Our Story

Nicolle and I were born and raised in south central Washington. Growing up we both had a passing familiarity with Christianity — the kind you pick up just by living in this country — but it never became personal or practiced. We met in 2011 and started dating in 2012. At 18, I joined the Army as a Nodal Systems Operator & Maintainer, essentially an IT Network Admin. I trained in Georgia and was stationed in Japan, Texas, and North Carolina. We married in 2015 while I was back in the states on a three-week leave from Japan. She wasn't able to move there with me, but a year later we came together to Fort Bliss, Texas, where I had received orders.

When we arrived to Fort Bragg, North Carolina in 2019, I was sent to Europe for a training exercise, where I was attached to a fellow soldier who was an avid believer. On our first Sunday in Germany, he asked if I would go to church with him. I had nothing else going on, so I agreed. That first sermon, on 1 Corinthians 7:4, convicted me of how selfish I had been in our marriage. It stirred up a lot of questions, and God showed His grace by putting someone like Steven in my life to help me seek Him for the answers. Steven and I made a deal: when we got back to NC, if he picked me up every Sunday, I would go. Steven, being a faithful man, was there every Sunday. Nicolle had found work and gone back to school full time online while I was in Europe. Eventually, she joined me in attending church most Sundays. 

I deployed later that year, which advanced my career, but more importantly, Steven continued to disciple me as best he could remotely. He and some other believers pushed me to attend a local Bible study, since we were so far out in the boonies that we didn't have a chaplain. There we went through the book of John, and through the devout men in that group, I started to truly understand the Good News of Jesus Christ.

Once I deployed, COVID hit and Nicolle stepped away — she didn't feel she had a need for God, believing she was already a good person. While I was deployed, she let work and school consume her to the point of burnout and bouts of depression. 

When I returned from deployment, I started attending a Navigators Bible Study, which began my own journey into discipleship ministry. When Nicolle left her job in November of 2020, a couple months after I returned from deployment, it freed her up to attend the Bible study I'd been going to. After some convincing, she agreed to try it. That first night she wasn't sure it was for her, but I asked her to give it one more week, to meet the couple leading the study — Matthew and Hannah — since they'd been out of town when she first came. She agreed, and meeting Hannah the following week drew her in; she wanted to keep coming back.

Nicolle kept attending the weekly studies, fellowship events, and church alongside me — reading her Bible, praying, following the study — checking the boxes, as she'd put it, but not yet surrendered. It wasn't until a women's retreat that she gave her life to the Lord. That retreat gave her the time and space to see all the ways He had answered prayers and delivered her from things like anxiety and depression over the previous six months. She couldn't identify what was holding her back from giving her life to Him — until He revealed it to her through His Word: fear. But He also revealed what she truly desired, and that she needed to leave behind her old life to pursue that desire, through Psalm 27:1, 4: "The LORD is my light and my salvation — whom shall I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my life — of whom shall I be afraid? One thing I ask from the LORD, this only do I seek: that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, to gaze on the beauty of the LORD and seek him in his temple." Nicolle surrendered her life to the Lord in May of 2021.

Around that same time, in 2021, I was planning to leave active duty but was struggling with which direction to move. I started pursuing a contractor position in DC, thinking it would be the best way to support my growing family and career. After some much-needed spiritual counsel from Matthew — a Senior Navigator Staff Member — Nicolle and I committed to prayerfully considering the choices in front of us. Matthew 6:33 kept coming up in that process: seek His Kingdom first, and everything else will follow. We decided to turn down the job and walk away from the new home we were building, choosing instead to commit to being discipled — me by Steven, and Nicolle by Hannah, Matthew's wife. It was at that point that I realized I had finally dedicated my life to Christ — when I put His needs above my own. In Fayetteville, we grew to know the Lord more intimately and became heavily involved in the Navigators Ministry at Fort Bragg, focused on disciple-making and Gospel-outreach.

After a couple of years, God put it on my heart to take the tech skills I had pretty much been idolizing and put them into ministry instead. Jeremiah 10:14-16 hit me hard during that time — the truth that anything we make with our own hands and covet for ourselves will never last. My work as an IT engineer for the DoD had taught me techniques that ministries could use to do exactly what I'd spent my whole adult life training for: connecting people around the world with little visibility and few resources. That idea inspired me to create MicroBible Portals (MBP).

In the spring of 2023, Matthew — the same friend who had once intervened in my life and encouraged me to stop and pray about the DC job — became a pilot for JAARS and told me about an open position for Director of IT. I applied, but it took a year to hear back. After visiting JAARS and asking God for clarity and provision, He opened a door for me to bring not just my idea, but my entire life's work, and dedicate it to Him. In November of 2024 we packed up our Fayetteville home and moved into an RV at the JAARS base in Waxhaw, NC in November of 2024. In January of 2025, I started full time as Director of IT at JAARS and finished my onboarding with New Horizons Foundation to begin the MBP project.