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You’re tired.
Not just physically; though yeah, that too.
You’re tired in your bones. In your soul.
Trying to be a steady husband, an intentional dad, a man of God… but deep down, you feel like you’re falling short. Like you’re carrying more than you know how to hold.
Dad Tired is a podcast for men who are ready to stop pretending and start healing.
Not with self-help tips or religious platitudes, but by anchoring their lives in something (and Someone) stronger.
Hosted by Jerrad Lopes, a husband, dad of four, and fellow struggler, this show is a weekly invitation to find rest for your soul, clarity for your calling, and the courage to lead your family well.
Through honest stories, biblical truth, and deep conversations you’ll be reminded:
You’re not alone. You’re not too far gone. And the man you want to be is only found in Jesus.
This isn’t about trying harder.
It’s about coming home.
Hey guys, I wanna tell you about some dad tired events coming up, hopefully in your area. We've got the dad tired annual retreat happening this week in just a couple days. The team has told me that they will take signups up until the very last day. So if you want to sign up for that. We'd love to have you.
You can go to da tire.com, click the annual retreat tab and join us on Friday. Man, if you are listening at a later date other than the week this episode was launched, make sure you sign up early next year for those. We do those once a year, but we also do DA tired one day conferences all over the country and sometimes around the world.
We've got one the following week, September 28th, 2024, Knoxville, Tennessee, and we're gonna be in joint base Lewis McCord in Washington on October 12th. That is a event for our military men. So it's private, but if you have a Department of Defense id, they tell me you can attend that. We would love to have you be part of that.
Meridian Idaho on November 9th. That's a dad tired one day conference open to the public if you're in that area and over Minnesota, February 8th, open to the public. Would love to have you be part of that. And then there's a men's retreat in Perold, Arkansas. If you want to be part of that, or if you're in that area, that's on Feb, February 27th to March 1st.
If you want to do one of these in your area, you don't see one in your area and you would like to do one, we'd love to come to your church and, uh, partner with your church so we can do our one day dad tired conference at your church. And that's for all men. They don't have to be dads. Um, we've had guys, late teens all the way up to.
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At, or you can host those at your church. Also, if you've got any men's retreats or men's events coming up and you're looking for speakers or someone to come alongside of you and partner with you in that, we'd love to be part of that as well. So you can go to dad tire.com. Again, just click the conferences tab and we'll get you all the information you need.
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Use the promo code Dad Tire at checkout and that will get you 15% off your order. Thank you, range leather for sponsoring today's episode. That being said, let's dive in three.
Newt, I'm really excited, man, to have you on the podcast today and to pick your brain. For the audience who may not be familiar, tell us who you are and what you're up to these days. Yeah, thanks Jared. I'm really glad to be joining you. I'm appreciative of what you're doing and how you're influencing, uh, young Fathers.
My name's Newt Crenshaw. I'm the president and CEO of Young Life. A, uh, global ministry that reaches out to adolescents, all kinds of adolescents. We're in all 50 states in the United States, 105 plus countries around the world, and it's a very relational ministry. Uh, it's a ministry that we believe, uh, makes a difference because we come alongside young people in friendship.
Hmm. We, uh, share the good news of Jesus Christ with them. We love them for who they are, and we continue to love them regardless of their response. So it's a deeply, Hmm. Relational ministry, that's a, a thing that we believe in and believe that, uh, God uses in profound ways. We know and walk alongside about 3 million kids.
Wow. And we know them by name right now on an annual basis. So, um, it's a large ministry. It's been around for 80 plus years. I've been doing it for eight years. Prior to that, I was in business and I was a. Corporate executive, uh, for a Fortune 100 company. Ran large businesses there for over 30 years.
Married to my wife Susan. We have four adult children, two of whom are married, and both of them have two daughters, so we have four granddaughters. That's kinda who I am. That's a sweet stage of life, man. I'm, I'm looking forward to that, that season of life. Yes. That's awesome. I think a lot of guys have heard about Young Life, if they've been in the church, young life's been around for a long time.
How long? Yeah. Uh, it was founded in 1941, uh, by a guy named Jim Rayburn, who was a Presbyterian minister, and he, his senior pastor encouraged him because young people weren't coming to church as often as they had even back then to go where the young people were. And that's what he started, and it grew from there.
I, I think a lot of guys probably have heard of Young Life, but maybe don't know exact, like when you say it's a relational ministry, we want to really become friends with these young people. Well, how are you doing that? Like practically? Yeah. We kind of talk in a very sort of memorable way about, uh, four Cs that we have, as if you wanna call it our methods.
