My First Year of School
My parents were never terribly involved with the community or very social, which meant that by the time I was ready to start school, I didn’t know anyone. Not far into my first year, I had already been pretty much rejected. The only person I really knew was my cousin, Tanya, but she was a year older, so I never got to see her. I couldn’t say I didn’t like school. I was one of the smartest people in my class so there was never anything hard about it other than having no friends. I was a very inquisitive person and sometimes I would have trouble sleeping at night just because my imagination wouldn’t quit. I would strain my brain pondering the edge of the universe and what’s past the edges or what is the end of life and what is after that?

Later Elementary
I spent a lot of my free time playing video games – the classic ones like Super Mario Bros. It must’ve been around third grade when I first got to know Michael Smith. We had a fairly instant friendship just because we both happened to live in the same small 500-person town of Prairie City. We also both liked to play games. Probably for the time, he may have been my best friend. He definitely was in terms of quality, because I also tended to hang around people who didn’t treat me well – just because they would hang around me at all. I never especially wanted to give into peer pressure to become more like the people who didn’t like me.

Club Video
When Michael and I were in Jr. High, I moved to Bushnell (the larger town that our school district was centered around). We started a video game club around that time and got a few members. I spent a lot of my free time playing video games. That was pretty much all that I enjoyed at that time besides TV.

The Computer
When I was in 8th grade, my dad bought a used computer. It was a glorious Tandy 1000HX. It didn’t have Windows and it barely had DOS, but I loved it. I started learning how to write games and programs on it almost as soon as I got it. Over the next couple years, I replaced playing video games with using the computer. My first year of high school brought me a faster computer. As soon as I got that computer, I started learning web programming and graphics.

How I met Jesus
Late summer on a hot day, I met Frank Broady at the public swimming pool. I had met him once before during the summer, but only briefly. He invited me to Vacation Bible School at church. It sounded fun, so I decided to go. I had nothing but fun the whole week. I didn’t have a Bible, so they gave me one. On Friday, when it was almost over, Frank invited me to come to church on Sunday. Franks dad was Terry Broady, the preacher there. I decided to go on Sunday because I was hoping to see everyone again, mostly. When I went, I got disruptive sometimes and was talking to people instead of paying attention, but I was still paying attention. Over the next several months, I began to understand who Jesus was and who I was. I stayed up late into the night to read my Bible to see all of the details.

A Growing Mind
I was questioning everything. This was the first time I had been openly accepted by so many people. I wanted to know what made them different. I believed in logic and order and so I wanted to figure out whether the Bible or science made more sense. High School tried hard to convince me there was no God – only science, but when I read the Bible I see science in the Bible. God commanded the Old Testament Jews to follow a strict diet and prescribed unusual rituals to cure diseases. Hundreds of years later, science catches up to explain the scientific practicality of all of those rules. To me, that was one of the first proofs to me that God was real. It also brought back the questions that bugged me when I was younger. What is eternity? How can there be life after death? Also, how could there NOT be life after death?

LaMoine Christian Camp
I first got my chance to go to LaMoine Christian Camp after my freshman year of high school. The week had a theme – “May the force be with you” that tied in with Star Wars. It was an explanation of how the Holy Spirit and demonic forces was similar to the light and dark side of the force. To me, that made a lot of sense, but generally it was just being surrounded by so many Christians and seeing their example (and seeing some bad examples too) that made me think the most that week. By the end of the week, I was ready to make a decision to follow Christ. However, it didn’t quite go that way. I waited about a year before I totally committed to it.

LaMoine Camp – The Other Side
The very next year, Terry Broady asked me to help with his week of camp – 5th and 6th graders! That was the best time! I was awful at helping and I didn’t know how to deal with kids and I kept forgetting my focus, but I learned a lot. I helped at camp every year after and totally enjoyed it. Each year, I grew more in my love and ability to work with kids.

Back to School
Between those years of camp, I had more than one significant new friend enter my life. The first one was Josh Swain. Just like Frank, he was also a preacher’s son, but he was a lot more passionate. One thing that I especially noticed from him and later repeated was that he always took his Bible to class. For the first year of knowing him, there wasn’t much to our friendship. We would talk about cartoons and silly stuff like that. He convinced a lot of his friends one time that he had only six months to live, and we convinced Frank that Josh had a twin brother named Steve.

Friday Mornings
Frank, Josh, and I all went to a weekly Bible study at our school at 7:45 a.m. in the Home Ec. Room. There were two teachers who attended regularly, but it was student-led. Through that Bible study I got to see just how many Christians there were in our small 200-student school. There were about 15 people there at most. I saw other people there, but I didn’t really get to know anyone for quite a while.

Cornerstone
Starting in 1998, I have been going to Cornerstone Music Festival every year. It is a HUGE Christian music festival that happens just a few miles out of Bushnell, but I didn’t know what it was until maybe ’97 or so – when I was already in high school!!! I learned a lot about Christian music from going there, because before going I never really got into Christian music that much. I logged down every last detail of my first year and put it up on the Internet.

