Five years ago, Dan Beazley, a man who once thought Christians were “crazy” had a calling. The country had just shut down for the COVID-19 pandemic and Beazley felt the Lord leading he and his family to a mission. The trouble was, he wasn’t sure what mission. He wouldn’t get the answer until months later when his wife shared the story of Atlanta evangelist Joel Crompton, who had built a 10-foot cross and carried it over his shoulder. “Immediately, it came over my spirit — this is what I needed to do. I knew what the mission was,” Beazley told Deseret News. Beazley completed the 10-foot, 65-pound cedar cross in the summer of 2021.

The Michigan native began taking his cross through the streets of Detroit, using a set of wheels attached to the cross to help him drag it. “People were giving themselves to the Lord, just because they saw the cross,” he said. On November 30, 2021, tragedy struck Oxford High School in Michigan, when a 15-year-old opened fire on the school, killing four students and wounding seven others. Beazley and his cross attended the vigil, soon striking national interest as images of the large cross appeared on news sites, including Fox News.

The attention soon inspired Beazley to take his cross nationally, going to sites of extreme tragedies where he stands silently with his cross. In December 2021, he took his cross to western Kentucky after a deadly tornado outbreak killed 89 people. “It was an amazing thing to pray with victims and survivors,” Beazley said. “It was so apparent that this is what God wanted — for the cross to be seen.” During his trips, people can go up to him and pray or just meditate at the cross, whatever they need.

In the four years that he has been traveling, Beazley has taken his cross on 73 trips through 33 states, including Hawaii after the Maui wildfires. He picks his destinations based on a calling from the Lord and usually drives. “My wife says, ‘No, you can’t (fly). You have no idea the amount of people whose lives are touched just in the journey from home to where you’re taking it,’” he told CNN. His cross has been seen at a number of familiar tragedies: Camp Mystic in Texas where flooding killed 25 campers and 2 counselors, Annunciation Catholic Church in Minnesota after a gunmen opened fire during a school mass, and the memorial service of slain Christian conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Beazley said he gets an overwhelming feeling that brings him near to tears, letting him know which sites to bring the cross to. “When that happens, I know that I need to go. I know that it’s impossible for me not to go. There would be nothing that would stop me from going,” he said. At Camp Mystic, he was asked to leave a cross behind for mourners. He commissioned a local carpenter to build a replica cross to remain at the site. “They needed it as the community,” he said.

While Beazley trips can bring attention to himself, he tries to draw it back to the cross and to Christ. “The tragedy isn’t going away. But the community can certainly heal from it, and they can grow. … I believe that the cross, the presence of the cross, is just the beginning for a lot of them,” he said. Speaking to Deseret, he shared about what is most important to him. “The cross does most of the talking,” he said. “Whenever people approach me, I know they want to talk about one thing — and that’s Jesus. And that’s what I like talking about the most.”