The first one is just being with kids. We call that contact work. It's really just being where kids are and getting to know them. And, uh, having a stable, caring adult in their lives, which is super important. Hmm. Uh, from contact work, as we get to know them, we invite 'em to kind of the first entry point which we call club.
Think about something, uh, somebody once said it was kind of a cross between a rock concert and Sunday school, but it's very welcoming. Place that, uh, once a week or once every other week, music, fun games ability to, to laugh and to be with other folks your age. That would happen as a middle school club. I.
Uh, high school club or at the university level. 'cause we actually come alongside kids throughout those adolescent years in all three of those stages. The third, uh, c would be a, a, a word we call campaigners, but that's really nothing more than a, a kind of a small group. Bible study could be more exploratory in nature, could be more in depth, depending upon the nature of the young people who say they want to be a part of it.
So contact work leads to club. Leads to going deeper in campaigners and in the midst of that, we take kids to camp. We have probably some of the best camps for adolescents, folks call 'em resorts for teenagers. There's over 25 here in the United States physical camps that we own all throughout the us and we own more than a handful outside the United States.
States and take kids to various places. Even if we don't own the camp, we, we do it in in other spots. So those four areas are sort of the ways that we interact with kids. And our camping ministry is not just summer camp where it's five, six, or seven days. We do weekend camps as well during school season.
So young people get lots of chances to be in very beautiful places that were designed for them and accompanied by a leader. To the camp and goes home. So there's that relational context even in the midst of that. I love that. This probably didn't make it up the chain to you, but we're actually doing our dad tired annual retreat at a Young Life camp in September, and so we visited, I was visiting camps all over the country and went to one of your guys' camps.
And was blown away. When you say resort for teenage, I'm like, yeah, this place is very, very nice. Yeah. Uh, so, so this is our third annual retreat, dad tired retreat. And we'll be doing it at one of your guys' camps, which is really cool. I think I, I think I listened to one of your podcasts and I, uh, if, if I heard you correctly, it's in Brevard, so that'd be, uh, what we call Carolina Point.
Yes. Right on the border of, uh, north and South Korea. Oh, boy. It's a nice one. Oh man, it's beautiful. Yeah, beautiful. I'm excited to get up there. When you say the clubs, are those at on the campuses of these middle school, high schools and universities? Yeah, they could be for sure. Oftentimes if there's an open campus and they allow space for that, absolutely.
We find that sometimes schools really want us to be there and we can do it in the middle of the day or after school. But I would say the majority of time it's at a, a, a location outside of the school. We may be doing that contact work in the school setting, uh, where those campuses, uh, allow us to do so.
But clubs are often even hosted at somebody's home. So it could be in a basement or someone's converted barn. Uh, we pick all kinds of places overseas club happens on soccer pitches in, in poorer countries. This is a place they'd gather. We, uh, in some of our cities here in the United States, it'll happen on a basketball court.
Wow. You know, where we would do some basketball associated with. So, so club can take a lot of different modes and be in a lot of different places, but what we need is really fundamentally, uh, a place to gather. To have fun with young people to sing, to laugh, and always, uh, part of a club is to have a brief 10 minute or so, uh, message from the scriptures talking about Jesus's life, who he is.
We really focus on the person of Christ because as our founder said, he's the most attractive and interesting person that's ever walked the face of the, this earth, and it's really, he would say it's a sin to bore a kid with the gospel because it's so dynamic. And so life changing. Hmm. That's an interesting take.
Yeah, I was, the reason I was asking about is does it happen in the school setting is I, when I was in eighth grade, that's really the first time that God had captured my heart in such a way where I realized like, I'm either gonna go this one direction, like pre eighth grade. All my friend, we kind of were all.
For lack of better words, kind of morally on the same page back then, you know, like we all kinda had this similar values, but eighth grade hit and that's when some of my friends started to make some bigger consequential decisions. Right? And that was the first time I had gone to a camp. And that was the first time where I realized like I'm either going to go down that path, right?
Or I'm going to take my faith seriously and try to follow Jesus, which is counter the way that my friends are, some of my friends are going. And so I had this conviction as an eighth grader to start some kind of like. Bible study on my campus at this public middle school campus. And the principal who in hindsight I think was very against it, they said, you can do this, but you have to find a classroom to facilitate it.
