Get to Know a Garden City Member: The Benetz Family

HI, we are Dan and Deanne Benetz. We have 3 almost-independent children: Alexi who is 24 and lives in Colorado, Collin who is 22 and graduating from college and moving back to the Bay area in the next couple of weeks to start his career, and Shane who is 20 and attends UC San Diego. (fun fact… our kids were among the first teenagers at Garden City!) We will be celebrating our 27th wedding anniversary this year and we have a passion for mentoring couples who are thinking about how marriage can reflect the gospel.

We both grew up in So Cal but Dan started life (until he was 5) in Argentina where much of his extended family still lives. He has great memories of his uncle grilling Argentine asado and camping in Yosemite with his cousins. We met at UCLA (go Bruins!) and Dan moved to the Bay area for work after college, with Deanne following a few years later from Santa Barbara.

We LOVE our life-group family! God has blessed us by getting to do life with such fun people who LOVE Jesus and encourage us to do the same. We began the year praying that God would grow our group so that we could send out a new life-group and He answered our prayers both by raising up new leaders and by adding some great families to our group.

To keep from going stir crazy lately, we pick a new hike every week to enjoy and have started biking more. A couple of our favorite hikes are Fall Creek in Felton and DL Bliss State Park near Emerald Bay, Lake Tahoe. The Santa Clara to Baylands bike trail is a good family friendly ride that we often do with friends. When we don’t have to socially distance we love to play cards and games with friends and family, travel, and watch our boys play volleyball. 

For the last 7 years, it’s given us joy to meet as a church body and worship the Lord together at Garden City and we are grateful that we can still meet with our life-group each Sunday morning via Zoom. It makes our hearts long for the day when we will get to meet again in person!