I was brought up in a loving Roman Catholic home under amazing parents who did their best to take me to church and teach me to pray. Nevertheless, I was spiritually dead and enslaved to the sin I loved and lived for, and totally blind to the glory of the God who supplied my every breath while I lived in wreckless opposition to His will.
At age 17, while a junior at Mayfield High School, God was pleased to bring me the life-giving truth of the gospel through a friend and classmate. The words of Charles Wesley sweetly summarize my what happened to me:
Long my imprisoned spirit lay
Fast bound in sin and nature's night;
Thine eye diffused a quick'ning ray,
I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;
My chains fell off, my heart was free;
I rose, went forth and followed Thee.
The Spirit of God patiently and powerfully pursued me and replaced my stony, self-seeking, sin-loving heart with a heart of flesh. Although my conversion to Christ wasn't dramatic (see Acts 9:1-9), it resulted in what every genuine conversion does: a new life and fascination with the all-satisfying glory of God as it shines most magnificently in the person and work of His Son, Jesus Christ. For the first time, I was made to see and understand the objective beauty, sufficiency, and soul-saving power of the Son of God "who loved me and gave Himself for me" (Gal. 2:20).
My conversion in 2003 was accompanied by an insatiable desire to know God and make Him known, a desire that would intensify the next few years through an abundance of teaching and preaching opportunities in my local church. In 2005, while attending Calvary Chapel Bible College in Southern California, I was asked by my pastor if I wanted to come home after my first semester to start and lead the church's first Sunday night service. I did, and it became clear to me in these early days, especially through the encouragement of God's people, that I wanted to spend my life proclaiming Christ and shepherding His people. Looking back, I can say that I had no business preaching or being asked to be in roles of leadership as a recent convert (1 Tim. 3:6). Nevertheless, being handed stacks of study Bibles and commentaries as a young Christian and being asked to lead Bible studies and preach on Sundays was used by God to nurture in me a love for studying the Scriptures and ministering to His people.
Shortly after this God blessed me with a beautiful wife and He began to fill my quiver with arrows (Psa. 127:4-5). In 2012, after prayerfully considering the counsel of a pastor friend in Texas, my wife and I, along with my parents and a few others, stepped out in faith to plant Grace Community Church in the "City of the Crosses" where I was born and raised.
Although my time is limited as a bivocational pastor, my heart is set on shepherding Grace Community Church in hopes of being freed up one day to serve the flock in a greater, full-time capacity. It's one of the sweetest and most sobering privileges to spend and be spent as God saves, sanctifies, safeguards, and satisfies the souls of His people through prayer and the ministry of His word (Acts 6:4). As an aspiring preacher, I hope to one day preach my first sermon, to proclaim the excellencies my crucified and risen as He deserves to be proclaimed. I suspect that I'll have to wait until glory to be able to speak of Him as He ought to be spoken of, when I'm no longer limited by all the flaws and frailties of my fallen humanity. As William Cowper put it,
Then in a nobler, sweeter song,
I'll sing [His] power to save,
when this poor lisping, stammering tongue
lies silent in the grave
Oh, for that day!