I grew up in the church with a loving Christian family. As far back as I can remember, God was someone I always believed in. However, I realized over time that to have peace with God, I must not just believe that He exists, but also understand that only through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ can I be saved from eternal death. I can't get into heaven through my parents' faith, because I was brought up in a church, or because I have done a lot of good works. I will be with God forever only because I personally accepted His free gift of eternal life in Christ Jesus. This testimony is simply the story of the journey to discovering that truth and then hanging on to Jesus afterwards.

Growing up in the church was a fun experience. I felt like I was at home with a large family. It was a wonderful environment with many elders whom I looked up to as mentors in faith. Sometimes though, you can get very comfortable in such an environment, especially as a child with all of the fun activities and games, and get away from the true focus of Christ. I understand that it's difficult for children to understand all that's going on, but I believe that kids can understand and accept that life is all about knowing Jesus and that we can only be saved through Him. My point is, that at an early age, my relationship with Christ was mostly an mimic of the worship styles, language, prayers and beliefs that I had seen in the church. I'm not sure how often I really sought after Christ by myself. I think that I tried to please my parents and those in the church more than just seeking to please the Lord first.

I can remember being in Jr High when the opportunity to be baptized was announced at a Sunday morning service. My mother had asked me many times before if I had wanted to be baptized, but I just put it off because I was afraid to be in front of a large group of people. This particular time though, I decided to make my mom happy and be baptized. I also knew it was something that a believer should do, but I didn't catch the full significance and meaning of it. I was baptized a week later. I had a feeling of relief to know it was over with. I could say that I was a "good Christian" now.

In high school I started to become a little more involved in the church and "Christian activities." I led a boy's accountability group at my house on Monday nights, helped organize other youth events, and participated in a type of evangelism known as "servant evangelism" (which consisted in handing out refreshments for anyone waiting at the local bus terminal to minster the love of Jesus to them). All of the ministry opportunities were great and I know people's lives were touched. Something was still missing though. While I was somewhat standing up for my faith, my personal relationship with Christ left something to be desired. I rarely ever talked with him in prayer and usually read the Bible to suppress guilty feelings or to find a passage that might prove me more right than someone else. Fortunately, God was patient with me and the college years would prove to be the avenue that He used to do some major reconstruction on my heart.

Everyone knows that life entails a lot of highs and lows. It seemed that for me, my freshman year of college had more lows than anything else. For the first time I was away from the shelter of my family and my home church, from my high school friends, and from my youth group. It was an exciting and fresh adventure, but it was one of the scariest times in my life.

One of the hardest things for me that year was the breakup with my girlfriend. We decided to go our separate ways after a year and a half together. What I didn't realize was how much I relied on her for my happiness and my self worth. Somewhere in that year and a half we lost focus of Christ in our relationship and it became unhealthy. It was an enjoyable relationship, but because of sin in parts of our relationship, it wasn't pleasing to God. The process of getting over my girlfriend took along time. It was very painful. I had made her an idol and I was forgetting my Creator. The bright spot and point to this story is that sometime during the middle of spring quarter God began to change my heart and show me some important things.

He showed me that I needed to start focusing on Him to have any kind of peace in this life. I shouldn't run to others for protection, comfort and self worth, but to Christ. (I understand that God uses others to minister to us.) I needed to always seek Him first. I also felt Him calling me to a deeper relationship with Him. It may be that this is when I really accepted Him completely for myself. A Christian walk should not be an imitation of what you see other Christians do, but a carefully discerned quest for the truth in Christ by spending time getting to know Him. If I hear a sermon, I should pray about it and check it against what the Bible says. I began to see that there was a deeper meaning to being a Christian. Baptism wasn't just an event to meet other's expectations of you, but to publicly declare your devotion to Christ and share what He has done for you. It is a public display of your change from the sinful life to a new life in Christ. With this new revelation, I decided to rededicate my life to God and be baptized again. This time I spoke to my church family and told them of what I had learned and declared my love for and commitment to Christ.