And a teacher that will kind of reside over it. And so I was going teacher by teacher. This was in California. I was going teacher by teacher asking. Can I do this? And I was getting like borderline ridiculed by some of these teachers, just absolutely not churches for Sundays, I don't remember how many teachers I asked, but finally I found a PE teacher who, he was walking away from me and I said, you know, Mr.
So-and-so, and he's, he's walking away like wanted nothing to do with it. I was like, would you be interested in hosting a Bible study on campus? And he literally just stopped in his tracks and turned around and said, yes, I would absolutely love to do that. And that was a really pivotal moment for me in my spiritual journey.
But I was curious. It sounds like they're not all in these campuses, but I was curious like what's the reception nowadays for these kind of clubs on campuses? Are, are campuses still open to that or do you find that's pretty challenging to find schools that will be able to host it? I think your experience is true in many places.
It's challenging. I think our society today as it becomes, you know, more secularized with people believing that separation of church and state means you can't really talk about faith matters, does tend to cause some of the, uh, campuses to be closed down. So we have to be careful. One of the things we do, much like you were instructed to do.
Is we try to, to gain admission through the appropriate channels and ensure that this is gonna be okay. We wanna be there, if you will, by invitation, or at least by permission. And it varies, but a lot of places are closed down. We find increasingly a lot lower income schools. Really would love for us to be there, though.
Mm-hmm. Because they may be lacking some of the resources to do things with young people. And many of our young life leaders also volunteer in other ways. They volunteer as coaches or tutors. So we wanna come alongside and administer in very tangible ways to young people and that school community. But fortunately, there's a lot of teachers out there also who know the Lord Jesus and wanna follow him.
And so we have a thing called teacher staff as well. Hmm. Probably goes, needs to be said. You know, young life, we have about 5,200 full-time staff people around the world. Hmm. But we have over 60,000 volunteers who are in the lives of kids. So while we may be in many instances, staff led. In our ministries, we are absolutely volunteer powered and we call those folks leaders.
Yeah, because they're leaders. They're in the lives of young people. A stable, caring adult, someone who knows Christ and can really love these, uh, young people for who they are, where they are. Wow. I love that. I love the discipleship model. That you guys are using. That's awesome. Well, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on today is really to, I, I came across the study that you guys put on this research that you guys had done, and some of the things that I had read in the research fascinated me.
We have a lot of dads who are listening, many of whom would have younger kids or are approaching those pre-teen, teen years. And because you guys are working primarily with that demographic, I'm really curious to pick your brain on some of the things that you found in that research. Can you tell us a little bit about the study?
You did, and then maybe we'll dive into some of the findings that came out from that. Right. Let me give you a little bit of a high sense of the study and the why behind it, and a couple of key takeaways. We really wanted to dig in and understand this next generation, really the next two generations, gen Z, which is in that 15 to 25 range roughly, and then Gen Alpha, which is coming behind them in.
Up to about 13 or so years old. Hmm. And so this is important for us because we feel like God wants to do amazing things in this next generation. And kinda like normal, the older generations talk in that younger generation down a lot and, and we think we'd like to raise them up and shine a light and say, who are they?
Mm-hmm. And how can we be for them? So we did a study that was really designed to understand at the core relationships in a very sort of basic way, how they're relating to themselves, IE, their self-concept, how they relate to others, and then how they relate to God as well. We did this on a global nature because the type of ministry we are, we surveyed over 7,200 young people, ages 13 to 24.
Who responded to this? Uh, so we got a few gen alphas, but mostly Gen Zs. Okay. Uh, in this, uh, study, uh, it was in the United States, in Mexico, in the uk, in India, and in four countries in Sub-Saharan, Northeastern Africa, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Kenyan, Gand. We have a lot of ministry in these places and big findings were first off, uh, a lot of folks think Gen Z.
They're on their phones all the time and they don't wanna relate in the real world. That's contrary. They do. They wanna relate in the real world. They want flesh and blood relationships, and they want them with adults. That's very important. They desire to be seen and people to ask questions of them and to get to know them.
They also are, as we found out, as we think about their self-concept, 40% of them don't feel like they're worthy of being loved, which is really something we should take to heart. About 50% have some affiliation with faith. And we found, and the last thing I'll say is that for young people to flourish, we've got kind of a model that came out of this.
Three things need to be present. This self-concept I described, I. IE worthy to be loved, am I worthy to be loved? And this isn't just by their parents, but it's friends, God and others. Even romantic love would, would fall into that. So self-concept or worthy to be loved, a sense of belonging. IEI, I'm a part of a community.
