Westminster School

Woodward Academy High School

 

I grew up in Vinings, NW Atlanta, living in a coldesac neighborhood of close families & best friends, going to school at Lovett. As a kid, I always found Church boring, & nothing more than part of the usual Sunday morning routine. The only thing I really liked about it, was lunch at McDonalds every week after the service.   Christianity was purely a set of rules & instructions, that I ought to live by in order to be a good person & to avoid getting into trouble, part of aiming to please my parents & others around me. Following my 10th grade year at Lovett, in 1996, I was first introduced to Young Life on Western Tour, after I'd been lured into going by a couple of my friends. Of course, going into that trip, I didn't have a clue what was coming.  It was at Frontier Ranch that summer, that my journey with the Lord began, after I accepted Christ laying on the roof of the Club room (Kachina), during the quiet time following the Cross talk.  The following two summers, 1997-98, I returned on Western Tour to Frontier, & later, would again in 2001, as a junior leader following my sophomore year at Virginia.  Over the course of my first few summers at UVA, I served on YL Summerstaff 5 times, both at Sharptop Cove & Crooked Creek Ranch in Colorado.  Between my junior & senior years in college, I was blessed to spend a year in Australia, where I studied in Melbourne for 6 months, living with the YL Australia Area Director there, before completing a NOLS Leadership Semester there in the Spring.  As I left Australia to head back to UVA for my senior year, I began to realize that I was straddling a fence between two very different worlds, & that the Lord was trying to get my attention, that anything & everything about my life & my relationship with Him was still all about me.  It was only after I'd wrestled with the reality & consequences of sin in my life, that I began to understand the truth about grace & our Father's love for us... that a life spent pursuing the Lord, isn't at all about a Religion or a set of rules, it's about a person, Jesus Christ, & growing closer to Him through the personal, intimate relationship for which we were created. It's absolutely so much more than what Christ said.  It's who He was.  Immediately following graduation, I worked a summer for Moondance Adventures, leading high school kids from home in Atlanta on Wilderness Adventure Trips out west, before I moved to Colorado, where I spent 12 months working on YL Property Staff at Frontier Ranch.  It was over the course of my time working at Frontier, that I felt the Lord call me into ministry.  After blessing me with the opportunity to go serve Him under YL's banner in Africa for 5 months this past year, ahead of returning home to go on YL Staff in NW Atlanta, the story remains the same - Our God is awesome.  It isn't about us, it's about Him.