My Testimony

The Foundation

I grew up a Christian my whole life. That's the honest starting place. There was never a season where God was unfamiliar to me — He was in the house before I could tell you who He was.

My mom taught me Bible verses before I was old enough to understand what they meant, and she made up songs out of them so they would stick. Those songs are still in me. I can still hear some of them. She wasn't trying to make me a theologian; she was trying to put something in me that would hold. It held.

Up until about the fifth grade, I remember having a real prayer life. Not a performance, not a bedtime routine — an actual back-and-forth. And what I remember praying for most was wisdom.

What good is having knowledge if I don't know what to do with it?

That's a strange thing for a fifth grader to fixate on. But even then, the logic made sense to me. I didn't have language for it at the time, but I was already asking God to be involved in how I lived — not just in what I knew.

The Decision

Around fifth or sixth grade, I was in church one Sunday when they asked us to say the sinner's prayer. My father walked me through it. And I want to be honest about how that went, because it matters to the rest of the story: he was strict enough about it that any kid in that room would have said the words.

So in the weeks that followed, my mom felt the need to follow up. She wanted to make sure the decision I made was actually mine and not just something I'd been marched through.

I'm glad she did. Because as we had those conversations, I found out I wholeheartedly understood what I had decided. I believed in God. I knew I was a sinner. I knew He sent His Son to die on the cross for my sins.

But more than the doctrine, I knew what I wanted. What I wanted more than anything was a relationship with God. I wanted to talk to Him. To be with Him. To laugh with Him and cry with Him. That's what I was saying yes to. Not a formula — a person.

Over the years that followed, my walk with Christ wasn't always at the front of my priorities. It was there. It just wasn't first. That stayed true until I was fifteen.

The Morning Everything Changed

I was sitting in my room when my grandma showed up at the house. I could tell immediately — by the way she was acting, and by the way my mom was acting — that something was wrong.

My dad, Brian, had been on and off drugs for basically our whole lives. There would be weeks at a time when he was gone. Sometimes months at a rehab facility. So it wasn't a surprise that he wasn't home that morning. What was a surprise was that he was in the hospital.

When we got to the hospital, my dad lay there in a coma. The doctors explained what had actually happened — an overdose, and he had asphyxiated.

But that isn't the version that left the room. We settled on "heart attack" for everyone else. Easier to explain. Easier to accept.

My sisters and I got the softened version too. The full truth of that night — where he'd been, what he'd taken, how long he was on that porch alone — we learned much, much later.

My dad had gone to his dealer the night before, and the dealer was out of his usual vice. So my dad tried something else the dealer had. He went out to the porch while he gave in to it, and he started to convulse. He fell face first out of his chair. While he was on the ground, his body reacted badly to the drugs and he began to vomit.

No one was around. My dad suffocated on his own vomit.

He was the person I looked up to more than anyone. And he was gone before I understood how much of me came from him.

What It Cost

When my dad passed, my relationship with my mom kind of passed with him. I looked up to my dad more than anyone. I showed love and received love the way he did. My mom is the opposite of that, and losing the one made the distance from the other feel even wider than it already was.

It was a hard season. I went looking for that love in relationships. I was still plugged into churches along the way, but they weren't my priority.

Here's the part I want to say clearly, because I think people expect the other answer: I wasn't frustrated with God for taking my dad. I was sad with God that my dad was gone.

I never once felt like He was the one who did this to me. I felt like He was the one sitting in it with me.

That distinction is probably the only reason I'm still here writing this.

As the years went on, I kept trying to find where I fit. I succeeded at a lot of things. None of it felt right. I've written the longer version of that season in There's No Place Like Home.

Chicago, and a Man Named Chris

Nothing felt right until I was offered an internship at the Missouri Baptist Convention. I was in a small group at the time led by Mitch Canote, and he was the one who extended the offer. Next thing I knew, I was off to Chicago the following week.

That trip is where I was impacted the most. And it's where I met Chris.

Chris was the first man to believe in me since my dad passed away. I don't say that lightly, and I don't think he fully knew what he was stepping into when he did it.

Over the next five or six years, Chris and Mitch showed me how to serve God from a ministry support role. I had always pictured myself as the support guy anyway — I've got a "what can I do to help" personality. They didn't try to make me into something I'm not. They showed me that the way God wired me was useful to Him.

Through the internship, I was offered a contracting position to test my abilities. Everything they threw on my plate, I ate. Anything I could help with, I wanted to help with.

"When Are You Going to Hire My Son?"

The Missouri Baptist Convention sits on East High Street, and every so often we'd walk downtown for lunch. On one beautiful day, we happened to run into my mom.

Without so much as a hi — no greeting, no warm-up — she looked straight at my boss and said, "When are you going to hire my son?"

Chris was so taken off guard he just kind of laughed.

I had been working on contract for about a year by then, and my mom had been asking me that same question the entire time. Every time, I'd just tell her soon.

Well — that soon had come. Not long after, Chris decided it didn't make sense not to hire me.

What Grew

Working at the convention put me around strong Christian men who came to mean the world to me. Everything they did, I wanted to do. Anything they needed help with, I wanted to help with.

But when I look back at those years, the thing that grew the most wasn't my skill set. It was my relationship with God. More than my abilities, more than my career, more than anything — that's what got built in that season.

Which is the whole thing, really. It's what the fifth grader was praying for when he asked for wisdom instead of knowledge. It's what the sixth grader meant when he said he wanted to talk with God, be with Him, laugh with Him and cry with Him. It took about twenty years and the worst morning of my life, but He answered exactly what I asked for.

The story of how that led back into ministry — and how God moved the mountain to get me to Concord — is in The Mountain Mover.

Where I Am Now

Now I'm just walking through life with Christ.