My Personal Journey

During his officer training my twin brother Paul and I were born.  We were born two months premature which was a pretty big deal back then, and we spent several weeks in the incubator in the base hospital.  It was a precarious situation, but by God’s grace, we both survived.  Following that, just short of two years later, after completing his F4 Phantom flight training, my youngest brother Daniel was born, and after that Dad was sent to the Vietnam war.

In July 1972 while in Vietnam, my Dad’s plane was shot down and he was killed.  In previous conversations with my Mom, he had told her that if he died, she had his blessing to remarry with the condition that the man she chose would legally adopt me and my two brothers and raise them as his own.  By God's grace, she did remarry and he agreed to do this.  An interesting similarity was that he was also a fighter pilot who had flown in Vietnam.  I was young enough at the time that I have no other memory of a dad apart from my “new Dad”.  He adopted me and was my Dad in every sense of the word and loved and raised me as his own son.  This was an amazing gift from God. This is an experience that I always think of whenever I consider the fact that, as a believer in Jesus Christ, I have also been adopted by my heavenly Father!  “In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— to the praise of his glorious grace, which he has freely given us in the One he loves.” – Ephesians 1:4b-6

A few years later, when I was 7 years old, my “new Dad” was given a new Air Force assignment and we moved to a base in southern Georgia.  I began taking piano lessons and loved it!  We started attending a new church where I began to hear and understand for myself the good news of the gospel.  Through the kindness of my parents and others, supported by my newfound love of the hymns we were singing, I learned that I was a sinner in desperate need of rescue.  I learned that despite my wretched condition, God loved me and did something that I could not do for myself.  He sent his only Son (Jesus) to pave the way for me to be freed from eternal punishment in hell.  Jesus came to earth and lived the perfect, sinless life that you and I could never live.  He was able to do this because He is eternal and divine in nature, perfect in every way.  He is God, the Son of God, who appeared to us in the flesh.  Because Jesus never sinned, He was uniquely qualified to be the Lamb of God, sacrificially dying a painful death on the cross to pay the penalty required for our sins.  I also learned that three days after his death, He rose back to life from the dead just as He had prophesied, proving that He had conquered death and sin.  This was amazing news and as a young boy, I received it with joy in my heart! I repented of my sin and asked Jesus to forgive me and save me.  I wanted to live for Him.  While I didn’t fully understand the full gravity of all that had happened, I KNEW something had changed in me – I was given new life!  The best way to describe it was that it honestly felt to me as if my life had started all over again. This verse describes what happened so well: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!” – 2 Corinthians 5:17.

None of this would be possible had it not been for the preemptive work of God in making me alive in Christ. It wasn’t because of what I had done, nothing for which I could boast.  It was only because of His great grace.  As the Bible says in 2 Timothy 1:9: “[God] saved us and called us to a holy life – not because of anything we have done but because of his own purpose and grace.  This grace was given us in Christ Jesus before the beginning of time.”

Over the years, I was blessed to be raised by God-fearing parents.  Mom homeschooled us as well, which gave us a wonderful academic and spiritual foundation for life.  I am incredibly grateful for her dedication to doing this.  During my childhood, piano lessons were also a big part of my life and I frequently had the opportunity to play in church and other places.  My twin brother Paul and I began to dream of doing concerts and in our teenage years my parents bought a second piano so we started playing 2-piano music together. 

​