Rice

I'm a husband to Kim, father to Connor and follower of Christ - those are the important things. I met my wife on match.com, my opening line via email was "How do you like your coffee?" We met in March of 2005 and were married that November.

After suffering through infertility for a couple years, God gave us Connor by-way-of in vetro in 2008. It's hard to believe our miracle baby is now a first grader.

I came to know Christ as my savior when I was about Connor's age. Being a preacher's kid, we went to church three times a week so when I entered college at the University of Arkansas, I took that time to really come to grips with my beliefs. When I entered college, I would go to church almost every Sunday and then almost every month and then I simply quit going. While I was in that transition period, I would ask people about their beliefs and was amazed at how many people would start a sentence with: "Well, I believe ..." and they would all end the sentence a different way. It's almost funny at what it took for me to begin the walk back to Christ.

Up until when my brother Pat completed his PhD, I lived with him during most of my college years. He would go to church every Sunday and always ask me if I wanted to come with him. He's a good brother. I would always say "no." One Sunday morning while my brother was at church, there was a knock at the door with a nicely dressed couple standing there and I knew from the Watchtower magazine, what they were.

I invited them in and probed them to find out what they believe. I told them about one of the times that I lived in Canada and there was a boy in there that had to sit during the singing of the national anthem and was not allowed to say the Lord's prayer or read the daily Bible reading (it's amazing to me how much Christian-based things were present in school whose society is largely un-Christian, but I digress). Our discussion progressed to why they don't celebrate Christmas and that was where they opened up their Bible which on the surface was like the Bible I remembered, but the devil is in the details or in the things that looked like small differences but were anything but.

For 3-4 Sundays in a row they would come over and I would surprisingly find myself defending my faith (which at the time I wasn't practicing) and challenging them on their interpretation of the Bible. I found them to be like the others that I talked to who started off by saying "I believe that" followed the type of wisdom that was fashioned by h