About Us

 A Letter From the Founder

I was talking with the teenage youth in our church one day about wearing a T-shirt that says Bless You on it. I was explaining the purpose — the why behind the words — and somewhere in the middle of that conversation I realized what I was saying was going completely over their heads.

That moment stopped me cold.

It was not their fault. It was mine — or rather it was the fault of timing. I had waited too long. If I was ever going to teach bless you to anyone in a way that actually took root it was going to have to happen before a child was old enough to resist it.

That is when I understood something about the church — not just our church but God’s church. We give it different names. We have different traditions. But we are all children of God. We seek Jesus. We believe He died and rose again in three days. We believe this was prophesied hundreds of years before His birth. And we share the responsibility of passing that faith to the next generation before the world gets there first.

The small children in our church are not the future of the church. They are the roots of the church. And roots have to go in early or they do not hold.

The Breath They Already Have

Think about what we already teach young children. We teach them thank you. We teach them yes ma’am and no sir. We teach them God is great, God is good at the dinner table before they can read a single word. And those things stay with them for the rest of their lives — because they went in early, before resistance was possible, before the world had a chance to offer a competing message.

But somewhere along the way we left out the greatest of the simple acts. We forgot to teach them bless you.

When a child learns to say bless you with genuine meaning they are learning to feel the life inside them — that soul given to them with their very first breath — and use it as a guide outward toward others. They are learning to thank God for that breath. They are learning to pass that gratitude to the person in front of them. They are learning to bless others, to look outward, to love before selfishness has a chance to establish itself as the default.

This is not complicated theology. It is the simplest act available in any moment. And it has to be planted before a child is old enough to let the enemy plant something else there first.

The Chinese Bamboo Tree

The Chinese bamboo tree shows no visible growth for five years while it builds its root system underground. Then in just six weeks it shoots up ninety feet.

That is what you are doing in these early years. Watering. Fertilizing. Waiting. It does not look like much is happening. But the roots are going in. And roots planted in patience and time — in learning and teaching, in teaching and learning again — will hold when everything else is shaking.

You are not just teaching your child. You are teaching yourself. That is how it has always worked. The narrow road is walked together.

 The Road I Walked Before I Built This One

I spent most of my life on the wide road.

Not completely — that is the honest truth. For years I straddled the line, unable to get both feet on either side. I was not lost on the wide road. I was lost between the two. And that in-between place is its own kind of wilderness.

From the time I left the Coast Guard to just a few years ago I wondered why I lived the experiences I lived. The mountains I climbed and the valleys I walked through. The lessons that came the hard way — the only way some lessons come. I asked God more than once why He let me wander so long. I did not always get an answer I understood in the moment.

A few years ago I sold my house. I told my kids I was moving to Oklahoma. I needed to be in a better place — for my health, for my soul, for the quiet I had not found anywhere else. I found fifteen acres near Antlers and started building something simple and on purpose. Off the grid. Generating my own power. Collecting my own water. Growing my own food. Chickens, cats, dogs, and two pygmy goats.

And in that quiet I finally had time to think.

I have been tested out here in ways I did not expect. The weather. The water. The electricity. The wild animals. And the loss — my beautiful dog Tucker was killed, and that grief was real and deep in a way that surprised me. You love what you love and when it is gone the ache is honest.

But the blessings have been just as real. More real.

I think I tell God every single day how grateful I am for Him. I tell Jesus — do not forget me. And I try to practice what I preach. Not perfectly. But consistently. One day at a time on the narrow road I spent too many years finding.

That is why I built this curriculum. Not from a place of having everything figured out. From a place of knowing what it costs to find the narrow road late — and wanting something different for the children who are still young enough to start early.

Tucker — my mini long-haired dachshund — lives on in this curriculum. His name is on the bandana of the little dog who sits beside Elijah in every Foundation Years image. He earned that place. He was as faithful a companion as I have ever had on any road.

The Two Freedom Roads curriculum is everything I wish someone had built before I needed it. It is built for the children — but if you are a parent walking it alongside your child, do not be surprised if it does something in you too.

The narrow road has a way of doing that.

 The Journey That Awaits

The Foundation Years are just the beginning.

When Tucker goes on the shelf and your child steps onto the six-year road the journey changes. The roots that were planted in those early years — the blessing instinct, the Soul Check, the gratitude habit, the two roads framework — now become the foundation for something bigger than either of you could see from the starting point.

Year by year the road opens wider and goes deeper at the same time.

Your child will learn who God is — not as an abstract idea but as a person who defined Himself in His own words to Moses on the mountain. They will learn what it means to put on the Armor of God and actually wear it into a Tuesday. They will meet Gideon hiding in a winepress and discover what God calls a person who cannot yet see what God sees in them. They will walk through the refiner’s fire and find the fourth figure standing in the flames with them. And at the end of Year Six they will
stand at the river of baptism knowing exactly what it declares — buried with
Christ, raised to new life, clothed with Him — because six years of the narrow
road led them exactly there.

Then the Academy opens its doors.

Your child will walk with the prophets of the Old Testament — from Genesis 1:1 all the way to Malachi — tracing the thread of the coming King through every era of Israel’s story. They will study the life of Jesus in full depth across all four Gospels. They will follow the first church from the upper room at Pentecost through Paul’s missionary journeys across the ancient world — watching the gospel spread from
Jerusalem to the ends of the earth exactly as Jesus said it would. They will
learn to see the world through a biblical lens so clear that once they have it
they cannot unsee it. They will learn to defend what they believe with grace
and reason. They will learn to navigate the hardest moral questions of adult
life with a biblical framework that holds.

And then in the final two years they will teach everything they have learned — to younger siblings, to children in the church, to families in the community. The Learn Teach river turns. What was given to them they now give to others. The circle begins to close.

The student who started at age two saying bless you to a stuffed dachshund in a flower meadow will stand at the Academy graduation as a fully equipped young adult — teaching the same curriculum they received, blessing the same people they were taught to bless, walking the same narrow road they have been on since before they could read.

That is the journey that awaits.

 Come Walk It

I want you to have the five Foundation Years series. Read them. Print them off. Give them to your friends. They are unlike anything else available for children this young — deeply informative, beautifully designed, and built to teach you how to teach your
child to find the narrow road that Jesus talked about in Matthew 7 and stay on it for the rest of their life.

They are completely free. No strings attached. Because the best proof of this curriculum is the curriculum itself.

Start here. The road continues further than you can see from where you are standing right now. And every step of it is worth walking.

— Craig

Founder, Two Freedom Roads
Disciple and Follower of Jesus
Antlers, Oklahoma

2freedomroads.com  •  Antlers, Oklahoma  • Follow the Narrow Road. Follow it all the way to eternity. ✝