IT HAS BEEN A JOURNEY
By: Jonathan Trask
God has given Sarah and me a deep passion for children and family ministry, as it has been through slowing down and shepherding our own children that we have experienced the power of the simple, sweet, and beautiful name of Jesus to break the chains of darkness and bring us into a deeper understanding of the nature of His being.
I grew up in a highly dysfunctional home in a small mountain community. Many of my earliest memories involve family fights, separations, custody battles, trips to the courthouse, counseling sessions, back-and-forth visitations, long periods of isolation, and constant shifts. I felt like an outside observer of the world, and it was hard for me to engage with others who didn't share my same experiences. I remember struggling with deep internal anger and loneliness. My family occasionally went to church, but even that was confusing to me.
So I learned to turn off the noise and escape into the imaginary worlds of my childhood. Imaginary worlds were full of beauty, adventure, playfulness, and creativity. They felt very different from the “real life” I was living.
I loved playing games, solving puzzles, making things, creating art, building projects, and doing anything else creative. It was a refuge for my mind and helped me deal with the emotions of a chaotic home environment.
Then, as a teenager, something changed.
At a creative Christian camp, I encountered Jesus in a way I never had before. There was a very real brokenness inside me, and I desperately needed the love and guidance of Christ. I responded to a message of the gospel that brought weight, meaning, and order to a life that had often felt empty and chaotic. Something else happened there, too. I discovered that creativity and faith didn't have to exist in separate worlds. I saw people who deeply loved Jesus and expressed that love through imagination, art, and play. And I wanted that same joy for myself.
Over the next several years, I decided I should bury the emotions of my childhood and focus completely on following Jesus. I went to youth group as often as I could, and eventually attended a small Bible college after high school, where I began diving deeper into my faith.
But soon after I began college, my father was killed in an accident. He had been the one truly stable person in my immediate family, and losing him left me spinning. It was like the ultimate capstone to an upbringing in brokenness. In order to emotionally survive, I "briefly grieved" and learned to accept that life is hard, and terrible things happen. I just needed to deal with it and keep moving forward.
It was at Bible college that I met my sweet wife, Sarah. I was an isolated guy, and she was an outgoing girl... a typical story :) We connected as friends, but didn't date at first. When we did eventually date, we only did so for about a year before we got married. About six months after our wedding, we moved back to the mountains where we discovered that Sarah was pregnant.
With a new baby on the way, I decided to pursue a career in the fire department. I went back to school, got into an academy, and spent the next three and a half years training, continuing my education, and gaining experience by working part-time at a local station.
But the Lord brought along another opportunity that would better provide for our immediate needs.
One day a close friend, who was working at a Christian youth camp, invited me to apply to be the camp's ministry program director. It seemed like a perfect fit: I was a creative at heart, focused on my faith, had a deep desire to help people encounter Jesus the same way I did as a teen, and the fire department taught me how to manage chaos... So, youth ministry, here we come!
We also became volunteer youth ministers at a local church at the same time.
Sarah and I spent the following decade designing, developing, and directing creative children’s and youth ministry retreats. We also continued to grow by attending conferences, youth ministry training, and leadership seminars. We grew in knowledge and our creative abilities. We wrote stories, built walking dinosaurs, light-up superhero costumes, weird puppets, elaborate stage designs, and many other strange and wonderful projects for the purpose of illustrating the gospel in creative ways.
Creativity became a major part of our ministry and family life, which at this point included our young son. Our years in camp ministry were incredible. Countless relationships were built as we sat around campfires worshiping Jesus and talking about life's adventures. It gave us a strong understanding of what matters most, as we came alongside many youth, young adults, pastors, and a large diversity of ministry leaders as they walked through their own journey of discovering the deep truth of the gospel.
Eventually, a good friend asked whether I would consider becoming a children’s ministry director at a large church in Orange County. I didn’t see myself as “simply a children’s pastor,” but after much prayer, we heard the Lord tell us that this was to be our next move, as it was a ministry that would allow us to better focus on our young children.
So, we packed up our life in the mountains and headed to the city to start a new chapter.
A few years earlier, our family had fallen in love with the Disney movie "Inside Out." It personified a young girl’s emotions as cute little characters who lived in her head. We had a little blonde girl who also had big emotions, and it was the perfect tool to start conversations about how to deal with big internal feelings.
