I was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan and raised in a Christian home. My father was ordained as a Baptist minister when I was a teenager and has been faithful in ministry ever since.

I made a profession of faith as a five-year-old boy and was baptized shortly thereafter. Our church was small, and my father taught the boys’ Sunday School class. He was a fairly young believer at the time and didn’t quite know how to teach the Bible to a group of boys, so he obtained a discipleship curriculum written for new believers and hit the ground running. Over the years, he faithfully taught the Word of God to me and several other boys. In addition to learning from my dad at church, he was always faithful to lead us in family worship at home. The lines have truly fallen for me in pleasant places.

However, as a young adult my head was full of all the “right” answers, but my affections were being drawn elsewhere. God brought several people into my sphere of friends and acquaintances during those years who challenged my beliefs, causing me to search the Scriptures. Others faithfully encouraged and exhorted me to lead a life “worthy of the gospel of Christ” (Philippians 1:27). In his divine wisdom, God used both of these groups of people to draw me to himself.

The story of a pastor’s kid struggling with personal faith is a tale as old as time. To use Dorothea Williams’ analogy from the Pixar movie, Soul, we’re a bit like small fish swimming all over the ocean searching for the ocean, because all we can see is water. Jesus’ words to Nicodemus ring true: we cannot even see the kingdom of God unless we are born again. When God opens your eyes and you truly believe in Christ and receive him as he is offered in the gospel, there’s no going back. The gospel changes everything. The Scriptures came alive, as though I were reading them for the first time. I began to see and understand things I didn’t see or understand before. The more I read of Christ, the more my faith grew, and I began to understand what it meant to be truly, authentically Christian.

In the years that followed, much has happened. I moved from Ohio to Michigan to intern under a pastor friend who is still faithful in ministry. I married my high school sweetheart and we started a family. We moved back to Ohio and purchased our first home together, expecting to put down roots and raise our growing family there. For eight years, I served in various positions of music and pastoral ministry and also assisted in planting a church.

Over the past decade, God has led me on a sometimes painful (but incredibly joy-filled and edifying) journey of personal growth and reformation. I have the utmost respect for my parents and the many others who have shaped me into the person I am today. I will always be thankful for the biblical foundation they laid for me. But the more I read the Scriptures, the more I became convinced and convicted of Reformed Theology—even though sometimes it felt as though the Scriptures were dragging me, kicking and screaming. It has not been an easy journey. Wrestling with deeply-held beliefs and surrendering your will to the authority of Scripture is a painful process for proud men. But I could not escape God’s sovereignty in the Scriptures, especially in salvation. I began to see how the Bible is truly one grand story of redemption, rather then a collection of different stories that were simply related to one another. By God’s grace, I learned to embrace and cherish the doctrines of grace, Covenant Theology, and Reformed Theology.

Today, I am confessionally Reformed. We are members of a Reformed church and are striving, by God’s grace, to raise our children to know and love God and to trust and rest in Christ alone for salvation as he is offered to them in the gospel.