TWENTY-FIVE. A quarter of a century. Wow!
We officially turned twenty-five years old on April 3, 2021! Reaching this milestone is both exciting and humbling.
We know we reached this milestone because of the grace of God. Today, we are more excited and hopeful about the future than when we began in 1996, and the web was new, and people thought we were a bit crazy. When we told people our mission was providing free resources to help people live for Jesus in today's world, they were sure we were dreamers and likely to fail. God, however, has been more than good; the Father has provided for our needs, given us friends all over the world, opened up new doors of opportunity, and kept us going and growing through these first twenty-five years!
In 1996 Paul Lee and Phil Ware launched Heartlight.org. The journey has been an incredible experience full of late nights, amazing people, incredible travels, major challenges, touched lives, and unexpected blessings.
A few years after the official launch, Ben Steed connected with the Heartlight.org team and brought along VerseoftheDay.com. Ben and Phil are still partners in the Heartlight.org and VerseoftheDay.com ministries.
With this twenty-fifth year, Heartlight.org is releasing a site redesign. This design is streamlined and programmed to work across all sorts of devices without needing an app. We have a free app in both the iOS and Android app stores — look for Heartlight Daily Devotionals. And, of course, we will continue to send out our free daily email devotionals and articles.
This next year, we'll be adding a few new things, refreshing some of our most used features, and continuing to send out our free daily emails. Look for VerseoftheDay.com to add daily voiced recordings of our devotionals. We will be highlighting a number of young women writers to bless our audience. ToGather.church, our Sunday DIY virtual worship experience will continue. We will also be sharing opportunities to explore more of our resources in our daily emails. In addition, we will be requesting your help with possible Scriptures for a new daily devotional Phil will be writing for 2022, called "Together in Jesus" — send ideas to phil@verseoftheday.com.
Behind the scenes, our team will also be involved in a special outreach to India, Africa, and South America. We will continue our partnership with
God has taken our "loaves and fishes" and multiplied them greatly. With all the forwarded email, radio stations who use our content, our websites, our daily emails, and fresh daily content on social media, we're currently connecting with well over 250,000 people a day in 13 languages and 190 countries.
We are thankful to the Father for the blessings so abundantly shared with us. We appreciate the support of thousands of believers all over the world who have joined us in prayer, used our free resources, forwarded our content, shared our resources on social media, and supported us financially and through their words of encouragement. You are our partners in every sense of the word!
What a humbling and amazing experience our first twenty-five years have been for all of us. Thanks for coming along with us on the journey. Please continue to pray us forward into God's future and for us to have the wisdom and faith to follow His direction.
With love and appreciation,
President, Editor, and Writer
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