l My grandmother would be proud, I think. My first photograph was of an STP oil sticker. One Christmas when I was in Jr. High, I was given a new camera and I was anxious to try it out. On anything! My grandmother never let me forget that first picture as my photographic career progressed. In time, I graduated to photographing old weathered shacks in the Colorado Rockies, pretty girls, working on the yearbook in high school, and when I was in college, apprenticing for a couple of incredibly great photographers, one a wedding and portrait photographer, the other a commercial photographer.

I still have the negatives from that STP shoot taken so long ago, I don't shoot for yearbooks anymore, now I am the one who apprentices when I see someone willing to work, and I am still shooting pretty girls: my daughters who I love dearly.

My pictures tell stories now.

l Alex Strauch was my pastor in college. I learned two valuable lessons from him which I have carried with me my entire life. First was to fully engage passion, and second was to always seek truth in my life. I was to find that neither was particularly easy to take hold of. It is easy to be passionate for a career, or an interest. But Alex defined passion as something you would lay your life down for, something so dear, so desired that you would sell all you had to acquire it. Once he established that in my life, he pointed me to Jesus Christ.

In the Bible, God frequently directs His people to love the outcasts, and to care for the widows and the orphans. As my love for Jesus grew, so did my passion for Him. That love and passion created in my wife and I a willingness to follow His direction and love others as He loves them, to consider others as more important than myself. That is how we came to follow His lead and take in orphaned children, give them a name and parents, and a home.

To love another and count them even more important than yourself is a foreign concept to us in America today. It is rooted in what Jesus did for all men on the cross, when He willingly laid down His life for the sin of all mankind. All of us have sinned and fallen short of God's righteousness, whether we have gossiped, held contempt for another, killed or committed adultery. Yet God, who is rich in mercy and love, sent His Son to bear our sin and punishment and stand in our place.