Creative Bio - Feb. 2022
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          My life has been a process of humbling. Not humiliation, but humbling. A slow recognition, given by a patient God, of my own ignorance, inadequacy, and unmet potential.

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          As the firstborn child, I carried with me, if only subconsciously, a certain pride. After all, I was the one that made my parents parents. This pride has mostly, and thankfully, been replaced by responsibility, a responsibility that when fully confronted is overwhelming to say the least. Recognizing the impact (positive and negative) I have had on my siblings’ development and my parents’ lives is extremely humbling. Heart stopping. I have been conscripted as a minister and peacemaker to this most fundamental of units. These people are mine. And I must help them return home.

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          My mission delicately (and sometimes not so delicately!) drug me through a similar process of humbling. I realized on those dusty, pebble-crooked roads of South America that I am not my own, my life is not mine to govern. Instead, it is a gift given to me out of love, and a gift best used when given to others. My mission forced me to think outwardly with greater empathy, to be constantly crushed under the beautiful, perfect love God has for all His children, to fathom, and let sink in, that God loves everyone just as much as He loves me. I felt deeply: these people are His and I must give my life to them.

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          The return home expedited my development and expelled any remaining sense of entitlement to normalcy. Afternoons of my first BYU semester were spent visiting a mom sick with cancer. There I witnessed faith as a breathing reality. Sacramental word was made flesh in that woman as wasting away she held on with a dire firmness. In those rooms of incessant monitoring, mandatory smiles, and masked grief brewing, I knew like I never had that life was so much more than matter and manmade meaning. Indeed, returning there to that same hospital 15 eternal months after she died to see my baby son enter the world reaffirmed this truth with invincible force. I learned, and little Elliot teaches me daily, that this life is imbued with His purpose, and I must devote each ounce of me to it.

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          Now I am in my fifth semester at BYU, a journalism major spending most minutes wavering between frenzied excitement and overwhelmed exasperation. But I know this is where I am supposed to be. I feel called to bring light to a world driven mad by its own misunderstanding, mandated to create community out of better dialogue and nuanced narrative, consecrated to a work transcending paychecks, press releases, and punditry. Zion is waiting.

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          My life, guided by God’s hand, is just beginning, and that thought, just like this review of my life up until the present, is humbling.