And then thirdly, that I have some stable, solid relationships, not just with peers, but also with adults in my life. Hmm. And when those things are present. Young people are flourishing when they're not. They tend not to flourish and faith actually causes those three things to be more likely to occur in flourishing to happen.
So faith makes a difference across that triad I just described. Yeah, that makes sense. How did you guys measure, like what kinds of questions and answers were you getting to measure that these young people want relationship with adults? What did they say? Yeah, we would just ask them. We'd ask them about the nature of the relationships they have in their families with their parents.
Ask them questions like, if you're in a tough situation, who's your go-to person? Who would you go to? 75% of the time they would say they're moms. Yeah. Right. Even these older students and young people, 50% of the time, they would say they're dads. As we're talking to dads here, dads need to know we're in the game.
They, as they age, they tend to rely more on their friends and they talk about those friendships. They want to go and, and, uh, speak to them. We ask them about the nature of those relationships, what's important? They desire authentic relationships. They want to be heard. Mm-hmm. They want someone to explore who they are and ask questions about them, and they would begin to divulge some of those things.
They want to be Gen Z wants to be known as kind and caring that this is something that's super important to them. Maybe because of all the hard things going on in this world that they have access to through their phones and social media, but these are the kind of things we would ask them, and they answered very honestly.
Yeah. One of the things that I read from that study, the 75%, the two thirds of the three quarters of them that said that they, um, would go to their mom if they were in need. Uh, in, in many ways that was encouraging. 'cause you're like, you know that at least it's mom, you know, it's not Google or it's not chat, GBT or some other thing.
Like they're going to mom when they're in crisis. But there was another part that was discouraged. It was only 50% were dads, but I guess the 50%, you could look at that glass half full. You know, half of the half of the young people are still wanting to go to dad when they're in a scenario. I don't really have a question on that just struck me, you know, that mom and dad were still such a big part of their lives and, and still such a valuable resource.
I think that's one of the fears that I have as a parent of young ones is, uh, how quickly do I dissolve as the primary influencer in their life and when will they stop saying. Uh, no thanks mom and dad. You don't really get it anymore, you know what I mean? I do. Well, having raised, uh, four kids, our kids are ages 35, uh, down to 25.
As I mentioned earlier. Um, my wife Susan, and my experiences are, you'll never, I. Fail to be an important resource for them. You may not be the initial go-to, but you'll be foundational. And my encouragement to young dads is be making those investments of presence, of, uh, caring, of listening. Coming alongside your kids when they're young, preteen, if you will, and it'll pay dividends in those teenage years.
I know there's a lot of, can be a lot of anxiety about, oh wow, what's it gonna be like when those teenagers happen and they hit those years. But frankly, our sense is, is you make those deposits early on, it'll pay off. And they want to hear from their parents. They want to hear from a stable, caring adult.
And a good number of, of the kids we, uh, surveyed said they at least had one. Uh, stable, caring adult who wasn't their parent. Mm-hmm. Uh, that they could count on as well. I do think it's something that requires being present. Mm-hmm. Somebody once used this metaphor with me, you've gotta be present enough quantity of time for those quality of time moments, or as he called it, an open window moment when they're gonna open that window and let you in.
You can't just manufacture that. You need to be around for when a young person decides to say, Hey, I'm gonna expose something. I'm really feeling deeply my heart to you, and we wanna be there as dads. We wanna be there. Yeah, that's important and really good. I mean, the amount of times that I've had really deep conversations with my children.
I've got a 13-year-old now. He's my oldest, but the amount of times I've had deep conversation with him that hit at a time that I wasn't expecting. You know what I mean? It's the quantity that allows the space, like you said, for that when that door opens up. 'cause it will hit at a moment that you, it was almost never an intentional time.
It was never a time that I had planned, I should say, for us to have some kind of deep conversation. And yet it, because of the quantity of time that moment really allowed for the quality that you're talking about. You're a couple generations ahead of the, especially the alpha that you guys were surveying from your perspective, like what is your pulse?
On young people. I'm, I'm a millennial, so there's looking be, I remember when I was the young kid in the room, which is, you know, I remember getting hired and being like, I was the young voice, and now I, I'm the old man it feels like in the, in the room, but looking at the generation behind me and the generations behind me, it's like, man, that it seems like I, I've become the old man that says like, oh, you guys are doing it wrong.
You know, like, mm-hmm. I'm the very stereotypical, but from your perspective, what are some things that maybe discourage you and what are some things that encourage you about the generations that are coming up behind us? Right. Yeah. Well, a couple things I mentioned earlier, these generations coming up behind, they wanna make a difference.
