My Bio

This is Me. 

I have an awesome family which I love a lot. I tried to find
a picture of all of us together, but unfortunately I do not have one on my
computer. I think my parents are great, and I cant imagine a better parents in
the whole world. I know everyone says that, but I believe I am speaking the
truth. I also have a younger brother, Mike. Growing up we lived out in the
country just outside of town. There weren’t many kids around, so a lot of our
free time was spent making up games so we wouldn’t be bored.  In all honesty, the games always ended the
same way with us running around the yard shooting every bad guy in sight with
fake guns and grenades.

I also have an amazing group of friends. One of the coolest
and most rewarding things in my life has been watching my group of friends
break up after we graduated. While I am on the World Race next year, my closest
friends will be serving as missionaries all over the world. I have over 10
friends working in Asia, another in Mexico city, 2 more in Paraguay, and many
more friends still in school who spent this summer in Turkey, France, Ghana, and more.
It has been amazing knowing that the people closest to me are having a huge
impact all over the world.

(This is the last picture I took with my friend Dave before
he took off for Oman
this summer.)

MY STORY:

I fell in love with Jesus when I was 11 yrs old. I have done
my best to follow him ever since. Growing up I was always a big youth group and
church camp attender. I didnt swear or drink or have sex. Oh and I read my
Bible and prayed everyday. I was the A+ good Christian kid. For most of my
adolescence this worked pretty well. I stayed pretty connected to God, and
whenever I started to get a little dry spiritually there was always another
summer Church camp to fill me back up.

When I got to college things started to change. I found I
had less time (maybe motivation) to get into the Word and to pray. There were
no more summer camps to pick me back, and what used to be a sharp black/white moral
line started to become a little gray. Yet I did not feel God pushing me to
return to that “Good Guy” cookie cutter Christian. Instead Ive slowly
come to realize that God wants Disciples, not just Christians. See I had taken
reading the Bible, praying, going to Church/youth group, and the DONT’s (Dont
drink, dont smoke, dont have sex) and made them my religion. I know what you
are thinking, “Isnt reading the Bible and praying what Christianity is all
about?”  What I am trying to say is that I turned good things into a
sort of check list. I read the Bible and prayed and attended Church, but what I
wanted was the good feelings that come with being close to God. What I didn’t
want to do was to give Him full control of my life and to seek His face. See
reading the Bible was easy, going to Bible Study was easy, but truly seeking
after God completely surrendered to what He wants in your life is hard. The
problem is God wants disciples, and that means complete surrender.

It was my sophomore year in college that God put an
insatiable desire to serve Him in my heart. That year the depth and horror that
is the AIDS epidemic finally became real to me. At the same time Christ’s words
that He “came to bring life and life to the full” were always on my mind. And I
knew that “life to the full” had nothing to do with the American dream and had
everything to do with following God wherever He calls you. That summer my
desire to take God up on His offer of life to the full combined with my
heartbreaking reaction to the AIDS epidemic led me to Livingstone, Zambia
with Adventures in Missions. We partnered with people from all over southern Africa to do AIDS education in high schools. What I saw and experienced there broke my heart, but I definitely got a taste of what Christ meant when he said he has come to bring life to the full. It was an adventure, and while it was hard to be around so much need, it was incredible knowing that Christ was using me to change these kids lives.  I came back from Africa knowing that I wanted to go into full time missions work for at least a year or two after I graduated.