Some of my story...

I was born in El Paso, TX. I grew up in a really great home with God, and life with God always being a major part of our lives. I remember asking Jesus to “come into my heart” when I was about eight years old, but it was not until the 8th grade that I remember actually giving Christ my life. 

High school was a rough time for me, and it was the grace of God that got me through it (literally, I wanted to drop out my senior year). Young Life was a big part of my life during that time, and the relationships I made with my leaders were sources of life for me. I attended camp once, and then I was on work crew twice and summer staff once. I also had the opportunity to go on two Wilderness trips that had deep impacts on my life, and I will never forget some of the intimate times I experienced with God on those trips. 

After graduating, I moved outside of Denver, CO and started attending Colorado Christian University. The Metro Director for Young Life El Paso had called ahead and set up some meetings with me and some area directors in Lakewood. They asked me to start a club at an underprivileged high school close to where I was going to college. I was 19. I was young and immature and just assumed that it was God. I did not pray much about it, and was excited for the opportunity. I say this because while I believe deeply that God worked through me, and the team I put together there, I wasn’t ready, and I needed so much more help than I ever asked for.

I put a team together and we started having club the next semester. It was a really fun time. It was messy, and raw, and by the grace of God the club was still alive and going the last time I checked. 

A couple years later, after leading some middle school kids from a church back in El Paso at a camp in CO, I felt very strongly that God was asking me to give up my dream life in Colorado and move back to El Paso to continue life with these kids. I had promised myself that once I left El Paso I would never look back, but after three years, I packed my stuff in my truck and moved back home.

I eventually became the youth pastor of a small Lutheran church in El Paso, and got to be a part of something special there. God was on the move, and I am so grateful that he chose me to be a part of it. I started a junior high group, that was really a WyldeLife club (we even attended YL camps) and started training high schoolers to be leaders. I also got to work with high school and college kids. This was a wonderful time of my life, but it was also extremely taxing. The church could only pay half-time so I was working another job and still going to school on top of that. I was burning out.

Then, after 2 years, I came home to hear my mom tell me that she was “pretty sure” her and my dad were going to get divorced. I never though anything like this would happen to our family. What happened over the next few years completely crushed me. I had been talking about and interviewing for a staff position with Young Life in Huntington Beach already, and in the aftermath of what I learned about my parents, I was told to come out early and they would make something work for me. I moved out in March of 2004, and lived on the couch of some YL Irvine leaders for a few months before finding a place to live. 

By the time I got out here I was emotionally, spiritually, and physically drained. I told Young Life I could not be on staff, and began working as a volunteer with the WyldeLife group in Huntington. 

Over the next 5 years, God began to strip me of all I felt made me safe, comfortable, valuable, “good”, worthy, and lovable and slowly began to show me how deep and wide his everlasting love for me actually was, not because I was a good youth worker, or even a good member of the church or society, but just because he created me to love me, and nothing will ever change that. This was a hard time mixed with depression, confusion, anger, frustration, disillusionment, doubt, and darkness, but God was always faithful to give me enough to keep me going.

I met and married the best girl in the world during this time, and we now have two amazing daughters. I also finally finished my undergraduate work and did something else I vowed I would never do: went on to seminary.

Now, I can look back over all the loss, and mess, and darkness of the last 7 years, and see so much beauty and love in it. I truly feel that God was setting me free to love, to actually love and be loved. I now believe with everything I am that the only way to experience life is to lose it, and that GOD IS LOVE. No matter who you are. I have always wanted to share this more than anything with others, but now it goes so much deeper than it did before. Its no longer just a sentimental/emotional thing, but something as real as gravity, or the air we breath... and something just as vital.