They care about things like kindness. They care about things like justice, which the scriptures talk about both of them. And in fact, that's super important. Um, they want to have a, a sense that they can find. Um, their unique calling in life. So they're pursuing ways, you know, to have an impact in this world.
And I think those are positive. I think what you've heard and has been written widely about they, they're challenged with social media and some of the hard things that come out of that. Particularly young women, I think, uh, they struggle with a lot of the comparison that occurs on social media, young boys, particularly with pornography.
Mm-hmm. Which is ubiquitous and increasingly hardcore. So this is a challenge as well. I. That they may struggle with, and therefore sometimes their self-concept or self-esteem may be diminished. They feel guilty or they don't feel like they're enough. And I think that as I, I would encourage us as dads, uh, dads of younger kids, is just to continue to tell your young person that they are loved and that they're worthy of love made in God's image, and absolutely lovable.
And as such, they don't need to do anything to earn that love. And even if they make mistakes or things go off the rails, that happens for all of us that doesn't diminish the love that God or, or we have for them. This is, I think, key for us in this, uh, uh, period of time. And I think there's a sense also that by having young people get out and have experiences, not just online, which they want to be, beyond that, it helps them build resilience.
Which I think they desire that resilience, but maybe in some cases, as a recent book that was written by Jonathan Het, part of his thesis called It was on the Anxious Generation. Mm-hmm. He said, maybe part of the challenge has been we've been overprotective parents in a sense, in the physical realm. Right.
Yeah. To allow kids to have experiences while maybe being too free in the, yeah. Uh, internet realm for them where they've been hit. So I think there's some opportunities for us to help build resilience for them, giving them experiences, but also monitoring the impact on when they get a phone and when they begin to interact on social media because it has such a psychological impact on them.
Yeah. But those are some thoughts. Yeah. I heard him talk about that on, in an interview, on a podcast, and he was saying. What you just said, where like, we're really in, in today's world, our kids are less likely to be kidnapped, statistically speaking out in the real world. But statistically, the amount of harm that can be done online is just, uh, insane amount, the harm that is happening through, uh, with a child in their screen and social media.
And yet we give so much freedom online and way less freedom out in the real world. That was really fascinating and I think. Convicting for many of us young parents. I have noticed, I'm, I'm interested to see how those generations, gen Z and Alpha, I think Alpha is such a funny name for that generation, but how those generations will respond to technology when they get to be about, well, basically parenting age, so mid twenties on.
Because they were born with screens. I mean, the, in their hands, they've had screens their whole life. From my generation. We knew what it was like to not have a screen. Right. And so there's some nostalgia there, but it does seem like they're even making some, like I heard of this, I think I mentioned this on the podcast recently, but there, there was this hangout I heard about, I don't, I think in San Diego where they were promoting these young people were promoting this.
I don't know what, it was a hangout session where you couldn't bring your phone, you had to just sit and talk, and young people were promoting this and doing it. It wasn't like a bunch of older people saying, Hey, you should try this. It was them themselves really saying, Hey, let's try to talk to each other without a phone.
And I thought that was interesting indicator of like, maybe they're already, maybe they're recognizing within their own generation that this isn't actually healthy for us and that we need other ways. So that, that gave me some encouragement when I heard that I was at a camp. Recently, uh, a family camp and they had college students overseeing the children.
And man, I was so encouraged, I don't get enough time with young people like college age students, which I miss. I'm going to ask you once we stop recording here, how I can become a volunteer for one of the, you know, get some young people in my neighborhood. But man, I was actually very, very encouraged by their, I I saw some of those things that you mentioned that you found in the study that they really did long to hear.
Like from my wife and I, they wanted relationship with adults. They, it wasn't that, it wasn't that they thought that they were, we were old and irrelevant. It was like, we want to hear what's it like to be married? What are the challenges you felt in marriage? What are the challenges you felt in your faith?
And it was, so, my wife and I, we were so encouraged by our time at the family camp, but we were deeply encouraged by these young people who really loved Jesus and were thoughtful and insightful, and they were very encouraging to our soul. So it gave me hope, gave me a lot of hope. I'm glad to hear that, Jared, that's, we find that every day in our ministry.
Yeah. It takes adults, uh, risking a little bit to move into the lives of, uh, teens, young people, right. Yeah. Because you can get rejected there, et cetera, but you'll find more often than not, they're very, very interested in, I. And, um, learning about what you know and, uh, engaging and they are remarkable. This generation's gonna do amazing things if we have hope for, uh, harnessing, uh, in a positive way.
