Hey All!
I've lost contact with you, just talk to you every once in a while, or for some of you haven't talked to you much since high school when we were best friends. I just wanted to tell you what's been going on in my life since when you knew me and I'm sorry - keeping in touch with people hasn't always been a priority for me. But I figured now was a good time to start. If you get the chance, write me back and let me know what's going on in your life!
After graduating high school, I went on to an engineering school (University of Missouri - Rolla) to study aerospace engineering. Not much changed when I went to college - I still liked playing strategy games, still didn't really do any homework, and still enjoyed ping pong. I stopped going to church and started reading more, but that's about the extent of the change. I wasn't exactly happy though, and it really bothered me that my mom was far happier than I was even though I thought she had far less to live for than I did.
Well, I ended up getting so sick of being depressed that I went on a 5 day fast to find the truth. I figured that if there was a God, then He'd relent and tell me the truth if I read enough stuff and tortured myself enough. Looking back on it, that probably wasn't the best attitude, but oh well - it seemed to work and I somehow knew there was a God and that Christianity was true. I really didn't want that to be the case - I knew it gave my parents "I told you so" rights and that I'd have to change a lot of my life. But I didn't have much I really cared about so I ended up giving everything over to God.
It was really cool and I walked away from the experience feeling a lot better all the time. My life was still pretty much the same though. Since I wasn't all depressed all the time, I could focus more on helping others out which I really enjoyed. I joined the heavy-lift airplane competition team and got to work on making a radio-controlled airplane from scratch (we got to do it multiple times if the plane crashed, which wasn't as fun - however, I do have some cool videos if you're interested). I became a Resident Assistant in our residence halls and got to do some pretty sweet things there, too (if this note wasn't going to be so long, I'd include a list of pranks we pulled / had pulled on us).
Future career-wise, I met a guy from Boeing who was really impressed with me. He told me that if I filled out an application, he'd make sure I got an internship (which are very hard to find in aerospace!). The night I was going to finish the application, one of my friends got me to go to a Baptist Student Union meeting. The topic happened to be about summer missions, and God told me I should do that instead. I ended up dropping the internship opportunity and going to the Philippines for two months, helping teach subsistence farmers techniques to farm more of their land. The people we worked with got paid about $1 a day and they had to feed their entire family on that. Almost every family was heavily indebt to the one rich person in town. I wanted to help more, but I really felt helpless to do much lasting good.
Well, I switched my degree to Physics and education so I could teach. I also gave up the heavy-life airplane team in order to focus more on RA stuff. I planned on doing more missions work – I still wanted to help others, and I figured helping a little bit was far better than not helping at all. But I knew there had to be a better way to help, and found it a couple months later! Until that point, my religion had been pretty much 1-sided. I talked to God. He, well… didn’t do much. He gave me direction every once in a while. Anyway, I found out that God still spoke, still does miracles, and does them quite frequently! Of course, after realizing this (it’s pretty obvious from John 14, 1 Cor 4:20, 1 Cor 12, James 5:16), I wanted to try it out. I got the chance with my church’s next mission trip to Mexico.
Our premise in Mexico was simple – a lot of these people need help and we had a big God who wanted to help. We did a lot of stuff, but the coolest had to be praying for healings. That trip was pretty awesome – we saw arthritis, chronic back pain, and complete muteness healed instantly in Jesus’ name along with quite a few smaller things. I know some of you don’t believe in instant healings or a God or whatever, but I’m just going to write down what happened – you can debate it with me if you like :P. Anyway, I was super-pumped – Christians always say there is more to life, but I was seeing it with my own eyes. We just weren’t giving people food or a healed foot – we were giving them a supernatural Savior who had power to actually do something about the problems in their life.
When we got back, we got to see scoliosis, a 10 cm tumor, an incurable heart condition (with the pictures and doctor’s records to back it up), and several cases of depression healed. It was pretty crazy. That summer I went to Brazil on another mission trip that was a lot like the Mexico one but longer. It was then that I realized miracles are a part of life for Christians in other countries. We don’t really need them most of the time because medicine will take care of it – most of the time they don’t have a choice. I decided to go straight into missions from college at least for a while – not so much to help others as to learn from other cultures and Christians.
So for you girls I sent this to, you’ll probably want to know about other parts of my life. This last year, our team won the MCC math competition – we thought it was funny because I wasn’t even a math major! Now for you girls who aren’t Rachel, Laura, or Mary, I met my wife two years ago at church and in my education classes. Carla had just got back from spending 6 months Bangladesh helping out the Christian church there. When she transferred to UMR, she was working on an English education degree and taught ESL on the side to international college students.
Anyway, I met her at lunch one day. We talked for several hours and I didn’t know her name. One person called her Carla, and I thought “Oh God please don’t let that be her name!” – I liked her a lot but it would be weird being friends with or dating anyone with the same name as my mom! It was a couple weeks later before I found out her dad’s name was John – if Freud were alive, he’d turn over in his grave! Then probably scream for help getting out of the coffin… We hung out a lot, especially after I crashed her car into a tree and had to give her a ride everywhere (I’d like to say it was planned). Long story short, I told her I was going to be single the rest of my life, she didn’t buy it, and now we’re married. She finishes her student teaching in December, and we’re planning on going to Mozambique this winter for a 9 month stay. We’ll be doing a lot of work with AIDS orphans, food distribution, disaster relief work, and of course, showing the people a Savior. Mozambique has recently been hit with multiple serious floods, and the number of people left homeless rose above 1 million. There have been several instances where food and Bibles were flown in to places where people hadn’t eaten in months, and the people ran for the Bibles instead of the food. The group we are going with has planted over 7000 churches in the past 12 years, regardless of constant death threats to Christians in the area. http://www.irismin.org has more info if you’re interested.
Currently, I have graduated, and Carla is student teaching while I act as house husband. We love having people over and working at camps for high school and middle school kids. We would like to know more homeless people, but Rolla isn’t exactly full of them. We don’t have very much stuff and we are debt-free, making it possible for us to get up and move whenever we need to. For the most part, we lead pretty simple lives.
Lastly, thank you Laura for dragging me to church even when I didn’t want to, Hannah for being the first to talk to me about truly important things, and Lisa and Raj for being my friends when I was determined not to have any. If you get the chance, please write back and tell me what’s going on in your life / what life-changing things you’ve run into!
