My Story

I was born in Oklahoma City and raised in a deeply rooted Christian family. Faith was never distant. It was in the rhythm of Sundays, the language of home, and the quiet certainty that life was meant to be lived with God at the center. I was raised in the Church of the Nazarene, shaped by parents and grandparents whose faith was steady, sincere, and woven into the fabric of our family.

Some of my earliest memories are filled with church, family gatherings, shared meals, and the kind of belonging that forms a person before he has words for it.

When I was eight, my family moved to Japan. That changed me.

It took me out of the familiar and placed me in a world that felt larger, stranger, and more revealing than anything I had known. Living off-base and immersed in another culture, I began to sense that life held more beneath the surface than most people ever spoke of. Something in me was waking up—an awareness, a sensitivity, an intuition I did not understand, but could not ignore.

When we returned to the United States, faith once again became central in visible ways, but my inner life had already grown more complicated. I was hearing, sensing, and knowing things I could not explain. During my teen years, while praying with a choir group, I had an experience that left me shaken and uncertain what to do with what I believed I was hearing spiritually.

So I retreated.

I learned to suppress parts of myself—my spiritual sensitivity, my questions, and other parts of my identity that did not seem safe to bring fully into the light.

Like many people, I tried to build a life by becoming what I thought I was supposed to be. I married, became a father, and tried to create stability through the roles life placed before me. My sons became two of the greatest gifts of my life. I loved them deeply and sought to care for them well. Yet beneath that love, I was carrying layers of repression, disappointment, confusion, and conflict I did not know how to name.

My marriage ended, and I found myself back in my parents’ home with my two boys, trying to rebuild a life while carrying failure, frustration, and exhaustion all at once.

That season broke something open in me.

I returned to church with my sons. I began hearing the voice again in ways I could not dismiss. One day, sitting in church, I heard clearly, “You no longer smoke,” and from that moment on, the habit was gone. No tapering. No struggle. Just gone.

It was simple on the surface, but I knew better. God was not absent, and He was not finished with me.

Then came the moment that changed the course of my life.

On a Sunday walk, weighed down by frustration, depression, anger, and the humiliation of feeling trapped in a life that had not become what I had hoped, I finally turned my rage toward God. I had argued with my father. I was broke. I was worn thin. As I walked, my words grew sharper—frustration becoming accusation, accusation becoming anger, anger becoming a cry I could no longer contain.

Finally, I shouted, “Why won’t You answer me?”

Then came silence.

Not emptiness. Silence.

And in that silence, I heard the words: “And what would you have Me say?”

That moment undid me.

I was not given an explanation. I was given an encounter. I knew I had been heard. I knew God was real. And I knew that if I wanted to live honestly, I would have to learn to listen.

That moment did not make life easy. It made life honest.

From there, I began—slowly, imperfectly—to live from a deeper place. I came to understand that faith is more than belief. It is a way of being. Purpose is not something we manufacture by force. It is something we recognize when we stop resisting what is deepest and truest within us.

Over time, I also came to understand that writing was never merely an interest. I had been writing down dreams since 1976, but eventually I had to face what had always been there: writing was part of my calling.

My life has not followed a straight line. It has held loss, hiddenness, reinvention, family responsibility, spiritual awakening, and hard-won honesty. I have known what it is to bury parts of myself, to live by expectation instead of truth, and to discover that no life becomes whole until it is lived from the inside out.

I have also known grace—the love of my parents, the joy of being a father and grandfather, and the steady hand of God, even when I resisted Him.

Today, everything I build grows out of that journey. My books, my blogs, Joyful Connections, and the wider body of work I continue to create all rise from one desire: to help others listen more deeply, live more honestly, and move toward the purpose for which they were created.

I am still listening. Still learning. Still becoming.

But I know this: when life aligns with purpose, resistance begins to lose its hold. What once felt scattered begins to gather. What once felt blocked begins to open.

If this page tells you anything true about me, let it be this: my life has been shaped by faith, struggle, love, loss, writing, and the persistent voice of God calling me toward a life that is more honest, more open, and more fully His.

Continue into the reflections that grow out of this journey.