My Testimony

I grew up in a christian home in the “bible belt” of the southeast. Baptized at the age of 7 I spent my younger years living the normal life; playing soccer competitively, hanging out with friends in their basement, and dating girls. I followed my older brother into Boy Scouts finishing it and getting my Eagle scout rank; was even blessed with a wonderful group of friends that didn’t get pulled into the drink/partying scene during high school. All the while I was involved in my church, doing the churchy things (going to sunday school, involved in a youth bible study, read my bible when I was supposed to, even went on two week long urban mission trips in 10th and 11th grade) but I felt like there was more. A life mantra became Thoreau’s “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation” and to not be one of those men.

 

My search to not live a quietly desperate life lead me to revisit my childhood dream to be an astronaut and study aerospace engineering at the University of Colorado. I became passionate about the skiing, climbing, and hiking in CO and fixed on my education. As I continued school I got involved in a college church called “The Annex”, doing what good christians do; what was needed to get by with God. I even tried to get involved with the homeless in Boulder, but still felt like there had to be more. I was a good guy, nice to everyone, polite, and kept my nose clean. I still to this day haven’t been drunk. This is not to toot my horn, but instead to say that I was this person, had the right things, right education, the right group of friends, led a good life, even knew of Christ but I was still missing something. Engineering took over more and more until almost everything in my life took a backseat to school. The beginning of my last semester at CU I went for a long bike ride on my birthday, as I sometimes did, and started praying. I said “God there’s got to be more to all this, there has to be more to You… if not, if this is all there is, then I’m out, I see no reason to be passionate about you if the comfortable norm is as far as it goes.” Then I asked for Him to restore in me to a passion that I once new; to take me back to where I had been the most passionate in Him before. The following week I went back to the Annex for the first time in months and they announced the summer mission trips through their “Messenger Program”. This program creates teams, selects countries, and connects applicants with missionary organizations, so I figured I would get an application. I then applied for several engineering job positions and thought well the mission trip will just be a fallback plan so I don’t end up doing nothing after graduation. As the semester continued all the jobs filled up and the mission trip became a reality. I was partnered with a guy from Boulder I had just met named Zach to go to Nicaragua through some organization I’d never heard of called Adventures In Missions (AIM). Sweet, maybe this is the something more that I’ve been looking for.

 

I show up kind of irked by their openness toward God’s love but willing to go with the flow and not make any early judgments. Someone came up to me, without knowing my story, and said I’m not sure why God wants me to tell you this, but He wants me to let you know that there’s so much more… As the trip went on, God’s perfect timing led me and the 23 other people on my team closer and closer to Him. I remember weeping one night longing to know Him more as I really began  understanding the saying, “To know You is to want to know You more”. If you’ve never felt that before you may not understand what I mean, but God wants you to ;). I remember seeing miraculous things happening and laughing out loud because of the simplicity of His Love and Grace being filled with Joy of His goodness. While I was a christian before, I would have never said these things or really known what these words meant until God showed them to me. He took me back to the foundation of do I belief that He exists to where I said if He exists then all of this must be true/real. All the times in my life without Him, all the things I turned to not of Him left me feeling empty, worthless, and without hope, but all the time in my life with Him were good, fulfilling, and purposeful. So I finally said, “What the Heck, Why not follow this? Why not CHOOSE LOVE OVER DESTRUCTION? What do I have to lose, because this other life isn’t working for me.” As the highly technical drawing below shows you God has brought me such freedom and passion for Him, that I’ve not only returned to the place where I thought I knew Him, but has taken me much further past it.

All it took was a little simple trust that He really is as faithful as He says He is; that He really loves us as much as He says He does. 

 

While I was there God taught me of obedience and showed me how Joshua in the bible was a great leader through his willingness to be obedient and follow. God then told me He wanted me to go forget my plans of pursuing an engineering job after Nicaragua and follow Him on something called the World Race. After briefly wrestling with this idea, God reminded me clearly of the obedience He just taught me, so I said what the heck. A different night Zach prayed for God to protect me while I was on the World Race and especially in these 6 countries (Peru, Bolivia, Swaziland, S. Africa, Cambodia, and Thailand) and a voice said these countries will be on the route I want you on. This was before the July route was posted. A month after we returned from Nica they posted the July route and I was sure that I was going. Out of the multitude of countries that AIM goes to, and the 11 countries selected, all 6 were on the list. 

 

Since then God has remained ever faithful, ever loving in this season of preparation He has called me to right now. I thought the season of preparation was going to be boring, just sitting and reading my bible as if it were a textbook. Lovingly, nothing has changed; HIS AMAZINGNESS IS NOT DEPENDENT UPON WHERE WE ARE IN THE WORLD OR IN OUR LIFES. God has been revealing so much about His character and my identity in Him through my everyday actions, that my life is going further and further away from that comfortable life of quiet desperation that I once knew and closer to the simple truth that GOD IS LOVE and He is working all things to draw us to Him (Romans 8:28). I’m now in regular contact with several homeless individuals, living among drug addicts and alcoholics, conversing with buddhists, muslims, and alien worshipers, depending and trusting in Him with next to nothing financially, and trying to fearlessly make known HIS UNDYING, LIMITLESS, UNCONDITIONALLY, PERFECT LOVE THAT IS WILDLY PURSUING US to everyone He brings me in contact with.

 

He is good and really does have good plans for us. I’m so excited to share this amazing time of REAL LIFE with you all and eagerly look forward to the work that He has arranged for us to be a part of.

Thanks for taking the time to read this ridiculously long post. 🙂