As we were praying about what the Lord wanted us to do with the ministry that we were taking over, an idea popped into my head: 'What if we used imaginative characters to help children understand what the Bible teaches about the mind and the light of the Lord?'
I spent the next two years diving deep into the creative process: studying Scripture, childhood development creative world building, writing different stories, and working through different creative approaches to teaching children the combination of Bible history, spiritual metaphor. It was fun, and I felt like a big kid playing with my kids. However, while tapping into my own experiences with the imaginary worlds of my childhood for creative inspiration, something else started to bubble up to the surface...
The "other stuff" from my childhood. The hidden things. I discovered that the dark memories of my childhood I thought I had buried had never really left me.
The contrast of the two worlds I was experiencing in my mind caused me great distress. I was spending my life creating something filled with the childlike joy the Scriptures speak about, while deep down I was still "haunted" by messages of anger, pain, and fear that I thought I had buried years ago.
I also started to experience the "deeper grief" of losing my father, the many frustrations I had experienced in ministry and life, along with some of the intense memories from a few incidents I experienced in the fire department. It was a very difficult season for me.
It felt like the light of God's love and joy was exposing everything dark inside of me. The more I ran towards the "garden," the darker my thoughts and dreams became. I sought out pastoral counseling, and I began to see how the experiences I thought I had moved on from were still controlling me, as those "messages" were still deep down in closed-off areas of my "inmost space."
Over the following years, I wrestled through the darkness of depression, anger, grief, and unforgiveness, all while creating a childhood for my children filled with light. God showed me that returning to that garden-like state of play I so desperately wanted, meant I needed to learn how to rightly turn off the noise that was persistently in my head, then just worship Him for who He is.
The cartoon world was no longer just about the children... it was about me learning to fight the influence of evil in my life through worship... just in my own creative way.
It was a painful, yet deeply sweet season for me.
Piano music, Scripture, and drawing cartoons became my spiritual discipline as I processed what was going on inside of me.
After the chaos of COVID, Sarah and I began reflecting more seriously on living in the city. We weren't sure it was the best long-term plan for our family. We began to pray about what the Lord would have us do next. It wasn’t long after our family started praying that we received an invitation to return to the mountains and help support a small church in the community where I had spent my early childhood. At first, we didn’t think it was a good idea, but the Lord showed us otherwise.
So, we handed off the family ministry to a great team, said goodbye to our friends in Orange County, and returned home to the mountains to continue raising our children in the community where my own story had begun.
I think someone called this "hugging the cactus."
I became an associate pastor, coming alongside an aging pastor and congregation. The following years became a season of healing and growth for me. I went back to school and then enrolled in a seminary. Seminary helped me better structure my thinking, personally grow, and gain some deeper insights into spiritual matters.
I graduated seminary in spring 2026, and now I’m going back to pursue a Master’s degree in Christian counseling. I also became the head pastor of the church. As I was going through the process of fighting many of my own deep internal battles, Sarah was also processing her own personal internal struggles. This whole adventure helped both of us grow stronger in our marriage and in a continued closeness with our children.
Now, we daily walk around our local lake, talking about life and spiritual things, and reflecting. Sometimes we dream about the future, other times we argue, and sometimes we are just quiet. We are learning to become healthier people as we marvel at this incredible journey of overcoming personal and true spiritual darkness, while we have intentionally taught and guided our own children to keep their minds in the truth of Christ.
Now, after being in children’s, youth, and family ministry for two decades and watching our own children learn to follow the way of Jesus for themselves, Sarah and I have developed a deep conviction: Parents need to be reminded that they are the "primary spiritual shepherds" of their children—not a pastor, nor a community.
Just as the Lord helped us fight our own spiritual battles so we could be the healthy spiritual shepherds our children needed, we want to help other parents who are just starting to build their families gain the tools they need to do the same.
No parent is perfect. Children don't need perfect parents. They need parents who are simply willing to do a bit of personal examination, listen to counsel, and learn to grow in the truth and love of the Spirit.
Discussions about spiritual things don’t need to be scary or strange. They should be a natural and normal part of our lives, as we are all "animated" by the messages that swirl around in our minds and hearts... So, let's talk about them.
That is what Toon Into the Word is truly about. This isn't just for children. It's a resource for parents who are starting their own journey of becoming healthy spiritual shepherds.