As a child I was in church every time the doors were open because my mother was the organist and my father sang in the choir and was a deacon. I walked down front one Sunday morning and said I gave my life to the Lord, but I was doing it because all my friends did it. When I graduated high school I joined the military and when I left home I literally abandoned the church and everything about it. For the next twenty five years I served everything but God, led a very reckless and rebellious life, turning to alcohol and looking for love in all the wrong places. I went through marriages like they were used cars. I was an unfaithful husband and for the most part an absentee father. At the end of my military career, I was stationed at Dyess AFB in Abilene Texas, where I retired a few months later. One Sunday a friend invited me to go to church with her and I thought I had walked into a cult. There were people singing, dancing, and (what I didn't know at the time), speaking in tongues. It wasn't but a few Sundays later that the Lord began to tug at my heart and I knew that I was being convicted of the life that I had been living and that it was not God's plan for my life. Being truthful, most people come to Jesus because they can feel and know the love of Christ. My conversion was solely because I was afraid of going to hell. Experiencing His love came later in my walk with Him. So I gave my life to Christ. I was baptized and began reading the Bible and for the first time in my life I started to pray. I watched in awe how God took me from where I was and began to transform my life. It's been an amazing journey so far, one that is still in progress. I thank God that He didn't give up on me and that I had a praying mom.

Before I started going to this little church, I had started to teach myself the acoustic guitar. Little did I know that was a plan of God's also. I noticed on Sunday mornings how the people were literally led into praise and worship by the music. I remember this longing coming over me that I wanted to do that. I wanted to help people come into the presence of God. I remembered reading in the Bible how those who praised and worshipped always went ahead of everyone in battle Before long there was a need for a guitar player and although I do not consider myself a musician or a singer, I knew that it was something I was supposed to do. The Lord will inhabit the praises of His people and if I can do something with the measure of talent the Lord has blessed me with to help people open up their hearts and bring the presence of the Lord then I feel like I have helped in some small way. And I love the presence of the Lord.

The Lord has given me several songs in my life and it never ceases to amaze me how it is different almost every time. I served in that little church for as long as I was there as custodian three weeks of the month. As I was straightening chairs, vacuuming, and emptying the trash, there were many nights the Lord would begin to download thoughts and ideas that eventually would become a song. Very rarely have I gotten a complete song all at one time. I believe He does that for me so I have to keep listening so I don't miss anything because my attention span sometimes leaves a lot to be desired. There have been times when I am listening to another song or listening to a message from the pastor and a random thought will just pop into my head. It has served to keep me always trying to listen because you never know when He will speak. So constantly listening has become a priority to me.

I never thought of myself as a song writer and do not believe that writing songs is my primary calling. However, it is very difficult to ignore an idea or a thought that pops into your mind and you know it didn't come from you because your mind was a thousand miles away from where that thought came from. I've had songs that have taken a couple of days to write and others have taken weeks. Although I don't completely understand all that sometimes I think I'm not in the place where God wants me yet in order to give me everything at once and maybe He never will. The one thing I do not want to do is go ahead of God or to lag behind so I try to always be open and ready for whenever God wants to speak.

What I want most for my music to accomplish is to have the people that hear it to be able to relate to what I'm trying to convey. I also want my music to portray a God that loves them, will forgive whatever they have done, and that He wants to give them a life that can come only from Him, with love, joy and peace that comes from nowhere else. I want them to be able to immerse themselves in the music and thereby bring an attitude of praise and worship like no other because there is only one that is worthy of all that and that is the one true living God. Praise and worship are obviously very important to God as we can see by the number of times they are mentioned in the Bible. Praise is mentioned 238 times and worship 188. We know also that God is jealous for us and wants all of our worship and all of our praise. We are all God's creation and the best part of Jesus being our Savior and Lord is that we don't have to wait until eternity to spend time with Him. He wants to spend time with us right now, right here and you can come to Him just as you are. The only thing we have to do is allow Him to not leave us the way we came. There must be a surrender and it must come from us.