When I was just a few years old, we realized that I couldn't hear very well. The doctors reported that I had lost 70% of my hearing, I've worn hearing aids ever since. But if you've ever met me, one thing you find out really quick is that I have a big voice—a "theater voice" my parents always called it. And I've always had a lot to say.

My grandparents were—and still are—pastors of a small Pentecostal church in Clatskanie. In the 1990s, when I was just a kid, our whole church was deeply affected by the Brownsville Revival that occurred in Pensacola, Florida. I remember lying beneath the pews drawing sketches to sell to the church folks for a nickel or a dime while my parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and the elders of the church prayed with intensity and worshipped with fervor. And I absorbed it all. Even as a child, growing up in the middle of a profound moment, I was marked forever.

As I entered my teen years, my parents began to feel the pull toward full-time ministry. They had been associate and youth pastors in Clatskanie for years, and now felt the call to something different. As a family, full of anticipation, we packed up and moved to a wounded Assemblies of God church in Northern California. At just sixteen, I stepped into that church beside my family with no idea that what would follow would be thirteen of the hardest and most rewarding years of our lives. This was also the year I self-published my first book with my grandma's help—Paradox, a portal fantasy. (No, you can't buy it anywhere.)

As our family faced heartache and hardships enough to fill a novel, loneliness got the better of me. And as I went off to a college, loneliness turned to depression. I battled severe depression during my brief time at that college, and for a couple years after I ended up leaving. It was three years later that I wrote and published my true debut novel, Love and the Sea and Everything in Between as well as my sophomore novel Every Bright and Broken Thing—both of which were a fictionalized way to express some of the things I walked through during that season.

In 2016, my sister was diagnosed with Crohn's Disease and depression had made me selfish. I wasn't there for her or my family like I wanted to be. So, in the summer of 2017, I was fed up, tired of feeling like a prisoner in my life. I began to get up at 6AM every morning before work and walk over to the church—since we lived on the property—and spend 45 minutes praying. The Lord began to heal my heart and my mind. Now, almost 10 years later, depression is still buried in the grave I dug.

In 2020, COVID hit, California shut down, and our family entered a strange season of ministry. Some people left the church, but something amazing began to happen—those few who remained with us when we re-opened our doors became like family to us. Bonds were forged between our small group as we began to do life together in a new way, praying and seeking the Lord alongside one another without pretense. That wounded little California church finally shuffled off its old identity and was reborn as something new. Something I'd only ever read about in the Book of Acts.

It was at this same time that I was working shortened hours, which allowed me to spend more time at home. My imagination was running wild. I started a rather short-lived candle-making business and worked a booth alongside my siblings at farmer's markets. I finished writing and published We the Wild Things and began to dream of a new kind of adventure. In 2021, Mammoth was born.

Fast forward to 2024, the floor falls out beneath us. In January, we receive word that dear friends—and one of the few families left in our California church—were being relocated to North Carolina. At the same time, my sister began to experience a medical crisis that, in March, landed her in the hospital where she received emergency, life-saving surgery. For 30 days, my parents and sister practically lived in the hospital while my brother and | ferried our parents back and forth and brought them meals. I wrote Scriptures and worship lyrics on every whiteboard in that hospital room, and our church family made sure we didn't go hungry.

As she moved into recovery, we began to feel as a family that, after everything we had endured in California, our season of ministry here was coming to a close. The church, though healthy, could no longer afford to keep the lights on. But we didn't want to just walk away. Out of a desire to make sure our church family was taken care of, we merged with another church body and began to take a step back—a deadline for when we needed to be off the property, August of 2025, now looming.

My brother and I turned in our notices at our jobs. My parents put out resumes. We had no idea where we would go. After our last day of work, we traveled to spend a week up in Clatskanie again. It was there on a Sunday morning as I led worship for my hometown church that my father felt the Lord impress a decision upon his heart: we would go to North Carolina and plant a church, joining with our dear friends who had moved there ahead of Us.

So, right in the middle of running a Kickstarter for The Mammoth Adventures, we packed up everything and set out across the country. No jobs. No idea where we would begin or what we would do. We weren't professional church planters. As my dad has said many times in the past year, "I'm just a man with a mantle." We felt a call and sense of responsibility, a pull toward a new assignment and a new territory, but it wasn't something we could pull together in our own ability. Fortunately, the leadership of the Lord is perfect and He began to orchestrate things behind the scenes so that my brother got a job offer within our first week in North Carolina, and my job offer followed only a couple weeks later.

We've only just begun to lay down roots and figure out our new Life here in North Carolina. As a man of routine, who thrives on a sense of normalcy, I struggled for months after arriving here to find my will to write again. Truth be told, for a moment, I thought i might set writing aside for a while. Maybe | had run out of stories to tell. But as I enter my 30th year, I find myself looking back at the three decades and the three cities, along with all the seasons that came between, that have helped to make me who I am today. And I feel a sense of renewed purpose and hope for the future.

My prayers lately have been that there would be a release from the Lord over my life as I throw myself headlong into my 30s. A release of favor and blessing over my writing career. A release of promotion and financial provision. A release of healing. A release of new relationships, connections, and opportunities, both personal and professional. Some things I'll gladly leave behind in my 20s, but other things I will carry with me forever.

I've found my place as a writer in stories about adventures and quests, about heroes who are provoked to a greater purpose, who descend to the depths of hell and who rise to the heights of humanity, who face impossible odds and are driven in their pursuit of untold treasure and ultimate triumph. These are the stories | feel compelled to tell because, in a way, it is the story that the Author and Finisher has written of my life.

I believe with all my heart that there is power in story, and so, I share my own, though it has just begun, with you now as I enter a new era. Thus, against the odds and in pursuit of a higher call, embark.