A Listening Presence for Hard Seasons

My Story

I spent over thirty-five years working with my hands as a laborer, landscaper, facilities mechanic, a tradesman, a man who showed up and got the job done regardless of what the body said. Thirty years ago, I married my best friend and we continue to raise our eight children even though most have moved out and two started families of their own. In my spare time I served as an ordained lay minister in my local congregation, teaching Sunday school, as mission leader, youth advisor, feeding the homeless, visiting the incarcerated and sick, and seeing to the needs of widows and orphans. That kind of work builds character. By the time I heard the call toward full-time pastoral ministry clearly, my body had already begun telling me that I needed to change my main work from labor to spiritual care. I went back to school. I earned a Master of Divinity. I completed a clinical pastoral education internship at UNC Hospitals in Chapel Hill, NC. I sat with patients in ICUs and oncology wards, with families in waiting rooms, with people whose worlds had just been rearranged by a single sentence from a doctor or a tragic accident. And through all of it, I was also navigating my own hard seasons: physical pain that doesn’t fully resolve, a vocational transition that took longer than I planned, the particular weight of a man who knows he is called but is still waiting for the door to fully open. I tell you this because I want you to know: when I sit with you in your suffering, I am not doing it from a comfortable distance. I have been in the middle of things. I know what it costs to keep showing up.