4661 State Hwy 176 E

Chestnutridge, MO 65630

Or donate on-line now!

Praying

This is a full-time position and anyone who has a special call for children is invited to add ours to their prayer list.

Together we are

Protecting Children, Preparing Parents, Prospering Families.

Media

Photo Books

Jacob's House ~ A Year In Review

2009 ~ 2010

Jacob's House ~ A Year In Review 2008~2009

Christmas Eve Video 2010

Donate

Make A Donation ~ Make A Difference

We have many requests that we must turn away due to lack of accommodations, or a family's inability to help financially with the childs care.

Consider Partnership ...

Invest in a childs future. We want to say YES to every request and Partners make that possible.

Green Down Arrow

Partner Round Up

JACOB'S HOUSE GENERAL FUND : We thank our partners for assisting us with the monthly overhead including food, medical needs, transportation, utilities. school materials, tutoring, clothing, bedding and furniture.

MONTHLY PARTNER / YOU PICK THE AMOUNT no limit as to the amount, every little bit helps.

BUILDERS PROGRAM / SUNSHINE HOUSE the anchor home - this project is a focus for 2012... Sunshine House will be equipped for the able and the disabled child.. You may want to participate in this project by providing finances , inkind donations , labor and materials . EMAIL for more information. penny_jacobshouse.org .