Testimony

To say that I was born on January 5, 1981 in Ridgewood, NJ, is an understatement. In actual fact, you could say I survived January 5, because I'm sure most of the professionals that treated me when I was born were sure mine would be a short life. I was born premature, with underdeveloped lungs, which landed me in an incubator almost immediately. Days after I was born, my parents had to rush their new firstborn from hospital to hospital, finding one that had adequate equipment to care for me. They left one hospital when a nurse confided with them, "I could lose my job to tell you this, but if you don't get your son out of here, he won't survive until tomorrow morning."

To make matters worse, I had an intestinal hernia that required three surgeries to finally fix. My point in all this is merely to state that God had already, in my first 18 months of life, been more gracious to me than I could ever deserve.

In a lot of ways, my childhood was idyllic. Until I was five, I lived with my parents and sister in a two-family house above my grandmother, aunts and cousin. Those years were a constant cycle of He-Man, Tonka trucks, apple strudel, soccer, and backyard barbeques. My parents, now married thirty-four years, loved each other enough to make our family work, no matter what it took. This wasn't considered unusual back then; this was waaaay back when divorce was still considered shameful, rather than liberating.

In other ways, my childhood was dysfunctional. I believe that my medical problems early in life caused my parents to see me as a little too fragile and a little too precious. As a kid, my dad would sometimes roughhouse with me, but this soon stopped when my mom was afraid he would hurt me. Pretty soon, I shut down the option entirely, because why would my dad do something that hurt me? I still wonder how this plays into my identity as a man, and I think it may contribute to the way I interact with other men. The fact that it's largely self-inflicted is not lost on me. I'm not saying this to blame my parents; they did the best they could, and I thank God that He gave them to me.

Noelle was born on December 16, 1986. Pretty soon, my family and I moved to Chatham, NJ, which is about 40 minutes from where I lived until age six. Both of my parents were working by this time to make ends meet, and they had decided to take day and night shifts to avoid having to send Noelle and me to daycare. Thank God for that!

A couple years after that, my mom experienced a change in her life. She was a social worker at a local hospital, when she met a man who told her about God's plan of salvation. She was convinced that he was right and that she needed to accept God into her life personally. I didn't really understand what was happening, although I knew every now and then she told me I should read the book of John. I thought they were interesting stories, a lot like the ones I heard in Catholic Sunday School, but I didn't think about them much more than that.

Fast-forward to my sophomore year of high school. I was a serious student, and I was quickly racking up awards, honors, and accelerated classes. I was on the fast track to awesomeness. This was in 1996, around when the Internet was first coming into prominence, and so we setup an account to get online for school and entertainment purposes. While there are a lot of educational uses to the Internet, I also found content that I have regretted seeing ever since.

Internet pornography is an addiction like smoking or drinking. It has a strong emotional pull like other drugs, and it can destroy your life just as capably as cocaine. And just like a recovering alcoholic, I firmly believe that thinking of myself as anything but a recovering addict-that is, failing to acknowledge my capacity to be lead right back into that sin-is the first step down the road to failure.

I couldn't see God's hand in my life at the time, but he was even then beginning to make his presence known. In the spring of my freshman year, I began getting interested in some of the programs on the Christian radio station that my mom listened to. I was studying evolution in school, so when I heard the speaker talk about it, my interest was piqued. The point of the program, Breakpoint with Chuck Colson, was to show that evolution was incompatible with the Bible. I accepted the Bible as Truth (not that I knew what to do with that), and so an argument to show that it contradicted evolution was compelling. I also liked the fact that Colson's commentaries were articulate, winsome and interesting-not like those fire-and-brimstone preachers I had seen so scrupulously mocked on cable TV.

As I began to look in the dark corners of evolution's closets, the skeletons were everywhere-not just in the theory's philosophical hangups, but in its implications. Books like Philip Johnson's Reason in the Balance demonstrated to me that naturalistic evolution meant no God, which meant no absolutes, which meant anarchy.

At about this time, a friend named Dan invited me to a Christian music festival in Mount Union, PA, called Creation. I had already been listening to Jars of Clay, so it seemed like it was possible other Christians could make music as well. (By this time, I had heard lots of evidence to the contrary.) I got to know Dan's family and was shocked to find that they were independent thinkers, fun to be around, and were serious about their faith-not like those goofy holy rollers I had seen so faithfully documented on cable TV.

