After hearing this amazing message another time on
Sunday January 28 th , 1996, I made a choice to believe what the
Bible said about Jesus. That He did die on the cross to pay for my sins (past, present, and future ones), and that if I invited Him, He would come into my life, make me a new creation, and give me eternal life.
A New Life, A New Purpose
It reminds me of the country song that has the line,
“God blessed the broken road that led me straight to you.” I believe that God used my challenges and some of the most painful and broken things in my life to lead me straight to Him.
Beginning a relationship with God through faith in His Son, Jesus
Christ, has been the most exciting, life-transforming, meaningful adventure I could have ever imagined.
“If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone and the new has come!” 2 Corinthians 5:17
Like this verse says, my old life is gone, passed away, and a new life has come. Since then God made me into a new person with a clean start. He has also given me a new way of life.
This new life is centered on living for God and God’s glory, instead of living for me and my glory.
God also gave me a new way of relating to women, with honor and purity. I gave up on trying to find a wife my own selfish way and trusted God to bring me the right woman at the right time. Eventually, he brought an amazing and beautiful woman into my life. Morgan and I were married in September of
2000. Again, I think of how God blessed my broken road of relationships and lead me to my amazing wife. We now have 5 wonderful children: Rorey(10), Graham(8), Justus(6), Judah (3), and Garrison (1).
I became a pastor in April of 2000 at Summitview
Community Church in Ft. Collins. In the summer of 2004, I helped lead a team of young men and women from our church in
Fort Collins to downtown Denver to explore the option of starting a new church like ours down there. Well after that summer, we sensed God leading us to stay in Denver and start our church.
This Fall will make eight years since we started “The Firehouse
Church”. We recently renovated and moved to a warehouse that looks like an old fire station in the Denver Highland neighborhood
(33 rd
Ave and Tejon Str).
In closing, I would just like to thank you for taking the time to read how God drastically changed my life. I also want to let you know that if I gave one of these to you that you are important to me and my family. And I hope that everyone can experience the love, the forgiveness, and the new life that come from a personal faith in Jesus Christ.
If you have any questions for me feel free to call at
(303)888-4015. You can also visit our church website: www.denverfirehouse.com
Take care and God bless you!

Dear Friend,
Thanks for letting me share a little about my life story with you. Like many, I was born at a pretty young age.

My hometown for 20+ years was a small city in New Mexico named
Truth or Consequences (I’m serious).
Growing up, I was a pretty good kid and made good grades, played sports, and stayed out of trouble (for the most part).
Thankfully, I grew up in a Bible-believing home where we attended church regularly. I was voted “Most Likely to Succeed” in my graduating class and I went off to college having most of my school paid for through academic scholarships and financial aid. I thought I had my act together...
Little did I know that selfish choices from my senior year of high school would follow me to college and cause unhealthy relationships and habits in my life.
When I got to college, I began drinking, getting drunk for the first time in my life, and then drinking more heavily as I progressed though college. I also had very shallow, selfish, and immoral relationships with the girls I dated. These relationships usually lasted only a few weeks or a couple months when they were more “serious”.
After several years of these patterns, I graduated with decent grades, a computer science degree, and a great job offer with Hewlett Packard out in Colorado. As I look back on it, I realize that God was baiting me out to Colorado to shake up my life and get my attention in major way.
A Fresh Start?
Colorado seemed like a fresh start to me –a new place, new friends, new opportunities. But sure enough, some of my old habits started showing up again, except they were magnified by having a decent salary. I wasted a lot of time, energy, and money on alcohol and continued to have selfish relationships with women.
Eventually I found a serious girlfriend. Serious, like we dated for something like 6 months and I wondered if she could be the one. The one I would marry and live happily ever after with.
The one who could bring new meaning and purpose into my life?
Our relationship wasn’t very emotionally or morally healthy. We argued like “cats and dogs”, but I didn’t expect much more than that. Well, she went to Hungary to do a study abroad program for a semester and while she was there, she wrote me a
“Dear Rich” letter that completely rocked my world. My heart was broken by this unexpected blow. It shook me to the core, because I thought I was in the driver’s seat of our relationship and in control of my life.
I began to deal with depression. I had this pain inside that just gnawed at me, and I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it. It affected my whole life. It made me start asking some deep questions like, “Why am I here?”, and “What happens when you die?” As I thought about these questions, I realized that I didn’t have solid answers and it frightened me and sobered me up a bit.
The Message
Since I had a church background I began wondering about God and how He might be involved with all that was going on in my life. So I started going back to church and looking for answers to some of these important questions. Eventually, I started hearing a common theme from the messages of the different services that had attending. I started hearing things like:
God is real and God loves us. But we’ve sinned against him by our selfishness. And that our sin has separated us from Him and earned us an eternal death sentence known as hell. I also started to realize that this message was not just true about “us” in general, but that it was true about me personally. That though God created me and loved me, I had sinned against him (many times) by rebelling against His ways and selfishly doing mine.
But this message that I kept hearing always came back to the point that even though I was a sinner (by God’s standards) who deserve eternal death, God still loved me. He loved me so much that He sent His son, Jesus Christ, to die as a substitute for any one who would believe in Him.
This verse finally started making sense to me,
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only
Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” John 3:16