When tragedy strikes an American community, Dan Beazley loads a 10-foot wooden cross into the back of his pickup truck, straps it down and drives to the scene to stand and grieve in quiet solidarity with those affected by a tragedy.
Since July, Beazley has brought the cross to Camp Mystic in Texas, where a flash flood tore through a summer camp; to New York City, after a gunman opened fire in Midtown Manhattan and killed four people; and to Northern Michigan, where a stabbing took place in a Walmart parking lot. He stood outside at the Church of the Annunciation in Minneapolis after a shooting during mass and carried the cross into the Charlie Kirk’s memorial service in Arizona at the State Farm Stadium building.
Most recently, Beazley has been in Grand Blanc, Michigan, where a man rammed a vehicle into and opened fire inside a meetinghouse of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, killing four people and injuring several others. The building was set on fire.
For days, Beazley had been stationed near the charred site near the police barricade, praying with mourners and offering what he calls “The Message of the Cross.”
With the cross as a symbol of hope and peace embodied by Christ, the 64-year-old Beazley hopes to bring comfort and healing to the communities devastated by grief. Beazley rejects comparisons to Jesus, but instead says his role is more like a “lampstand holding a light up.” Holding up the cross is “an open invitation,” he said, to come up and pray together.
“Whether it’s 50 miles or 5,000 miles from my house — it goes the same way,” said Beazley, who lives in Northville, Michigan, an hour south of Grand Blanc, and works in real estate. “As I’m driving it, people across the country get to see the cross.”
Since building the cross in 2021, Beazley has traveled with the cross to the sites of shootings and natural disasters across 33 states.
“I just go stand there quietly and — and then whatever happens, happens,” he said. “The cross speaks for itself.”
The call to a mission
On a quiet March morning in 2020, just after the country shut down for COVID-19, Beazley felt that God was calling him and his family to a mission. But he didn’t know right away what that mission would be.
Months later, sitting in his family room, his wife pointed to photos on Facebook that featured a man in Atlanta walking with a 10-foot wooden cross slung across his shoulder.
“Immediately, it came over my spirit — this is what I needed to do,” Beazley recalled. He recalled dropping to his knees and weeping. He went on: “I knew what the mission was.”
There was just one problem: Beazley had never built anything.
So he contacted the Atlanta evangelist from the news, Joel Crumpton, who shared with Beazley the cross’ designs. After months of what Beazley calls “distractions,” he finally finished building the cross in the summer of 2021.
Standing 10 feet tall, weighing 65 pounds and made of cedar, the cross sits on wheels to help carry its weight. It includes a prayer cloth that had been dipped in the baptismal waters from the North Georgia Revival and prayed over.
Beazley’s longest walk with the cross so far has been five miles, though once he and two others share the load during a 17-mile trek to raise money for Israel.
At first, he took the cross into the streets of Detroit. People stopped to ask what it was for, interactions that often ended up in prayer.
“People were giving themselves to the Lord, just because they saw the cross,” he said.
But in November 2021, a tragedy pulled Beazley into his first public vigil.
On Nov. 30, a 15-year-old opened fire at Oxford High School in Michigan, killing four students and wounding seven others. Beazley carried his cross to the vigil, where nearly 5,000 people gathered. The next morning, his phone started buzzing with calls and texts. The cross had appeared on Fox News, and even though Beazley wasn’t in the picture himself, the image spread widely.
It was then that Beazley felt he needed to expand his mission with the cross beyond Michigan.
“I thought, oh man, what’s that going to look like?” he recalled thinking. He had a real estate business to run.
A journey, not just the destination
God didn’t always speak to Beazley. The Michigan man felt an intense conversion seven years ago while sitting in a Good Friday service at a nondenominational church not far from his home in Northville.
The experience was life-altering and he recalled crying and shaking.
“I had no idea what was happening,” he said. “He just took over my life.”
In December 2021, before he had figured out the logistics of taking the cross nationwide, an EF4 tornado ripped through western Kentucky, part of a record-breaking December outbreak that killed 89 people.
Beazley knew exactly what to do.
Along with his son, now a pastor at a church in Grand Blanc, he loaded the cross into the truck and drove south.
“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.”
His son accompanied him on several early trips, but Beazley now travels alone.
In the four years of traveling across the country with the cross, Beazley has adapted to what the situation demands.
When he was in Texas, a woman asked him to leave a cross behind at Camp Mystic after a flood devastated the summer camp. So he commissioned a local carpenter to build a replica, which still stands at the site.
“They needed it as the community,” he said.
For his trip to Maui after the wildfires, he constructed a collapsible version that fits into a plastic case and can be checked on a plane.
His wife says she’d rather he doesn’t fly with the cross, Beazley told me.
“She says no one gets to see it along the route,” Beazley said.
“And it’s about the journey, not just the destination.”
Familiar figure
Beazley has become a familiar figure in Michigan, where police officers and locals wave when they spot his truck with the cross strapped to the bed. On a recent morning, while stopping for bagels, a man recognized the cross from the coverage of Charlie Kirk’s memorial service.
“He rolled his window down and we prayed right there in the parking lot,” Beazley said.
He sees his mission in biblical terms and compares himself to the lampstand described in Matthew’s Beatitudes. “Even without speaking, the act of standing with the cross sends a message of peace and comfort,” he said.
At times, Beazley has been asked to move the cross to the back of a crowd. He doesn’t argue.
“I don’t take offense — I just go wherever God tells me to go,” he said.
A year ago, he started driving to Washington, D.C., to attend a vigil in honor of the first anniversary of the Hamas attacks on Israel. But as he crossed into Ohio, he said he felt a nagging question: was he bringing the cross there for God or “for himself” — to just show it off?
Beazley turned around and drove home.
Beazley’s real estate career allows him flexibility: he can manage listings remotely and rely on colleagues to show homes. He always has a laptop on him. That balance makes his travels possible.
When to leave?
When I asked Beazley how he knows when it’s time to leave the site of a tragedy, even as the mourning continues, he admits there’s no formula.
“It’s just an overwhelming feeling when I know the mission has been met,” he said. “Sometimes I don’t know. Sometimes I leave too early.”
Even at Grand Blanc, he says he doesn’t need to say much.
“The cross does most of the talking,” Beazley 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.”
