God was very much an undeniable reality in my family.  My dad has been in rescue mission work for the majority of my life and my earliest memories are from when we lived at a rescue mission in California where my dad worked with inner-city youth.  There is a song lyric that says “I was waiting for the right time, the right moment for You to look away, though You never did I pretended for a while so I could walk where I don’t belong”.  This lyric pretty much sums me up from the ages of about 10 to 24.  My teen years were wasted with drug use and rebellion against the God my parents served.  In my senior year of high school some very serious things took place in the lives of my friends due to the partying and drug use which scared me causing me to begin to withdraw from scene I was in, making all new friends after high school.  However none of these friends knew the Lord and all the new friends began going down the same path as the old.  The presence of drugs once again became normal.

Shortly after this I met my wife, Tristan.  Tristan was a “good girl” but she was not a Christian.  As we became closer I was spending all my time with her and we were soon married.  Due to my upbringing I did not have the “privilege” of being able to deny that a God existed or debate on who He was.  I had witnessed too many little miracles that surrounded my father and his ministry.  During all these years I knew that everything I was doing was wrong and that one day I would have to answer to God for it.  Occasionally I would break down and begin to cry, I told my wife many times “we are not right with God, we need to get right with Him.  Let’s go to church this Sunday” but Sunday would come and go and we would stay home.  Finally one Sunday we made it to church.  Calvary Chapel South in Kent, Washington, I knew it would be a good church because it was the church that my parents went to.  The moment I walked in those doors I knew that I had just come home.  The message washed over me that morning and when I got home I ripped our house apart and found a bible of my dad’s that I had.  I sat down and began to read it and I was never the same again.  Immediately a love for the Word of God began to grow, this love has only continued to grow in the years since.  The next Sunday we went to church again and our pastor gave a message entitled “Hell, You Better Believe It”.  That morning as our pastor emotionally preached on hell the Holy Spirit graciously broke through to my wife and she turned to Him.

A few months later I began a discipleship program with my pastor.  It included listening to verse by verse, chapter by chapter teachings from Genesis through Revelation, took a course on Inductive Bible Study which included mini sermons that were critiqued by the senior pastor, elder, and a few other men who were being discipled, memorized the book of Titus, 2 Timothy, and Ephesians, and read many books second only to the Bible.  During this time I also began serving weekly with 5th and 6th graders at our church.  In 2011 I went on a mission trip to Uganda where I visited a prison with a native church that conducts church services for the inmates.  The Lord used this experience to lead me to volunteer with Prison Ministries in the Seattle.  During this time the Lord greatly blessed me and has continued to bless me with an insatiable desire for Himself.  The more I got to know Him the more desperate I became to know Him more.  This desire for the Lord led me to Ellerslie Leadership Training in Windsor, CO.  In October 2012 we sold our home and in January 2013 I quit my job that I had for close to ten years, packed up my wife and our two kids, Sophie and Silas, and headed for Colorado.  The year and few months we spent in Colorado were some of the most trying and difficult times of our entire lives but the Lord was so good and so precious also.  If I could describe our time there it would be pretty well summed up in these three words.  Trial by fire, but I would have had it no other way.  Our family has learned along with Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego that in the fire with us is “one who looks like the Son of God”.  Leonard Ravenhill speaking about this story pointed out that the only thing that was burned on these three Hebrew men was the bonds that the world had put on them.  And so it has been with our family.

Our third child, Ezra was born April 25th 2014 and on April 26th I was connected to the Columbus Rescue Mission by the dean of men at Ellerslie and Edwin Heinze, the president of the board for the mission who had come to the school for a conference.  I have a passion for the preaching and teaching of God’s Word, and a passion to see lives transformed by the power of the Gospel.  However, much greater than that I have a passion to know Jesus Christ and to see Him glorified, loved, and worshiped.