I was born and raised only a couple of hours away, a little bit north of Pittsburgh. I attended high school in Freedom, and then college at Oberlin where I studied physics and graduated in 1993. At Oberlin I met my future wife, Mary Lynne who was studying both biopsychology in the college and piano in the conservatory. I went on to graduate school at Penn State where I studied Acoustics, doing Low Temperature Physics research. In 1998, four years into the program, I left the program, realizing that while I really enjoyed physics, I did not want the Ph.D. for the right reasons. During my time at Penn State, I found myself more and more involved in church events, even teaching a graduate student bible study. I found that I could not escape the call to go to seminary, which had been hanging around since Oberlin.

   In 1999, Mary Lynne and I married and moved to Columbia, South Carolina, where I attended seminary at the Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary and she worked on her doctorate in piano pedagogy at the University of South Carolina. In 2001, we moved to the Arlington, MA where I did internship at another St. Paul Lutheran Church. We returned to Columbia to finish our studies. Mary Lynne graduated in December 2002 and shortly after that in April she gave birth to our son, Coray Odon. We moved to Fairmont, West Virginia where she received a tenure track position in the Music department teaching piano and music education. We are enjoying our new lives here a great deal. The grandparents also enjoy their children being much closer than we were in South Carolina… ok, the grandparents really enjoy the grandchild being much closer. We are just transportation for Coray, and we are okay with that.