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January 6, 2023

'22 In Review

By Barry Rudesill

To all of our participants, Facilitators, and advisors: Happy New Year!

Usually, I like to take the first two weeks of the year to bring you up to date on where The Trek has been, and where it’s going in the New Year! This week, I get the exciting job of telling you what we accomplished in 2022:

By far and away, the biggest challenge for us in 2022 was the switch of our servers. In February, we discovered that our web-hosting company had us sharing our physical server with a spammer. Because of that, our emails were routinely getting blocked and we had our server go down on more than one occasion. Needless to say, this was more than a little...annoying!

It took us about a month – and a TON of help from a wonderful man named Pavel – to get the servers moved, online, and working. Since then, our emails go through and our website has had no downtime! The new servers are also faster, so we’re hoping that will help to create a better experience for all of our Trekkers!

Next, we finished The Bridge – Facilitator’s Guide. This has been an enormous task, as we’ve been trying to make sure that everything we say is as Biblically-solid as we can make it. We have already begun the process of uploading the new Guide, and I should complete the task in the next two weeks. This also means that The Trek – Student Edition will have a new Bridge – Facilitator’s Guide, as well!

This year, I (Barry) got to visit a prison and teach to some of the inmates there. We are hoping that there will be an opportunity to take The Trek into prisons in 2023. We’re working on setting up a trial, day-long program to begin with; and it would be my honor to go back and work with those men!

And speaking of prisons, in 2022 we were approached by a group in Iowa that is looking for a “transitioning program” for people leaving prison. Right now, when you’re released you’re simply sent back home; no new tools, no changes to your behaviors or beliefs, and no support network. Needless to say, the number of people who re-offend is high. The hope is that by using The Trek, they can reduce the recidivism rate by giving people the knowledge and the tools to make significant, permanent, life-long change. The talks are in the opening stages, and there’s a lot of work to be done, but we’re excited to be a part of the conversation. (Now if we can begin the same conversation in Wisconsin!)

As for us, personally, both Maria and I were able to lead some in-person classes. (We really missed those during the pandemic!) But I think, for us, the best thing in 2022 has been some of the one-on-one opportunities that we’ve had to share with others. We’ve worked with some amazing people, seen some unbelievable changes, and it’s always an honor to be invited along on someone else’s journey! (We’ll be talking about this more next week, as well!)

Also, this year I got to spend a lot of time preaching on Sunday mornings with a few different churches. On those occasions, we spent a LOT of time talking about who we are in Christ! (If you’re a Christian, you ARE a “Child of God!”) In addition, I was invited into a number of small group programs to talk about the importance of how we define ourselves...and who we let define us! (If you want either Maria or I to come speak to your group, the going rate is a 20-ounce Diet Dew for Barry and a 20-ounce Diet Pepsi for Maria.)

Other than that, there IS one more change that happened at The Trek this year: we published our first book! But, I’m not going to share any more about that this week. You’ll have to wait until next week to get the rest of the story! (I’ll got into more detail on our Bridge post, as well!)

We would like to thank all of you who have joined us on this journey so far. You will never know how much we truly love and appreciate all of you! (To our Facilitators, we need to start making dinner plans!)

Until next week, we hope you enjoy your journey!

- The Trek

January 6, 2023

'22 In Review

By Barry Rudesill

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