The most surprising thing here is that people who live here are always searching for the next adventure, and that is the same with Jesus in the fact that living this life is an adventure, because He will guide you to where He wants you to go.

And I have used this analogy up at Olympic to try to bring Jesus into the conversations, But the biggest issue is that people turn off to the fact that a “Christian” is supposed to do, and what “church’ is, and to most of these people these words are boiled down to legalism.

So throughout this whole summer I did my best to hang out and adjust my preliminary thoughts about these people and simply be with the drug addicts, the pot smokers, the drunk people.

But the hardest part was not doing that, but finding the right balance to be filled first with my own time with God and work on my own relationship with Jesus before I try and “force” it on another person.

JD T., Olympic National Park, 2015