Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
This book is the fruit of God’s Spirit prompting us, bringing us together, and using a village of people around us to make it a reality! Our first and deepest gratitude goes to God, giver of all good gifts.
Special thanks to our editor, Stephanie Duncan Smith at Baker Books, and our agent, Greg Johnson at WordServe Literary, for urging us to move forward on this important project and for helping Kara and Brad discover Kristel as a gifted writing partner. From start to finish, Stephanie asked all the right questions and relentlessly kept us focused on teen readers. Our entire publishing team at Baker Books is just plain amazing. We are especially grateful to Eileen Hanson, Brianna DeWitt, and the rest of the marketing crew for laboring so cheerfully to bring this book into the world.
The research grounding this devotional is detailed in 3 Big Questions That Change Every Teenager, and while we won’t rename here all the people who touched that project, it’s important to call out that neither book would exist without the twenty-seven diverse teenagers who generously shared their stories of identity, belonging, and purpose. In order to protect their confidentiality, we’ve given them aliases, but they are very real people with very sacred stories. We were equally dependent on the other members of the interview team, who spent well over one hundred hours asking questions and listening deeply: Kat Armas, Macy Davis, Tyler Greenway, Jennifer Guerra Aldana, Garrison Hayes, Jane Hong-Guzmán de León, Helen Jun, and Andy Jung. To everyone who participated in interview transcription, analysis, literature review, advising, and synthesis, a hearty THANK YOU again.
The entire Fuller Youth Institute team has endlessly supported this project, and Kara and Brad are especially thankful to Yulee Lee and Jake Mulder for their partnership in senior leadership as well as the team members whose day-to-day work made this book launch possible: Macy Davis, Rachel Dodd, Mai Anh Hall, Nica Halula, Jennifer Hananouchi, Roslyn Hernández, Andy Jung, Issac Kim, John Kwok, Will Lewis, and Giovanny Panginda. Special thanks to Tim Galleher for helping us gather student-reader feedback to improve our first draft, and to Ahren Martinez and Jennifer Guerra Aldana for offering additional cultural review. We are so very grateful for the generous funders who make our research and resources possible, in particular Lilly Endowment Inc.
Crystal Chiang and the wizarding curriculum team at Orange Students dared to collaborate with us to take the findings from 3 Big Questions That Change Every Teenager and develop middle and high school youth ministry curriculum called The Big Questions. We’re so glad they did, and we hope leaders and students will find these resources partner well for deeper kingdom impact!
Kristel would especially like to thank her parents, Kristabel and Danilo Lopez, for all the sacrifices they made by immigrating to another country and for laying foundations of both faith and writing in her life. She also thanks the leadership at Transformation Church for their support, prayers, and encouragement—not only in this project but in daily ministry life.
Finally, eternal gratitude goes to our spouses, Dave Powell, Alex Acevedo, and Missy Griffin, for making writing possible—especially midpandemic. And huge thanks to our kids, whose feedback made this a better book and whose lives make us better people: Nathan, Krista, and Jessica Powell; Liam and Isabel Acevedo; and Anna, Kara, and Joel Griffin. This book is dedicated to your own journeys toward identity, belonging, and purpose.