How It All Started

For many years, I stayed away from church because I didn’t feel like I fit in with the “church crowd.” I always believed in Jesus Christ, but I never studied the Bible. Well, that all changed one day back in early 2004, when I was forty-three years old. What prompted this change? All it took was a simple invitation over dinner from a customer and friend named Tom Douridas to come visit his church. We accepted the invitation, and soon visited Tom’s church near our home in northeast Georgia. There, we met a wonderful man named Pastor Jeff Rogers.

After only a few months, and for the first time in my life, I found myself comfortable enough with a church to join it. As I look back on it now, that day actually started my journey away from the world’s ways, and towards God’s ways. Yep, that’s all it took for me at that point—a friend inviting me to a church where there was absolutely no pressure at all–-only love and concern from the pastor and his staff. Soon thereafter, my wife Elissa and I rededicated our lives to the Lord and got baptized.

For years, I had been kicking around the idea of writing a short story centered on taking a walk through Pike Place Market (my favorite place on Earth) with God. While we were enjoying a family vacation in our favorite destination city—Seattle—that old, lurking idea of a short story began to evolve into a novel.