November 2007
Hello, my friends!
Let me introduce you to my partner. She was raised in a Christian home the sixth child of a Southern Baptist preacher. Her dad was pastor of a large church in Atlanta who also started work in one of the roughest multi-housing areas in the city - -Techwood.
She graduated from Lakeside High School and left Atlanta to follow her call into full-time Christian service by studying at Columbia Bible College. Her best friend at CBC was from India. My partner LOVES internationals! After two years, she returned to Atlanta to finish her degree at Mercer University.
After graduating, she joined the Journeyman program - a two year foreign assignment with the International Mission Board. She was originally commissioned to go to Brazil to teach missionary children, but she never got her visa. Fortunately for me, the board asked her to consider an assignment in Kenya, East Africa - which she accepted.
In 1982 I had returned to Kenya to visit my parents and help my Dad with disaster relief projects including digging wells and providing drought resistant corn. A knock on the door of our house in Nakuru was the first time I met my future wife, Kathy! She was super athletic (she still rides her bike 5 miles around Stone Mountain every day!) and strikingly beautiful!
We had a wonderful romance in Kenya. Not all the missionaries thought it was a good idea for her to hang out with this crazy Missionary Kid - me! I was in a transitional time in my life. I had begun to doubt my childhood beliefs. Kathy is one of the strongest Christians I know. She told me, "You might have a problem with organized religion, but what do you have against JESUS? Read the Gospels. See what HE said. Or, I just don't see our relationship going anywhere otherwise." I was completely in love and decided that reading the Bible again probably was a good idea. Her encouragement completely changed my life. She was the missionary I NEEDED.
I returned to the States to start work and save money for seminary. Kathy finished her assignment in Kenya and returned to my waiting arms six months later. Soon we moved up to Fort Worth, Texas to begin our training at Southwestern. In 1985 we were married and a couple of years later we received our Master's degree - Kathy's in Religious Education and mine in Communication Arts.
From Texas we moved to Atlanta, Georgia - Kathy's home. I worked at GPTV while she worked at a local day care center - Kathy LOVES children - and they love her! From Atlanta we spent five years in Savannah where I was the Chief Photographer/Field Producer for WTOC-TV and Kathy gave birth to our two beautiful children: Ashley and Jesse. We were also active at the Savannah Baptist Center where we worked with the apartment dwellers around the church.
We were commissioned by the International Mission Board to work as Media Missionaries in Rwanda in 1993. We moved to France to study French and watched Rwanda be destroyed every morning on TV. The IMB decided that we should move to Kenya instead.