Welcome to the new blog for the newly renamed Love Walks! It has been a whirlwind of a year for me personally, and this transition for our organization is a fitting one given this season of my life. In the past year I finally finished up my degree program in Nonprofit Leadership and Management, I spent two months in Rwanda for an internship with Food for the Hungry, I have continued to pursue photography as it seems God has provided me with this craft as my own form of tent making (i.e. Paul throughout his ministry), and I have downsized my financial commitments drastically moving out of my house and now selling my car.

You may wonder why in the first blog post for Love Walks I’m telling you so much about my own life. It’s because God has made it more and more apparent to me that the burdens he has placed on my heart, the experiences he has given me, and the opportunities that lay ahead are all connected. He has and is shaping me to better glorify Him and respond to His call of being a light in his Kingdom. Such is his call for all of us. To be a light on a hill, a presence so strongly reflecting His glory that darkness simply cannot co-exists.

I started Love God Love People is 2005, feeling both a burden and a hope that this generation could push through the stereotypes of what service of God looks like; learning to let God use us in the unique and powerful ways he has created us to be used. It was my hope that we would see missions not as a once a year trip to an exotic country where we work on a project and then head home swapping pictures and stories and then going back to the status quo; but rather a posture we take each and every day as we use our talents, passions and obedience to glorify God and share the hope that we have been given in him!

Over the next year we as an organization will strive to push forward in engaging the young adult generation here in Phoenix, challenging them and inviting them to walk with us on this journey. We will continue our work in Mexico, traveling down on a monthly basis and working with local churches and ministries to serve the community there. We are also working with Phoenix Seminary to begin an equipping class that utilizes experts from nonprofits, universities, and churches to pour into this generation of Christ followers in an extensive and shaping way; equipping youth to not only know what it is that God has created in them uniquely, but how this fits into his vision of redemption in this world.

When Christ walked the earth he had a specific call. Being led by the Father he never wavered from this call. Through trials, temptations and distractions of all kinds he remained faithful all the way to the cross. So now in this season we ask you to do the same. Join us as a community, as a the body of Christ, and help us follow Jesus’s lead. Why? Because Love Walks. It did and it does, it’s upon us to follow that lead!