Who am I?

I was born and raised on a farm just Southwest of Chanute, Kansas. I was an All-State basketball player who graduated from Chanute High School in the top 10% of my class in 1989. On July 15, 1991, I became paralyzed from the shoulders down as a result of a diving accident. I have devoted my life to kids by tutoring at the Chanute elementary schools, teaching at the Cherry Street Youth Center in Chanute, traveling around speaking at schools and churches, and serving as a Youth Minister for 4 years in Fredonia, Kansas. I recently completed a computer programming diploma from the American College of IT and am currently working on my first book.

But that's all stuff telling about me.  Now, who am I?  At different times in my life if you had asked me who I was and why I was put on this earth I'd have probably answered many different ways:  I might have said I was a baseball player and my purpose was to get as many strikeouts and homeruns as I could, depending upon which side of the plate I was on.  Or that I was a basketball player and my purpose was to make shots and win games.  Or that I was a hard-working hay hauler and my purpose was to make money by doing a good job for my customers.  But over time all that was stripped from me.  A bad shoulder took a few MPH off my fastball and ruined my hopes of playing baseball past the age of 15.  A bad ankle limited my ability to move laterally and jump so my basketball career ended after high school.  Through all these things I simply replaced the loss with something or someone else.  Like when baseball ended, I focused my efforts on becoming a good basketball player.  When that ended, I spent most of my time working on the farm, building up my haying business.  When I wasn't working I spent most of my time trying to figure out what to major in at college and which girl to date.  When I became paralyzed, I had nothing in the physical realm to replace my identity and purpose with.  Everything was stripped away and it was just me lying naked in a hospital bed at night unable to move or breathe or talk on my own.

After spending a fair amount of time wallowing in self-pity from the disappointment that came with losing the ability to use my arms and legs, I began to see that I still existed despite the fact that I had lost everything that I thought made me the person I was.  I'd dealt with loss and disappointment before, but never to this extent.  I felt like a big part of me had died because the person I was seemingly ceased to exist.  Slowly I began to accept the fact that I came into this world with nothing and I'll leave with nothing, so there must be more to who I am and why I'm here.

Who I am and why I'm here are questions only God can give me the real answers to because He made me.  God says I am His child and from this truth I get my identity and purpose.  Simply because I am His child, my life has purpose and meaning no matter what the circumstance because I was created to love Him and then to love others.

“If you look for truth you will find comfort in the end, but if you look for comfort you won't find it in the end.”  
-C.S. Lewis