Life Story

Growing up in a highly transient missionary family meant that by the time I graduated from high school I had lived in three countries, several states and attended five different schools. This trajectory of change was compounded by the death of my father in a car accident while I was in junior high and my diagnosis with a birth defect that wasn’t caught until high school. While I can now look back and see just how faithful God was with the gifts He provided alongside those losses and transitions, my teenaged self recognized far less of God’s sovereignty and instead decided that I was strong, autonomous and capable of overcoming whatever struggles life would toss my way.

While God was gracious enough to slowly and gently draw my prideful heart to Himself over the course of four years at Cedarville University (which resulted in my eventual baptism as affirmation of my need for Christ's work on the cross), my most formative spiritual experience was far less subtle. In the midst of a season where I found myself choosing between living overseas as a photographer for international nonprofits or staying in the United States to pursue music in one form or another, He took both options away within a matter of days through health complications which left me entirely unable to speak and covered my face in an infection.

In His goodness, God demonstrated that He loves His children enough to break through hard-heartedness, reveal pride and draw a heart so prone to wander back into accordance with His will and plans. That refining love demonstrated what little trust I had in God, since the elimination of my two career paths and future dreams left my identity shattered. In the place of these newly identified idols, there became space for Christ at the center of my priorities that I hadn't previously made available to His lordship.

In response to this change of my values and goals, I sought employment at The Village Church in order to continue learning my craft as a musician and developing as a follower of Christ. I’m immensely grateful for the ways that He has been faithful to bless, enable and empower that pursuit.

Hope for The Village Church

My hope for The Village is that we would be a people who gladly decrease in order that Christ might increase, who desire that His face be seen and who make His voice heard, rather than our own. I pray that we would be people whose service, love and relationships reflect and magnify those of our Savior. “Complete my joy by being of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility count others more significant than yourselves. Let each of you look not only to his own interests, but also to the interests of others. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.” –Philippians 2:2-8