The rest of my years at the university are hard to describe. I had a desire to grow closer to Jesus, but I soon found out that there is nothing magical about baptism and that following Jesus means giving Him everything. I almost felt that after I had openly declared my commitment to God, Satan wanted to hinder my devotion more than ever. I was not free from the influence of desires and temptations. I struggled with old habits, depression, jealousy, and a lack of trust in God's timing and provision. However, I wasn't alone because God was with me and He was working in my heart. In this time, I was awakened to the battle that rages between the Spirit of God within a believer and the sinful nature of the old self. Unfortunately, I lost a lot of battles with temptation during the college years because I underestimated sin's power, overestimated my personal strength, undervalued the necessity of drawing on strength from God each day, and failed to recognize the truth that there is always victory possible in Jesus Christ. Still, there was a distaste for sin growing within me to the point where I was able to confess my struggles with some close friends. God strengthened some old friendships with Christians during this time and also gave me some new friends that continue to provide accountability and encouragement in seeking after the Lord.

After I graduated from the university, I could start to see that God really was changing my heart. My progress was still slow. New challenges popped into the picture. Now that I had a job, I could afford to buy things I wanted. However, it was easy to get into the trap of working a few hours of overtime so I could afford to buy something more for myself. After doing this for a while, I had less time for fellowship with God and with church family and I often found myself tired and struggling for purpose. Still, I knew inside that things had to change and I asked God to change my heart and bring me closer to Him. I knew that the only fulfilling purpose I was going to find was to be living for His glory.

Sometime during the spring of 2000, God gave me the desire to go on a short-term missions trip sometime in the late fall or during the Christmas/New Year's holiday when I had enough vacation time. I had been on several short-term missions trips to Latin America before and had always had a desire to be able to live there for a couple years and do missionary work and/or language study. I spoke with my former youth pastor who was now a missionary in Panama with his wife. We had verbally agreed that I would work with him for 2 or 3 weeks at the end of December and beginning of January. I was excited to go and serve the Lord in a sunny place and practice my rusty Spanish. During a visit to the states that summer, he told me that it actually wouldn't be a good time to work with him and he discouraged me from coming. I was pretty bummed. I told my parents and they put me in touch with a missionary who had led them on a trip to Albania. He said that he was going to Kosovo in October and said there was still time for me to get on the team. I decided I wanted to go and was ready to ask for time off when another guy in my group asked for the same time period off. We were a small group at the time and couldn't have two people gone at the same time for more than a day or two, so I couldn't take the time off. The next plan was to go to Cambodia with the same missionary in November. I wasn't as excited about it, but wanted to go on a missions trip, so I was about to make arrangements when we found out that my mom had a relapse of cancer (seven years after first being treated). I decided not to go to Cambodia, but made a verbal commitment to go to Russia with that same missionary at the beginning of January 2001. My mom died on November 13th of that year. I was crushed, but I still felt like going to Russia would be a good thing. I wasn't terribly excited about it, but I felt like I should go. As for the effect of my mom's death on my life, I won't speak of it in this testimony. I will only say that loss brought me closer to God than ever before. God is my sustainer and my life. He is my hope and my refuge. He brought me through the season of mourning after mom went to be with Him.

Anyway, the trip to Russia literaly changed my life. Maybe it's better to say that God designed for the trip to Russia to change the direction of my life. It was on that trip that I met my wife Olya. As a result of meeting Olya, I am now ministering in Vladimir, Russia. During that trip, God also showed me a lot about the importance of Christian fellowship and community. It is something I have continued to keep in mind since that time. Finally, because of that trip, I was introduced to a new church in Seattle that became my home church until the time I moved to Russia. In that church, I continued to grow in Christian fellowship and community and in a desire to know God in a deeper way.

Now I'm a married man living in Russia and working with a Calvary Chapel church plant. I've been here since January 2003 and have continued to grow closer to the Lord. Here I have learned to appreciate God's revelation of Himself in the Bible and to appreciate God's faithfulness in providing comfort and guidance in a place so far away from my former home. There are greater challenges and struggles here, but I am more confident than ever in God's love and provision for me. The future is very cloudy and I don't know where the Lord is leading us, but I have His presence and He will keep me until He comes back again or until He takes me home.