It started with a phone call.

We were living in St. Louis when our son enrolled at the University of Arizona. We thought the hard part was behind us. Housing was sorted. Classes were picked.

Then he called, frustrated. He was playing club soccer, and between practice, training, and lifting he was booked most nights — which is exactly when a lot of campus ministries meet. He was living in Arbol de la Vida with no car, which put most churches out of easy reach. He was trying. It just wasn't coming together.

My wife went to work on it from twelve hundred miles away, doing what any parent would do: Google searches, ministry websites, church websites, page after page. She ran into the same wall he did. Not because the information didn't exist, but because it lived in a dozen different places, in a dozen different formats, and none of it was built for the question she was actually asking — which of these would work for a kid training most nights of the week with no way to get across town.

That's nobody's fault. Campus ministries are built to serve the students in front of them, not to market themselves to a mom in Missouri. But it meant that by the time we had a real picture of what was available to him, most of a semester had gone by.

So we moved.

We arrived to Tucson in 2023, determined to close that gap for the families coming behind us.

God helped us secure a beautiful home under a ten-minute drive from campus — a house with room to host large groups, which turned out to be exactly the thing we didn't know we'd need.

We started connecting with campus ministries, and what we found was encouraging. Campus staff, pastors, volunteers, small group leaders — they were already here, already doing the work, already good at it. There was no shortage of faithful people serving this campus.

The gap was in the middle. Students were looking - Ministries ready to receive them. And there was nothing standing between the two but timing, word of mouth, and a little luck.

Nobody was standing in that gap. So in 2026, we formally created C3: Connecting Cats to Christ.