Life Story
Like most who were raised in a cultural Christian background, I was aware of a westernized God, but I was not acquainted with the God of Scripture. I wanted God not for God but for His gifts. I looked to Jesus not for Jesus but for a heavenly afterlife living in mansions and being free from earthly cares and responsibilities—that was my motivation when I “asked Jesus into my heart” in the 5th grade. My sin, coupled with a lack of good teaching and discipleship, sent me down a road filled with idolatry, mistakes, and scars.
But God didn’t leave me to my own devices. Beginning in 2015, by God’s grace, He sent friends who began planting seeds in my life that God used to draw me to Himself. God used them to begin the sizable task of dismantling all the legalism, self-righteousness, and bad doctrine I had adhered to for the first 27 years of my life, and they did it with patience, persistence, and prayerfulness. The fruit from those seeds are still sprouting to this day.
In 2016, after graduating from college and moving from Florida back to Texas, I began attending The Village. Here, God opened my eyes to robust doctrines through the efforts of lead pastors, ministers, directors, artists, designers, and teachers—something I cherish and hold as a significant marker in my sanctification process.
I am continually learning and being shaped every day by the gospel, and I continue to be marked by a posture of repentance and faith in the finished work of Christ that began in a moment but sustained for a lifetime. I hope it’s said of my life that “I do not account my life of any value nor as precious to myself, if only I may finish my course and the ministry that I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify to the gospel of the grace of God.”
Hope for The Village Church
My hope is that we would be a people who holistically display the trinitarian God as He is: infinitely perfect, beautiful, merciful, gracious, wise, loving, forgiving, and sovereign. And in that, we would be a people who reject lukewarmness and are endless in our concerted efforts of growing rightly in our knowledge of Him, and from the overflow of that knowledge be conformed to the image of his Son.