So the Gillespies and I traveled out to Huntingdon County for four days of camp food, port-a-potties, and rock and roll. The first show we saw was by a band called Five Iron Frenzy. The lead singer wore a cow suit during the set; I thought they were a little too loud, but not a thing like the Gaithers. It seemed pretty much like a vacation of sorts until the second day, when a former football player named Miles McPherson spoke about how God changed his life. He had been a pro, playing for the San Diego Chargers, and was living the typical celebrity life, with all the trimmings. Some of his fellow players began leaving Bibles in his locker, and he soon repented of his sin and turned to God. Now remember, at this time I was knee deep in Internet pornography and wondering whether I would ever find a way out, so I wasn't sympathetic to the old Miles-I was the old Miles. It was like he just happened to fly by my mud pie in a helicopter, and let down a rope ladder. I knew if this wasn't my ticket out of there, I didn't have one.

So I became a born again believer in Christ. From the outset, I was determined not to become one of those stuck-up, ultra-conservative, Republican buffoons that were so rightly condemned on cable TV. I purposed to be different, and I was-sometimes because that's who I was, other times because that's who everyone else wasn't. I don't think this was all bad-Christianity is and always will be counter-cultural. We can't and shouldn't be defined by a political party or cultural movement-and heaven help us if we let the media do it for us. What we need to do-and what I was haltingly learning-is to "test everything and cling to the good." This means we need to speak the truth even if it's the same truth spoken by our opponents. This isn't associating with evil because all truth is God's truth; when we speak His truth, we associate with Him, and glorify Him.

After deciding to go to Grove City College, 350 miles away from my hometown, I once again lived an ideal life. A constant cycle of pizza parties, ultimate Frisbee, Bible study, snow football (and also some classes…in computer science, I think) convinced me that I made the right college choice. In the aftermath of September 11, a group of friends and I decided to give blood because we had heard supplies were low. I ended up giving blood for the first and last time with the Red Cross in Grove City. I got a letter a couple months later saying they had detected Hepatitis C antibodies in my blood. This started a year-long process of blood tests, doctor's appointments, and talking with Elizabeth and my family, before I decided to begin a year-long round of treatment. What that amounted to was a year of injecting myself with a needle twice a day, five pills a day, and a blood test and doctor's appointment every month. This was kind of the first factor which would eventually create for the perfect storm our Senior year.

The next factor was supposed to be a good thing. I did very well on an entrance exam given by U.S. Steel to potential interns, and so I received the opportunity to intern with their programming department. The two options put before us were: (1) work for U.S. Steel for a year straight, and delay completing my degree, or (2) work the summer for U.S. Steel, and then Tuesdays and Thursdays over the course o the next year, inline with the rest of my classes. We eventually chose the second option. Now Grove City is an hour away from Pittsburgh, which would mean an hour of driving each way, twice a week…if you were comfortable driving in Pittsburgh, which I wasn't. So what I did instead was drive 20 minutes south, take a commuter bus into Pittsburgh, and take a city bus near the office, then walk the remaining 3-4 blocks on foot. In retrospect, learning to drive it straight would probably have been much easier, but change and bold, new experiences have never been easy for me. Also, the four hours of commuting per day gave me valuable time to study for my other classes.

So now we fast-forward again, this time to the beginning of my Senior year in college. I had been dating a lovely young girl named Elizabeth for almost a year. We had made it clear we were planning on getting engaged, but had not made it official until September of 2002. We had just gotten back from an engagement party that represented a massive clash of cultures between my family and Elizabeth's-and was a microcosm for the very real clash between our families-when my parents called to say they had some concerns about our relationship. As we began discussing these concerns with them, with each other, and with some close friends, it became clear that some concerns were valid, but others seemed a little fuzzy. In any case, the question remained: what to do about the wedding? Does it go on as planned, get postponed or get called off? I had had very little previous experience with weddings, so I understood very little of how these things worked. (I also was unaware of how common this sort of thing was.) My parents wanted to postpone the wedding indefinitely, which seemed like a bad idea from a number of angles (how long is long enough? Who decides when it'll be rescheduled? Who decides if it gets called off permanently? Who's in the driver seat?) Finally, we decided to darn the torpedoes, full steam ahead.

