Yesterday was the first day of Life Teen summer camp out in Georgia. It’s so exciting to imagine the bus loads of students rolling into camp. It’ll be a powerful, life-changing week for them. I am the MC for next week’s camp, so I have to; work hard for the rest of the week to load lifeteen.com for the week that I am out of town.

The days of me freaking out about lifeteen.com while I am gone are coming to an end. I have a full-time intern coming in on Monday who that will work with me for a year. His name is Adam Robezolli, and he is a graduate from the Franciscan University of Steubenville. Although he graduated with a degree in Philosophy and Theology, he picked up Flash (motion graphics) a year ago, and he has gotten quite good at it. He’s a good match for us because he is young, cool, talented, and solidly Catholic.

I am super-excited about getting Adam into the studio because I have worked way way way too much since the new lifeteen.com launched in February of this year. People are hesitant to hire a full-time employee in a non-profit organization just because I predict that I might need more help. So the whole goal was to create the new lifeteen.com to be so big and beautiful, that our ministry had no choice but to hire somebody new. He’ll be able to help me maintain the site with fresh content, but more importantly, he’ll help me start new websites and online projects. We have to press forward.

Even though it’s been a very difficult spring at work, I am in a good place because I know that the day-to-day work goes directly to making a difference in the life of teenagers. The previous two years have been behind-the-scenes work to help lay the foundation for the site. Now that all the code, graphics, and writers are in place, every second of my time that I spend on the site is noticeable. If I want spend an hour and a half on the NewsBox (the news feed on the site), I know that 8000 people are going to read it by the end of the day. That’s a great feeling.