If you’ve read much of this site, you’ve probably gathered that Abiding Together is all about authenticity and intimacy.  So, I want to be honest and open with you in my Bio as well.  I’m tempted to try to impress you, but I know I have a deeper longing – I actually want to give to you out of my heart more than my competencies.  I want to relate with you not as an impersonal skill-set, but as a unique human being.  So, let me tell you briefly about myself personally.  Then, you can see my experience and training on the next tab.

I grew up mostly as an only child in a single parent home.  I was a lonely kid.  Without realizing it, I developed patterns of self-protection, self-sufficiency, and isolation early on.  As I grew, I longed to be good at something, and to be noticed and admired for it.  I found that in running and in music.  My accomplishments made me feel valuable, but an emptiness remained.  I tried to fill it with various addictions for years.  And even though God intervened in a supernatural way in my teens and I began to sincerely follow Jesus, deep-seated patterns of isolation continued.  I had friends, but I was careful to hide the most shameful parts of me.

Through college and into my early twenties, I began to find my value in helping people, whether in ministry or everyday life.  But I would never ask for help for myself.  Sure, I would seek God’s help when things got desperate, but letting other people really see my sin and weakness and neediness – that was too humiliating.  Until I had no other choice.

Thankfully, in God’s severe mercy, He brought trial after trial into my life, each of them too much for me to bear.  My self-reliant efforts to overcome debilitating depression, consuming anxiety, uncontrollable addictions, deep-seated masculine insecurities, relational tensions, chronic family illness, vocational confusion, financial desperation, etc. – my attempts to beat them alone eventually failed every time.

Nothing ever changed until I gave up trying to make it on my own, until I sought out people who understood my struggles firsthand, listened to them tell their stories, got honest about my own, and slowly started to come alive in mutual relationships with other broken people.  

Somehow, vulnerability about our weaknesses was forging a new kind of strength in us.  Interdependence with each other was deepening our dependence on God.  And ongoing openness about our sin, when met with constant reminders of God’s relentless grace toward us, was producing in us a genuine love for God and for the people He had put in our lives. 

My passion for abiding together was born out of honesty and weakness in a community of grace.  And it keeps growing today.  I’m definitely still learning to relate authentically and intimately.  Oftentimes I fail miserably.  And I know I’ll never relate perfectly this side of heaven.  But until then, I want to learn to live and love like the Trinity as much as I can.

Learning to love this way is most rewarding and also most challenging with the people closest to me – my wife, my son, and my daughter.  But through all the kindness, hurt, repentance, forgiveness, struggle, and joy, I am grateful I get to abide together with them in this life I’ve been given.

Over the last two decades, in addition to facing  the issues described in the “Personal Note,” I have counseled and walked alongside adults and teenagers struggling with those and other issues, first as a Campus Minister at Oglethorpe University, then as a Pastor in a local church in Atlanta, and then as a Pastoral Counselor with a local counseling ministry before branching out to start Abiding Together.

I graduated from Oglethorpe University with a B.A. in Philosophy and from Covenant Theological Seminary with a Master of Divinity.  I have also trained under Dr. Larry Crabb at The School of Spiritual Direction (New Way Ministries) and engage in continuing education with CCEF (Christian Counseling and Educational Foundation).  I am ordained in the Presbyterian Church in America and am authorized as a Pastoral Counselor under GA State Law (GA Code Title 43-10A-7, b, 10, 11).