The thing that seemed to cause it all to blow up in our face was the bridal shower. Elizabeth sent a shower invitation, but told me that it was effectively a "token invitation", thinking that none of her family would ever drive out for a shower that distance (and that it would be too much to ask them to do so). My parents heard the word "token" and were thrown for a loop by everything they thought they saw in Elizabeth's life confirmed. I, in the meantime, was still trying to work in Pittsburgh twice a week, attend classes, and manage an aggressive, chemotherapy-like treatment for hepatitis; I had no idea what to think.

So what I decided to do was break up with Elizabeth from several hundred miles away-over the phone. In retrospect, the only good thing about this decision was that I did not opt to do so over email or carrier pigeon. Actually, that's not true; the other good thing is that, for the first time in this whole situation, I was bearing the consequences of my own decision. I told her we needed to take some time off and the wedding was off indefinitely. My dad then told her that she was not worthy to be part of our family. He felt like he needed to say this to protect our family. When I got back to college, Elizabeth and I (with our respective roommates acting as seconds) had a tearful, slobbering goodbye meeting, where she gave me back the engagement ring and I told her things were definitely off. Elizabeth had a lot of other things to give back, so she recruited poor Derek Campbell to bring them up to my room for her. So our future life together, founded on a job offer in Altoona, halfway between our families, was seemingly down the tubes.

A few days later, she managed to catch me in the student union and asked me whether I was making my parents' decision, or my own. I honestly didn't have an answer to that, and ultimately decided to take a few months to make sure my decision was the right one. I floated that past my parents, and the conspiracy theories abounded. I finally put my foot down and told them that's what I was going to do, regardless of their feelings. They told me they would never attend a wedding to see me married to Elizabeth. I think they and I both hoped the other would back down.

So I returned to New Jersey, missing my actual graduation ceremony because of how painful it would have been for everyone, feeling completely defeated by the world. One of the things my parents offered and I accepted was to send me to a Christian counselor near their house. I met with Lillian perhaps 4 or 5 times. At the end of our last meeting, Lillian said, "I think I know what you should do: You should move to Altoona, and be free of influences from both sides, and decide what you need to do." Looking back, she couldn't have been more right.

I moved out to Altoona, asking Jason Garber to once again consider me for the job I had interviewed for a couple months prior. He agreed, and I moved out to Altoona a couple weeks later. That summer was perhaps the most conflicted one of my life. It was filled with good times, like Eli Garber's first birthday party in the backyard of the Pinecroft apartment, and the discovery of Mama Randazzo's pizza miracle. It was also filled with painful times, as I continued dialoging, internally and externally, about what God wanted me to do about Elizabeth. Just before I felt confident enough to get back in touch with her, Ben felt like he needed to tell me that he had heard Elizabeth had moved down to Mississippi. This again threw me for a loop for another week or two, but I finally decided to get back in touch with her and resume a relationship.

I felt confident that this was a good decision because two important people, Ben and Lillian, had both mentioned to me over the course of a couple months that they didn't think God necessarily had one spouse in mind for a person; in fact, there might be any number of people God saw as wise marriage partners. A couple months after we had gotten back together, I was listening to Anointed for Business by Ed Silvoso, and he made a non-business comment along the same lines (paraphrased): "Perhaps some of you are thinking you are married to the wrong spouse. Let me encourage you that, by treating this person as if they were the right spouse, you might find them being transformed by your love." I think this is an important thing for married couples to keep in mind.

Things were sometimes rough between us, understandably, and were even rougher with my parents. My parents and I tried to stay off the topic of Elizabeth, but when we failed, it often led to heated arguments and debates. I'm not sure if there's anything I could have done to make them come to the wedding; I really wanted them to, but I was now convinced that, with or without them, this was the right decision.

So, after a long time spent in Pennsylvania and Mississippi, respectively, the day finally came for us to be married: June 12, 2004. It ended up being a small wedding, with lots of friends from college, some of Elizabeth's close family, and no one else. Looking back on it, everything takes on the characteristic of complete sweetness. For instance, Ben left his shoes in the hotel room and had to attend in flip-flops. Britt Pratt showed up even though he wasn't actually invited. And all the food was prepared by Elizabeth, her roommate's family, and our friends.

It still amazes me that God is able to bring so much good out of so much heartache. There are still so many stories to tell, about how my parents reconciled with us, about being free of hepatitis, and about how God is freeing us from many of the sins that still plague our marriage, but I don't want to keep you here all night.