2024 Highlights and 2025 Dreams
Sincerely Media. (2018). Happy New Year Clipart [Image]. Unsplash.
As the calendar year turns over, we rejoice in all of God’s blessings in 2024 and look ahead with joyful anticipation to 2025! Here’s a short recap of some of the best highlights of 2024, and some goals and dreams for what’s ahead in 2025:
2024 HIGHLIGHTS
Growing our staff
After months and months of praying, planning, and preparing, we were beyond thrilled to welcome Alex Wolfe as a full-time employee in August! In his role as Assistant Director of Programs and Development, Alex will provide support to new and existing LGW chapters, help fundraise to further the LGW mission, and so, so much more. Bringing a second full-time person on staff (in addition to co-founder Dan) took a lot of leg-work for our new and growing organization, and every little bit was worth it. Alex has been, and will be, completely essential to our continuing growth in so many ways, and we are deeply grateful to have him on the team!
Dan with Alex on his first day.
Board retreat
We have been so blessed by an incredible board of directors from Life-Giving Wounds’ inception in 2020, and for the very first time we met in person for a weekend. (Our board is scattered around the country.) It was a deeply meaningful few days of prayer, reflection, strategizing, and joyful fellowship with people who have given so much time, talent, and treasure to seeing Life-Giving Wounds grow from an idea to a full-fledged reality. Huge thank you to our board, for all that you do.
Members of the LGW team and board of directors at our first in person retreat.
SEEK conference
In January, our team attended the SEEK conference (run by FOCUS) for the first time, and it was incredible! Beth Sri, one of our board members and LGW leaders, gave an amazing talk on healing for adult children of divorce, which led to so many worthwhile conversations and connections at our LGW booth. We were so grateful for the volunteer leaders who made time to be present and available during these days to meet with hundreds of college students and others eager to hear about what Life-Giving Wounds has to offer ACODs. Definitely something to continue (as we are in January 2025!)
Our booth at SEEK 2024.
Retreats, of course!
In 2024, we hosted twenty-two retreats around the country, literally from coast to coast, as well as in Toronto, Canada (and including our internationally-reaching online retreat). This is up from seventeen the year prior. And beyond the numbers, the greatest joy is knowing that we are providing ever-more opportunities for adult children of divorce to come together, grieve, process their pain, walk together with Jesus, and find support and love for the wounds they have experienced. Each and every retreat bears so much fruit of healing and it is an honor to be witnesses to that.
2024 retreat photo from our Southern California chapter.
Growing number of support groups
We also expanded our support group offerings in 2024, with more chapters taking up our revamped curriculum (based on our book and workbook) and providing ongoing support for local ACODs outside of the retreat setting. The feedback here, too, has been overwhelmingly positive, and we are happy to provide another modality for our chapters to create spaces of love and encouragement for ACODs. More to come with that in 2025!
Website revamp
Last but not least, our website (which launched back in 2019, as we were preparing to become an official non-profit) got a much-needed trim-up and face-lift this year. Our wonderful web designer Caden had some fabulous insights on how to make the website more user-friendly and streamlined, and we love it! One of the best new features: a clickable map where you can see all the current chapters.
2025 DREAMS
Continue growing our team
As we move into 2025, we are keenly aware of a continued need to grow our team in order to meet the ever-steady interest in bringing retreats, launching chapters, and providing more resources to adult children of divorce across the U.S. and beyond. This is an ongoing discernment about how best to meet this demand, and we pray for the resources to be able to best expand our trained team (both paid and volunteer) and also for God to raise up more talented men and women who have a passion – like us – to bring healing and a voice to adult children of divorce. (P.S. Check out our Collaborate page to see ways to help bring LGW to your area, or discern a volunteer role with us!)
Provide more opportunities for healing
This is an ongoing, forever dream! It includes breaking new ground in new locations with new LGW chapters (we already have at least five set for 2025!); equipping more chapters to run support groups in tandem with their annual or biannual retreats; and creating more modalities for healing opportunities, such as our long-desired “Perfect Love Casts Out Fear” program for couples (you can find our OSV Innovation Challenge Finals pitch here to learn more about the project). We have wanted to expand into online courses for a while (but: see need for more team members, above 😉) and hopefully 2025 will make some fantastic progress with these new ideas, as well as nurturing all of our twenty-eight-and-counting chapters! If your diocese does not yet have a chapter, and you, or someone you know, is interested in working with us to host a chapter, we invite you to check out this page: https://www.lifegivingwounds.org/be-a-chapter-host.
Expanding marketing outreach
We want to do more, and more effective marketing in 2025, so that we can reach more and more people who are looking for support after their parents’ divorce or separation. The harvest is plentiful! We always love when people reach out through social media after learning for the first time that yes, there is support for them as ACODs. And we are always brainstorming ways and strategies so that Life-Giving Wounds can be better known everywhere – not for our own sake, but so that we can get the support we have to more people who are searching for it. (P.S. If you follow us online, please share our content! So much of our growth has been from ACODs or friends of LGW who tell others.)
Grow our campus and seminary programs
We have already worked with a few campus ministries and seminaries and have seen tremendous results for college students and seminarians – both uniquely situated to need and benefit from healing of family wounds, as they discern their own vocations and relationships, or prepare to be spiritual fathers to others (so many of whom come from broken homes). We want to develop these “arms” of LGW more extensively through more partnerships with schools and seminaries, and finessing our programs to be the best fit for these arenas. (Love this idea? Consider donating a copy of our book to your local campus ministry or seminary’s library!)
Fr. Mario Majano, LGW National Chaplain & Hispanic Ministry Advisor, stands with Fr. Ben Petty next to "Let the Children of Divorce Come to Me" painted by the artist Michael Corsini. It was commissioned by, and in consultation with, Life-Giving Wounds ministry. It is the first-ever Christian sacred art meant specifically for the healing of children from divorced, separated, or broken families.
There are of course more dreams than these! But hopefully this gives a sense of where our hearts are heading into 2025, and where we are praying to see doors opening. (p.s. This is not a fundraising-focused blog but IF this moves your heart, of course funds are helpful to make these dreams a reality! Volunteers are also important, and if you have interest in sharing your talents with us, please reach out!😊) Please pray for all adult children of divorce in 2025, for whatever their hearts need - and pray for us at Life-Giving Wounds to respond boldly to the Lord’s call and - with Him - reach more ACODs with God’s love and healing.
Prayer: Litany of Healing for Families
Authored and narrated by Simone Rizkallah and available in the Amen app or direct on their website here.
Pope St. Sylvester I, whose memory we celebrate at the close of the year, you oversaw a great period of transformation and growth within the Church after a long period of immense suffering. Please pray for the Life-Giving Wounds ministry: that we, like you, may respond to how God is calling us at this moment in time and that we, like you, may share the healing love of Jesus with a wounded and weary world.