My Story

I was born in Oklahoma City and raised in a deeply rooted Christian family. Faith was not something distant in my childhood. It was part of the air I breathed, the rhythm of Sundays, the language of home, and the foundation beneath daily life. I was raised in the Church of the Nazarene, shaped by parents and grandparents whose faith was sincere, steady, and woven into the life of our family. Some of my earliest memories are filled with church, extended family, shared meals, and the kind of belonging that forms a person long before he has words for it. 

When I was eight years old, my family moved to Japan. That experience changed me. It pulled 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, immersed in another culture, I began to sense that life held more beneath the surface than most people ever talked about. Something in me began to awaken there—an awareness, a sensitivity, an intuition I did not yet understand, but could not entirely ignore. 

When we returned to the United States, faith once again became central in visible ways, but by then my inner life had become more complicated. I was hearing, sensing, and knowing things I could not easily explain. During my teen years, while praying with a choir group, I had an experience that left me shaken and unsure what to do with what I believed I was hearing spiritually. From that point on, I began to retreat inward. I learned how 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 open.

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 and meaning through the roles life placed before me. My sons became two of the greatest gifts of my life. Yet even while I loved them deeply and sought to care for them well, I was also living with layers of inner conflict, repression, disappointment, and confusion. My marriage ended, and in the aftermath, I found myself returning to my parents’ home with my two boys, trying to rebuild life while carrying failure, frustration, and exhaustion all at once.

During that season, something in me began to break open again. 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 forward, the habit was gone. No struggle. No gradual tapering. Just gone. It was a simple moment on the surface, but for me it was part of a deeper pattern: 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 hoped, I finally turned my rage toward God. I had argued with my father. I was broke. I was worn down. As I walked, I began speaking aloud—first in frustration, then in accusation, then in full anger. Finally, I shouted, “Why won’t You answer me?” What followed was a silence so complete it felt like the whole world had stopped. And then I heard the words: “And what would you have Me say?” In that instant, I was undone. 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 listening would forever change the way I lived.  

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

From there, I began slowly, and often imperfectly, to live from a deeper place. I learned that faith is more than belief. It is a way of being. I learned that the words we live by shape the lives we experience. I learned that purpose is not something we manufacture by force, but something we begin to recognize when we stop resisting what is deepest and truest within us. Over time, I also came to see that writing was not merely something I enjoyed. It was one of the clearest threads in my life. I had been writing down dreams since 1976, and somewhere along the way, I realized that writing was not a side interest. It was part of my calling.  

My life has not followed a straight line. It has included loss, hiddenness, reinvention, family responsibility, spiritual awakening, and hard-won honesty. I have known what it is to suppress parts of myself, to try 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 profound grace: the love of my parents, the joy of being a father and grandfather, the power of being seen more clearly than I saw myself, 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 come from one desire: to help others listen more deeply, live more intentionally, and move toward the purpose for which they were created. I believe God still speaks. I believe purpose is real. I believe life begins to change when we stop performing, stop hiding, and begin responding to what God is awakening within us.

I am still listening. Still learning. Still becoming. But I know this much: 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. And faith becomes something lived, not merely spoken.

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.