It is hard for me to say when my walk with Christ really started.  I can think of three major encounters that have lead me to the place where I am now.  I suppose some would like it narrowed down, but God is real and the relationships that He creates with His people are real, and because of this they don’t always fit into the cookie cutter box that we try to put them in. 

           When I was only a child, maybe three, I remember walking into my sister’s room.  She was sitting on the bed and reading a book.  Lori and I were very close and I spent most of my time with her.  I asked what she was reading and she told me about the Bible.  I didn’t understand then and it just seemed like a good story to me, but it has stuck with me over the years.  That memory I look at as a major event simply because I know it was the planting of a seed.  I don’t remember much from my childhood so this memory, however small, is very dear to me.

           My parents did not seem to attend church, although it was brought to my attention later that before I was born they were both looking into the full time ministry.  I didn’t have any encounter with church until my father remarried.  I would go to church with them on Sunday mornings but it all seemed like a show to me.  It was a boring time and I didn’t understand what the preacher was talking about.  They didn’t have a children’s ministry and the time there had no impact on me spiritually.

           When I was about fourteen, I moved down to Georgia with my mother.  She was also remarried, but I wanted to get away from the situation in Delaware with my father.  Neither my stepfather or my mother went to church, but the first friends I made did.  They were my neighbors and I would go to church with them every Sunday and almost every Wednesday.  This church had a wonderful youth group and it wasn’t long before I committed my life to Christ.  In 1995, I was baptized and our youth program was growing in leaps and bounds.

           While I was going to this church I started seeing things in my hallway.  I don’t know any way to explain this without it sounding strange but I wouldn’t want to leave this out.  It was always at night in my home, I would see these things outside of my room.  They made me feel scared when they were around, and I would pray that God would help me.  I went to my sister with this and she told me that she could feel them in the hall the same nights I would see them.  I kept going back to her to be sure I was not going crazy, that someone else could acknowledge what I saw.  After I became a bit more comfortable with this I talked with my neighbors on the way to church.  Their parents told me that this kind of thing was of Satan and that I should stop because it was evil.

           Over the next few months I tried to just ignore the things and I would see them less and less.  While I was struggling with this I remember asking my Grandmother and she taught me how to do self-hypnosis as well as a few other occult like things.  I did what she told me to do and I stopped seeing them.  I mention all this because I believe this is how Satan got a foothold in my life.  I believe my Grandmother may have had ties in the occult that even she did not know about.

           Now that I felt I was cured of my satanic aliment I continued going to church.  One day while I was there I saw the pastor speak in this language that sounded like giberish.  I remembered reading about “tongues” in the same place I saw discerning of spirits.  Somehow in my mind I made the association that this must be satanic work in the church.  I had already seen so much “corruption” and I was tired of being associated with a corrupt church.  I walked out of the building and began calling myself a follower of Christ, not even wanting to be called a Christian because I was so angry.

           A Christian cannot last long without the support and fellowship of his peers and I soon fell further.  Divide and conquer was his tactic.  I started to question whether Christ was really the messiah and soon called myself a follower of God.  I took a few people with me in this process and I am sorry I was the reason they visited so close to the depths of Hell.

           Calling myself a follower of God left me to explore the other religions.  I thought maybe I could find the truth in one of them.  I read many books about all the religions I could find, until someone handed me a book on witchcraft.  I was entrapped by the freedom of belief that it proclaimed to give.  It was the first religion that I had come across that openly acknowledged the spiritual world.  I had seen enough in my short life that I was convinced that a spiritual world existed and that a true religion would have to include the spiritual in order to be true.  I accepted witchcraft and went further and further into the hole I was digging for myself.

           I stayed down that path encouraging those I came in contact with to take a closer look at the “fallacies” of Christianity.  I was dating a girl that asked me to join her at a home group.  A couple friends of hers had just converted and she was hoping I could “talk some sense into them”.  I attended the meeting and calmly listened through the whole thing.  I didn’t hear anything special from the message.  I had heard all that Christian stuff before and I was not moved by it anymore.  After the meeting was over I stayed and talked to my girlfriend’s friend.  I tried to explain to him that all religions really head in the same direction, and made the argument very well.  So well in fact he replied like this “I hear what you are saying and I can’t argue any of those points…I don’t know, I just still believe.”  I never expected such a statement of faith.  I had never seen anything like it before.

           I went home that night and read the Bible some more.  I was hoping I would find something more I could show him.  As I was reading I felt my heart changing, but I was fighting it.  I came across the portion of scripture that talks about Jesus walking on water.  While I was reading that I remembered a dream that I had forgotten.  Dreams are very important to witches and I had always made it a point to interpret dreams when I had them.  I had not had many after the self-hypnosis as a child and those I did have seemed to come to pass in some way.  I had one dream, however that I had written off as impossible.  I had a dream where I was in an old city, it was raining and Jesus and I were walking on water saving people together.  We would pull them out of the water and take them to a hilltop where some ruins were.  I had always ignored the dream because it had Jesus in it.  Now the dream was coming back to me very vividly.  I was stunned and felt like I understood the dream.  Jesus and I were going to work together to pull people out of the drowning waters of life.  I started to pray.  I said, “Creator of the world (I didn’t want to mess this up since at the time God could have meant so many things to me and I didn’t know who God was) is Jesus Your son?”  I don’t know how to explain it I just knew He said “Yes”.

           I was devastated.  I broke down in tears right there and cried myself to sleep.  The next day when I got home from work I did the same thing and so on for three days.  When I finally pulled myself together I enrolled in Bible College.  I had not yet finished school when I started working with a church creating the first youth program the church had ever had.  I had so much fun working with that church, loving and learning about God with new eyes and ears.  I knew the Bible stories well but now I was getting to know the Author.  It was amazing. 

           After working with that church for a while I left because of some denominational differences.  From there I went on to work with the YMCA in Georgia.  They let me take a 100-acre camp they had, and start a new camp program.  We had a very effective year and they kept me on staff to help bring Christianity back into their company.  Creating the program from scratch and letting God play an active role in a company that had abandoned Him was such a great privilege.

           Working at a camp has on and off seasons and during one of my off seasons I came to visit my sister in Ohio.  She was having some problems and needed a family member to just be around and support her.  I stayed for an extended visit and then decided it was time to get back home.  She kept trying to convince me to stay, I even felt like I should, but I didn’t seem to like the area much and thought I should go.  When I packed up my car and set off to go my car wouldn’t start.  I had not had this problem before and there was nothing I could do to fix it.  I had to buy a new car and I stayed a bit longer.  In the process I realized that God had some work for me to do here.

           Now I have been in Ohio for two years and I have spent the time working in a daycare.  I have learned a lot about working with kids of all different ages.  There is a wealth of information out there in this field.  I can't say I have seen any preschool or daycare or any institution for that matter, impliment any of these ideas in a way that was true to the theory.  However, I can say that it is interesting that our top minds are just now coming to realize what the bible has been telling us the whole time.  I believe that I have been equipped to create a program that is much more broad then anything I have done in the past. 

Now I am currently working with the CMA church called Embrace in West Chester Ohio.  I am excited to see things within the church unfold, a new vision for children and family ministry that will change our area.  My career has come a long way.  I remember thinking I would continue to work as a civil engineer for the rest of my life.  The blessing the Lord had put on my life, even before I was obident, allowed me to advance in a career that most people spend six years just going to school for.  God has shown me how he can bless me even in the secular world, He has shown me power and money and then asked me if I would give it all to him.  Well here I am and I have given these things over to Him.  Now I get to see what He calls a blessing.