When Evan first walked into a Trail Life meeting, he was 11 years old and looking for something different.
It was late 2020. Covid had disrupted nearly everything, school had become a difficult environment, and his after-school situation offered little stability.
“There were lots of fights and just a general lack of supervision,” Evan remembers of school. After school wasn't much better. “We would go out and just walk through Clarksburg, totally unsupervised. You can imagine how that went. It wasn’t a good situation.”
His mom, Lauren, knew he needed something different—structure, healthy relationships, and men who would invest in him. They found it through a Trail Life Troop at Horizons Church near Clarksburg, West Virginia.
Years later, when church leaders were considering whether Trail Life was a ministry worth continuing, a Troop leader named Terry pointed across the church youth group at Evan and several other young men.
“You see those guys?” Terry asked. “They’re some of the best leaders, best examples we have in our youth group, right?”
The pastor agreed.
“Those guys are all Trailmen.”
The ministry continued.
The boy who had entered Trail Life looking for stability had become part of the evidence for why the next generation of boys needed it.
For Evan, the change began outdoors. His Troop camped on farms, hiked through the West Virginia woods, canoed the Clarion River, fished for trout, and built shelters on cold winter campouts.
“There is a healing part of being out there in nature,” Evan says, “a peacefulness away from the chaos.”
That quiet began doing something deeper in him. He continues, “When you’re out in the middle of nowhere, and you come to the end of the day, it’s just so peaceful.”
Evan began connecting those experiences with what he saw in Scripture.
“In the Bible, Jesus would sometimes withdraw and go out into the wild, or just find a quiet place for a while,” he says. “Many examples are given of Jesus going away to solitary places and praying.”
For a boy who had experienced plenty of chaos, the wilderness became a place to be still. But Trail Life didn't simply remove Evan from difficult things. It gave him a place to face difficult things differently.
Cold campouts still had to be endured. Fires had to be started when the wood was wet. Shelters had to be built. Problems had to be solved.
Evan began discovering that something that seemed overwhelming often became manageable once he stopped, worked the problem, and kept going.
“It’s never as deep as you think it is,” he says. “It seems daunting, but it really isn’t at the end of the day.”
That lesson followed him home. Lauren watched her son become someone willing to take on challenges and see them through. Recently, Evan decided to rebuild the engine in his truck himself. He worked on it in the driveway, encountered problems, figured them out, finished the job—and has been driving the truck ever since.
For Evan, perseverance and faith became intertwined. “Sometimes God allows the testing,” he says. “And it’s the testing that ultimately refines you.”
But Evan wasn't learning to endure hard things alone.
One of the men walking beside him was Terry.
At first, Terry simply offered advice. Evan listened. Over time, the relationship became something more.
“Terry’s very stern,” Evan says. “But the more you got to know him, the more you realized he was always there because he really cared.”
Evan discovered that care in an unexpected way after injuring his knee playing paintball.
“Terry called to check on me. He bought me pizza, and just sort of babied me for a whole week. I about cried when I realized he’d called just to check on me like that. It meant a lot.”
Those moments mattered.
A boy who had once described adults as absent from some of the places where he needed them most was now surrounded by men who noticed, called, challenged, encouraged, and stayed. And eventually, Evan began becoming that kind of person for someone else.
Today, Evan is active in his church youth group. He and several other Trailmen have become young men others look to—not formal mentors exactly, but steady examples who can come alongside younger students who are struggling.
Evan understands those boys because he remembers being one. He remembers chaos. He remembers needing stronger influences around him. And he knows how easily a young man can begin walking the wrong direction when no one is there to help him make sense of what is happening. Now he wants to be there for someone else.
That desire has even led Evan to consider seminary and vocational ministry. He loves God's Word and wants to be equipped to help others faithfully. “You plant the seed, God waters,” Evan says. “I’m just going to go out there and do my part, do my best to essentially plant the seed, and then from there it’s up to God what happens.”
Perhaps that is why the moment in the youth group was so significant. Years earlier, Lauren had brought an 11-year-old boy to Trail Life because she wanted something better for him. Now church leaders were looking across the room at Evan and the other Trailmen and seeing something they wanted reproduced.
The boy who needed men to invest in him had become a young man worth following.
Firm faith takes years to form. But time alone doesn't form it.
Faith is forged through testing. It grows when boys encounter challenges and discover they can persevere. It deepens in quiet places where they learn to listen for God. And it becomes visible when faithful men walk beside boys long enough for those boys to begin doing the same for others.
America's next 250 years will require young men with that kind of faith—men who can remain steady when the world around them isn't, who know where to turn when life becomes difficult, and who understand that what God has formed in them is meant to be invested in someone else.
That is what happened with Evan.
He came looking for a better place to grow up.
Years later, he became part of the reason his church decided to keep that place open for the boys coming behind him.
Find a Troop near you or learn how to bring Trail Life to your community at TrailLifeUSA.com