Favorite Photos of 2022

We are quickly winding down my “Favorite Photos of 2022”. #SadDay. I hope you have enjoyed these photos, and this trip down memory lane, as much as I have.

As we move into February, I am going to be sharing more recent photos. To be more precise, I will be sharing photos from my recent trip to Kenya. I hope you will be looking forward to that!

But we have two days left in January, so I will be sharing two more of my favorite photos of 2022. Today’s photo is a selfie that I shot in the mountains of Colorado with an amazing group of students and leaders.

These are “the Cheesy Grits”.

When I served as a Youth Pastor at a church in Ohio, I took our students to an event called “Lead THE Cause“. It was AWESOME! I have never seen a more transformative youth conference / mission trip.

I am thankful to God for the years that I was able to lead other people’s kids to Lead THE Cause. To be able to witness and be an active part of what God was doing in their lives was truly an amazing and humbling experience. But now that our kids are high school aged, I have lamented the fact that I am no longer in a position to lead them on similar trips.

Well… then again… why not?!

As I thought more about this reality, I came to the conclusion that you don’t really have to have a title or an official position in a church to be actively involved in the spiritual growth and formation of your own children-nor of other people’s children, for that matter. God has given parents the mandate to train up a child in the way they should go (see Proverbs 22:6).

So I decided that I was going to take our two oldest children to Lead THE Cause.

The good LORD has blessed us with a 12 passenger van that we use for ministry purposes, so we decided we may as well try to fill it. In faith, we bought 12 registrations to Lead THE Cause, and then started sending out text messages to find out if anyone was interested in joining us.

God brought together an incredible team from our community.

Our good friends, Joe & Heather Heatwole, agreed to come along and help us “lead” the trip. Their two oldest children joined the crew, as well. The eight of us were joined by four more students, and just like that the van was filled.

We packed up and drove from Ohio to Colorado for an awesome week of ministry, and we watched God do some powerful things in the lives of our kids, our students, and hundreds of other students from around the country.

Throughout the week, as we learned about Jesus and went out into the streets to share our faith, we were a part of a movement that saw thousands of people hear about Jesus through relational evangelism-and hundreds of people actually put their faith in Jesus Christ alone for eternal salvation!

How cool is that?!

Today’s “Favorite Photo of 2022” was taken on the last night of the event, just before we loaded back into the 12 passenger van and drove from Colorado back to Ohio. You may have noticed that it features the excited faces of transformed lives, and it also features a pretty amazing double-rainbow. To us, it felt like a message from heaven… like God was saying, “Well done, good and faithful servants.”