Deeper Water

… and so my journey began.

When I entered college, I became involved with a couple of different Christian groups on the campuses I attended. My primary involvement was through Baptist Campus Ministries at Troy State (now Troy University), but I was also involved with Campus Outreach.

During the summer of ‘92, I participated in Summer Beach Project with Campus Outreach. During the course of that summer, God kept taking me back to an event that occured several years earlier when I was only ten. I knew that God had called me to minister, but I had no idea what that meant. Part of me was utterly terrified that if I finally just gave in, God would send me to Africa where I would live in a grass hut without air conditioning, marry an ugly woman with a monkey on her head, and wear ugly clothes. (Did I mention that I received a fairly typical Baptist upbringing? I have seen more slide shows from missionaries than I would ever care to admit.)

That summer, I gave in. I finally came to the point where I was willing to scrub toilets if that is what God had in store for me. Within weeks of returning from Beach Project, I was serving as a youth minister at a small, rural Baptist church. I continued in part-time youth ministry for the next five years. In the summer of 1997, I took my first full-time ministry position.

That story is definitely one for another night. Stay tuned, I promise to share it.