orphan-poet-adoptee-soldier-prodigal-servant-husband-counselor-desperate seeker after my Father’s face

Abba brought me into the family in February of 1994 at age 20. I was living in Nashville, where I'd been since early October of '93. I was technically homeless at the time, crashing in a friend's dorm room in High Rise at Lipscomb when I could. I'm twice-adopted, I guess you could say -- my biological mom's half-brother and his wife adopted me when I was 8, after I'd bounced from family to family for most of those 8 years. My mom wasn't, well, stable. Actually, when I was born, she was a prostitute in NYC, and it is by God's grace alone that I was not aborted since Roe.v.Wade, et al, had just been decided.

Didn't make things easy on my adoptive family -- high IQ and ADHD were problematic. No major discipline problems (I was a chicken) but I was terribly addicted to lying and had a rich fantasy life.

Spent two years at West Point after high school, but I never learned to study and so when I got to the Academy and had to take REAL classes (instead of typical HS fare), I sort of tanked. Went home to Birmingham, but two years in the Army doesn't do much to make you want to go back under strict parental discipline. Met some folks from Lipscomb online, threw my stuff in a duffle bag and rode the Big Grey Dog up to Nashville.

The Lipscomb community took me in and gave me a home, showed Jesus to me, but I fell through (or hid in, more likely) the cracks at two different congregations. Wasn't til I married a Lipscomb girl from Frankfort and we decided that I needed new surroundings that I ended up in Frankfort, where an older minister at my wife's home church took me under his wing. Showed me how to study Scripture and let me be free enough to come to my own conclusions on things. He's one of what I call "Elijah's remnant" in the Spiritual Sword crowd.

Now, I'm striving to share the gospel of grace to all those around me. I've been thinking missional thoughts for years before I began overhearing the missional conversation in different ways. Being in a grace-parched congregation will sometimes drive a person to think missionally out of desperation, because the attractive model just won't work.

That's all for now, I guess.