“I knew at an early age that I wanted Jesus in my heart and life,” William wrote. Even though he desired to live for Christ, William didn’t have a strong model of what it meant to live out his faith. As a child, William harbored secrets at home. While he and his mom...
Timothy spent his high school summers volunteering on mission trips with a local church. But Timothy wasn’t a Christian—he was a professed atheist. “Although the youth center [that I had joined] was separate from the church, they often invited us to events and...
“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” – 2 Corinthians 5:17 Jose grew up in a large Catholic family. His parents’ marriage, rife with abuse and addiction, ended when Jose was young. Left to raise seven...
In 2009, Peter was at his lowest. Twenty-nine years old, deeply entrenched in his gang and desperately lonely after serving the first five years of a lengthy prison sentence, he cried out to God to bring a good woman into his life. “It’s not like I thought of God as a...
Paul grew up in one of the roughest neighborhoods in his city. “I was involved in gangs as a teenager and got in trouble in school, always fighting and hanging out with the wrong crowd, constantly getting suspended from school,” he wrote. One of his friends, who...
At Crossroads, we have been sending Christmas cards to our students for over a decade, reminding them that they are not forgotten during the holiday season. This is the only Christmas card many of our students receive, and the seemingly small gesture can have a...
