[1] While still in her late teens, Trasher attended Bible college for one term, and then worked at Miss Perry's Faith Orphanage in North Carolina in 1908–1910, after she failed to get a reporting job that she wanted.

[5] Trasher also taught at a second Bible school in South Carolina, pastored a Pentecostal church, and briefly travelled with an evangelist, but later returned to work again at the orphanage.

In 1910 after meeting Pastor Brelsford (or Perlsford) of Assiout, Egypt at a missionary conference, Trasher decided to defy her family's wishes and leave for that country.

When they arrived, their Arabic translator told Miss Trasher that the old woman then holding the baby (its grandmother) planned to throw it into the great river Nile.

Lillian Trasher worked 50 years among Egypt's orphans[9] and other forgotten people, from 1911 to 1961, without a furlough, including through the Nazi occupation during World War II.