Our Story

Sent Out

There’s a version of this story where a kid from a good family builds something nice. This isn’t that one.

My mom left and didn’t come back. My dad worked, so I grew up at my grandma’s, asleep in her recliner. Years later I got put out of the house and ended up back in the same chair.

That’s not a sympathy pitch — it’s context. When somebody says they built something from nothing, it’s worth knowing what their nothing was. Mine was one recliner, twice, years apart.

I stayed in trouble. Then I enlisted.

The Marine Corps was the first thing that ever asked more of me than I thought I had. Five years, most of it in presidential security, where the standard isn’t “good enough,” it’s exact.

It taught me discipline. It didn’t fix me.

Service costs you people. The ones back home drift, and then the Corps hands you another family — a real one — and orders come and take it back. You promise to keep in touch and you mean it, and then you don’t.

Then came the move. Across the country, watching money we’d counted on disappear, no idea how I’d provide for my family. And I missed my people.

I’d been carrying depression and anxiety a long while by then. Not the kind you talk about. The kind you work around and never name.

So I asked God for help. Out loud.

An angel came to me and said, Everything will be okay.

The depression and the anxiety left me like they had never been there. Not long after, I got a raise at work. It covered the exact amount we’d lost. Not close to it — the amount.

I don’t know why it went that way for me and not for everyone. I’ve stopped trying to explain it. I only know what I asked for and what I got.

Luke 9:2 says He sent them out to proclaim the kingdom of God and to heal the sick.

Sent out. Not sat down.