Interesting Observation
This paragraph is for all Christians reading this. I grew up not knowing who Jesus was….at all! It wasn’t until I was in 8th grade that I was invited to church. Before then, I didn’t know what “sin” was, I had never heard of a perfect God, and I didn’t know Jesus was even historically. I was so clueless, that I didn’t even know what Christmas was. I grew up watching the Charlie Brown Christmas cartoon but I still didn’t know enough background to understand it. My point in saying all of this is that there are others here in the U.S. who have NEVER heard the gospel. Not EVERYONE has heard about God and get annoyed every time they hear his name mentioned!

My Final Answer
In the year 2000, Josh and I were at his house watching TV. We watched an episode of “Who Wants to Be A Millionaire.” From that, we thought up a skit we were going to maybe do somewhere where the main character faces his everyday decisions through a daydream taking place on the set of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire. That skit turned into a full amateur movie production. It was my first time ever doing any real video editing and I loved it. It took us eight months to do it and when it was done, it was full of mistakes.

A Friend for Life
Right before we finished the movie “My Final Answer,” Josh moved with his family to South Dakota where his dad was planting a new church (September 2000). For the first year after he moved, I hardly talked to him. I wanted to, but I felt like it was too hard to keep up with. The next year, I went to visit him in March and that was all I saw of him that year. The next year, I bought a cell phone and I have kept in touch with him really well ever since.

God Exists – Personal Proof #1
It was March of 2002. Spring break had already started at WIU where I was going to college at the time. I had planned for over a month to go to South Dakota in March to visit him. I was at work the night before until either 9 or 10 p.m. When I got home, I had a message from him saying I needed to call him as soon as possible. When I reached him, he told me the bad news. There was a big winter storm coming in. Not just a couple inches of snow, but maybe a foot or two – along with some ice!!! The storm was supposed to start at midnight. I was walking around Bushnell on my cell phone and we were talking it through. We prayed about it. Right after we prayed, I felt a sense of urgency and I walked as fast as I could back home. I felt that God wanted me to leave that night! I grabbed all my stuff and left at around 10:30 at night, planning to forfeit the whole night of sleep. I had originally planned to leave at 8:00 the next morning. I drove all night and into the early part of the day. There was no sign of bad weather. I had managed to stay mostly awake all the way there and had survived so far. I got about 20 minutes from Josh’s house. The next stop sign I reached, I tried to stop as usual, but I found it hard and nearly slid through the intersection. There was a light coating of ice on the road. I started driving more cautiously, as my windshield started to cover with ice. I made it to Josh’s house just fine at 9 a.m. and not long after I made it there, I went and fell asleep on the couch. I woke up 3 hours later. When I looked out the window after that short nap, the ground was covered in deep snow and there was a heavy wind. On top of that snow, another layer of ice came down. I had only seen the first 20 minutes of the whole storm. If I had left at 8 a.m. I would have only made it an hour of the 10 hour drive by the time the storm started. If I had left a half hour later that night, my trip would have been a lot more dangerous. It was the perfect timing of God. That’s one thing that keeps me from ever denying God’s existence.

God Exists – Personal Proof #2
Between my trip to South Dakota in March 2002 and May 2002, my parents were having a rough time in their marriage. It was getting so bad that I was wondering if they were going to stay together at all. Around that time, my mom made the decision to leave. She was gone two days before I found out (she worked odd hours, and I wasn’t home much). My dad was hit pretty hard by her leaving. He really couldn’t handle it. I was at work one night during this time at the grocery store. I had been at work an hour or two when I got a VERY sudden feeling that I should pray for my dad. More specifically, I felt like I was supposed to pray that he wouldn’t kill himself. I almost laughed as I mumbled to God quietly about how ridiculous the idea was. Nonetheless, I was obedient to that urgent calling and I prayed for my dad right then and there. Then I was a little bit nervous for the last couple hours I worked. I drove home and parked. I noticed that something was unusual. I could see the bright red tail lights from my dad’s truck glowing through the garage door. I walked as fast as I could and made sure to pass the garage door on my way inside. I heard the truck running. I could smell the fumes strongly from outside. My first thoughts jumped right back to the moment I was at work praying what I thought was such a crazy thing. I was both assured from praying and also scared. When I got inside the house, he was in the living room. He had been out there. He had been ready to end his life, and I believe that God saved his life. After I enlisted several friends to pray for the situation, my mom came back and the relationships were restored.

What I Believe
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. I know that evolution has a wider acceptance, but I choose to believe in 6-day creation, which means that God created the earth and man and animals in 6 days and then rested on the seventh day, as it says in the Bible. You may think that all of the evidence is stacked against me, but in reality, there are questions that haven’t been fully satisfied by the science of either evolution or creation. I believe that God created man to be friends with Him. He gave us the free choice whether or not we would love Him, rather than creating “robots” that would do whatever he wanted (is that what you would want?). Our problem is that we have all sinned and strayed from God and fell short of the glory for which He created us. We deserved death as punishment for what we have done, but out of love for us, He sent His son to take our punishment. Jesus came to the earth and did not sin, yet He was punished a horrible death. By this, He redeemed us all from death. It is our choice to accept or reject His offer to save us.