Uh, artificial intelligence. I know you just did a podcast recently on that. Uh, it's gonna be this generation that's gonna figure that out. Yeah. And interesting enough to your whole phone attachment, uh, comment. Uh, we ask our, when young people come to our camps, weekend camp or a full week camp, we ask them to turn their phones into their leaders and we storm 'em for 'em.
Mm-hmm. And at first there could be a little tension, but they all thank us. Yeah. And increasingly now, I think more so than even 10 years ago. Uh, they're happy to get rid of them because they play such a persistent role in their lives. To get rid of them just sort of begins to open their minds up. For other relationships, for what God has for them.
So I think you're onto something there. Hmm. One thing that we, I try to encourage the, the guys listening to our show is to see their lives on mission for the glory of God that you are being used to see his kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. To really view your life, not just as your own life, but as a scent one into the world for the gospel's sake to take risks, as you said.
And so I. Part of this is a selfish question, but I'm curious, are there opportunities for young families to host anything or to get involved, like for young moms and dads to invite these young people in? And forgive me for my ignorance if this is widely known information, but are there, do you have to be a.
Uh, just outta college to help out with these college students or high school students or can how, you know, what are some of the demographics that you're looking for? Volunteers. We've got leaders. We've got high school aged to mature believers, maturing believers who are, uh, leaders in middle schoolers lives, college aged students who are ministering and, and leaders in high school.
And. And middle school lives. We also have ministry for teen moms called Young Lives and also a ministry for kids with disabilities called Capernaum. And recently, in the past several years for kids who are in the system, foster care, and kids who are homeless or even in juvenile detention. So we wanna minister to all kids, and truthfully, we've got leaders who are in their seventies.
Wow. And we've got leaders clear down, as I stated, you know, in college age. So it's something we say. If you have, uh, a deep desire to, to reach out to young people, as you described, be on mission, a person, a cent one with the gospel, then we would love for you to join us. You could look in your local area to find out if there's a young life.
Club or ministry there, you could go on to young life.org. You could find the results of the relates study there in their complete form, but also find out and and tap on there and see where your town is or your city is. And generally speaking, we're gonna be somewhat close by even if we're not in your small town where there's gonna be a ministry there.
And there's lots of ways to get engaged in young life as a leader. It's not just walking alongside young people. You could be on. Our local committee, kind of a group of caring adults who sponsor the ministry in a given town or community or school. We need workers and helpers at our camps as well. And this is a, a, a way that you could come alongside some people drive buses, some kind of serve meals, et cetera.
So. If, if you're able to, to jump in, we've probably got a need. Cool. Well, I love the idea of filling our living room up with young people. That sound, that sound, I mean, even more young people than I already have running around my house right now and going crazy. But, uh, I, I mean, not my own children destroying the house.
I mean like college age, high school students. And just kind of, I guess, being married and following Jesus and parenting on display for them, that sounds like something that would be really cool. You know, just to invite them, like watch us struggle through what it looks like to love Jesus and be married faithfully to each other and to raise our kids.
And I think that could be a, a really cool mission field for a lot of. Young families, thank you for taking the time to kind of give us some insight on what Young Life's doing, and it sounds like I, again, I love the discipleship relational model of reaching these young people. I'm excited to spend some time at one of your guys' camps and highly encourage all of our listeners to go.
I. To the website and check out all the findings that you guys found on that study. I think it's really helpful for us as young parents as well. But I appreciate your time there. Thank you. Yeah. Can I close with a quick comment? Yeah, please. Story I'll tell you about my dad who died 12 years ago. My dad got involved with, he met the Lord later in his life and he got involved in young life after he was walking with the Lord for about five years.
He was dying of cancer back in 2012 and in those final months I talked to him. He lived nearby and I talked to him, uh, multiple times a week, and he told me that he never had so much joy in his life. Mm-hmm. That when he served Jesus. Through young life. Young life transformed our family. To your point earlier.
Mm-hmm. It made a difference and my dad, I believe is happy right now as he is, as he is with the Lord, just as he was full of joy, being somebody who would come alongside young people and help them grow in their faith, to know and follow Jesus. I'm telling you, there's nothing like it. Yeah, I believe it, man.
What an encouraging story. Brother. Thank you so much. It's been great getting to know you and I look forward to staying in touch. Absolutely. God bless. Thank you, Jared. Thanks, man. 3, 2, 1.