I’ve never sat down and written this out in a single cohesive narrative. I think to understand some of my thoughts, one has to understand what has made me what I am. It starts quite literally at the beginning.
I was born in a small town in central Mississippi in July 1984. Nothing special there. My grandfather on my Dad’s side was a preacher and on my Mom’s side was Navy. Shortly after birth though, by the grace of God, the doctors detected what they thought might be a problem with my heart. Diagnostics revealed there was a defect, but nothing severe enough to warrant any immediate action. We’ll circle back to this later.
Things progressed pretty normally for a while, less than a year later, the family welcomed my sister, and about a year and a half later, a brother. This is where things start to turn. 7 weeks after his birth, he died suddenly of what was then called “crib death” known more commonly today as SIDS. What followed was a whirlwind of events that eventually led to our family moving to Yuma, AZ for a fresh start.
Life continued for a while, including welcome another sister. What I didn’t recognize as a kid at the time was the enormous strain that losing my brother had placed on my parent’s marriage. By this time, Dad was drinking fairly heavily and they had all but abandoned following Christ. Things spiraled down until a decision in the fall of 1991 was made to send my sisters and me to live with Mom’s parents
What followed was a 6-month journey that took us from the desert of Yuma to St. Louis until finally we finally ended up with my Dad’s parents in central Minnesota. Things stabilized finally. My grandfather was serving a small church there, my sisters and I were introduced to Christ, and life was good. This situation also happened to put me within a couple of hours of a great specialist that was able to look at my heart and determine that everything was still ok, but for the first time, I understood that eventually, I would have to have surgery to correct the problem. On a Sunday morning in March 1996, our world shattered. My grandfather, the male role model that had become my rock, died unexpectedly while getting ready for the day.
At this time, my two youngest uncles were still living at home. The youngest had just gotten engaged and was due to be married the following May, the other had a passion for music and led the worship services at the church. It so happened that a close family friend who came for the funeral heard my uncle lead that following Sunday. He was an elder for a medium-sized church near Fort Wayne, Indiana. He returned to the church to find that they were starting to search for a Worship Minister. In the fall of 1997 my grandmother, sisters, my uncle, and I moved for him to take that position. Life continued.
Finally, in the summer of 1999, the call 15 years in the making finally came. My heart had finally progressed to the point where it had to be addressed or risk very serious complications. In one of those situations that can only be considered a “God thing” our move to Indiana put us with 2 hours of the world’s premier surgeon for the specific procedure that they wanted to perform. So in August of 1999, I went under the knife. Over the next few months, I healed and felt physically better than I had in many years. Life continued.
I graduated high school, accomplished some pretty remarkable achievements, earned an Associates degree in IT, started working toward a Bachelor’s degree, and my spiritual life was beginning to blossom to some degree. During the summer and fall of 2006, I started to experience some disturbing physical issues that put me back in the cardiologist’s office. Diagnostics done indicated that there was a new problem that had been exacerbated by the prior procedure and a second open heart surgery was going to be required to repair it. And so, just two weeks before Christmas, I was back in the hospital under the knife. Physically I healed pretty quickly, but mentally and emotionally I didn’t heal so fast. I ended up dropping out of school and for the next couple of years struggled to hold a job. Financially, I was in serious trouble as well as I didn’t have any health insurance for the second surgery so I was on the hook for a couple hundred thousand dollars in medical bills as well as some seventy-five thousand that I had racked up in student loans. I moved to another city to take a job and lost that job a couple of months later, was evicted from my apartment, couch surfed for a while, before finally moving back home and working what odd IT jobs I could find. This was all during the recession and recovery of 2008-2010.
Finally, in the spring of 2010, I was able to land a part-time job working tech support for a small rural internet company about 45 minutes from home. I worked that summer and commuted. In early fall, I was asked to start full time and I decided that the commute was too much and got a small apartment close to work. I thought I was ready to be on my own by then and for the first year or two, things were really good. I had somehow managed to settle, pay, or get forgiven all the medical debt. But things weren’t all perfect. By 2012, I started drinking, mostly out of boredom sitting at home by myself. I started to pull away from family, stopped going to church regularly citing distance as the reason (really just an excuse not to go). I thought things were going well – financially I was standing on my own two feet, barely, but I was. I managed to buy a house and generally live a comfortable life – but it was a smokescreen. Finally, on a rare Sunday morning in 2017, I visited my family and went to church and was so hungover I couldn’t hide it. There was no judgment, but the look of disappointment on my grandmother’s face was enough to cut me to the heart. I quit drinking, reconnected with family, and started going back to church.
By 2018, I had regained some equilibrium and was on my journey back to Christ when the leadership of the church that had been home for our family for over 20 years, made the decision that my uncle didn’t fit the vision they had for the future and we were left adrift and searching for direction. It was a turning point in my life as I consciously made a decision that I was not going to let these events separate me from Jesus.
During Christmas in 2018, I found a church home that swallowed me and I’ve never been more thankful.
For those that might be wondering, Mom and Dad eventually divorced. She now lives with her husband in Oregon and are very happy. Dad moved to Fort Wayne in January 2004 and has rebuilt his connection with the family and his relationship with Jesus.