A Short Biography
I was born August 3rd 1978 in Jackson, MS. When I was three years old I moved to Diamondhead, MS which is a small private community on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. I lived there with my parents, Lee and Daine, my two sisters, Leanne (older) and Leslie (younger), until I graduated and left for college in 1996. I first went to Jones County Junior College in Ellisville, MS and established that I wanted to pursue a biological engineering degree. After two years at JCJC, I continued my engineering studies at Louisiana State University in 1998. I only studied at LSU for one, unfruitful, year before I transferred to Mississippi State University in 1999. After one semester in the biological engineering program at MSU I decided that engineering was not the path for me. I finally graduated from MSU in 2007 with an Interdisciplinary Studies Degree with a Communication, Counseling, and Religion concentration. This decision to change my major was made because God started to convict my life and wanted to use me for His purposes.
I became a Christian when I was seven years old and grew up in Diamondhead Baptist Church. I lived for Christ for many years but when I was a junior in high school I began to live a more carnal life. This continued for four years until the summer between JCJC and LSU. It was a glaring truth in my life that I was not behaving “in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.” (Philippians 1:27) I remained an infant in my Christianity because of sin but I finally began to grow on the solid food of God’s Word. (1 Corinthians 3:1-3) When I finally transferred to MSU I started serving a campus ministry called Campus Crusade for Christ. I helped run the weekly worship meetings on campus and started leading Bible studies and making disciples of other college men who were younger than me, which were mostly all of them at this point in my college career. I worked as a Pharmacy Technician while I paid my way through college. Sometimes I would only take one class but it was what I could afford at the time. However, during my struggling to graduate I continued to serve God in Campus Crusade for Christ.
I volunteered with Campus Crusade for five years leading Bible studies, running the technical end of the weekly worship meetings, and sharing the gospel to non-Christian students. In the summer of 2001 I spent ten weeks in Panama City Beach on a Campus Crusade Summer Project. I worked at a golf course doing maintenance and shared the gospel with my co-workers. I lived in a small hotel with 55 other college students who had their own odd jobs and we would all do initiative evangelism on the beach on the weekends. If you think evangelism is hard, then try sharing the gospel to vacationing partiers on the beach. Three years later I went to Salerno, Italy on another summer project with Campus Crusade for Christ. I had the opportunity to live in Italy for six weeks while I shared the gospel with Italian students at the University of Salerno. It was a new experience for me to share the gospel to a small group of Italian students through a non-Christian translator. The gospel transcended language that summer because we saw many Italians profess Christ as Lord. In fact, I went back to Italy two years later and met one Italian student who I had shared the gospel with and had never believed. However, when I saw him again he was a true believer sharing his faith with other students and making disciples. I went on staff with Campus Crusade for Christ in August 2005 and served with them two years at Mississippi State. After I graduated in 2007, I left Crusade and moved back to the Mississippi Gulf Coast to pursue a career in ministry.
My first order of business was to find a church that I could attend while I job search. I was looking for a church that preached the Word of God and had leadership that was greatly convicted to make disciples. I visited several churches on the coast and was greatly disappointed. Then I visited Bayou View Baptist Church and I only had to listen to Chris King preach two times to realize that this was the church that I could grow in. I told my current boss, Allen Simons, at my temporary job and he told me that Bayou View had been without a Youth Minister for close to a year and was looking for one. I prayed about it and decided to submit my resume. After 2 ½ months of interviews Bayou View called me to be their Student Minister on August 19th, 2007.
