Micah, Noah, Isaac and Ezra are the names of our first 4 sons. Over the course of the first 6 1/2 years of parenting Lisa and I traveled through a fairly stable season of life. There were no job changes during this time and there were no major moves. However, this changed in 2014 when my fourth son Ezra was approaching his first birthday. It was in the months leading up to this milestone that I began to pursue health, prepare for a sports mission trip, and also vowing to God to get healthy so that I could see my fourth son graduate high school. In this season I wrote the Moms: Heroes, Hurts and Healing poem for Highpoint Church. I was leading a growing young adults ministry at my church, Kirby Woods, and Lisa and I were prayerfully considering a move to New York to help with a church plant. A lot was going on and I was riding a wave of manic energy into an event that brought extreme anxiety and pain to the surface, Ezra’s first birthday.

If you have read the entirety of my journey perhaps you are able to discern what was so significant about Ezra’s first birthday, or maybe not. In my mind I made the connection a couple months out and it fueled me to seek God in the quiet moments of my mornings. The significance? I was my dad’s fourth son, and he died before ever seeing my first birthday. I was thrown into a world of prayer and sleeplessness for the first time, and I eventually sought counsel from the mission’s pastor at Kirby Woods, Ed Reed. He recommended I go to Dr. Stephen Rice, a psychiatrist at our church that he knew was a lover of God. I will never forget sitting in the waiting room and seeing a teenage girl ravaging in distress. I took a seat next to her and began to sing the name of Jesus into the airwaves. Immediately she looked at me with head tilted and began to calm down. I had a confidence that God was bigger than all the mental health distress I was facing, and I believed back then that spiritual warfare was at the forefront of the battle many, including myself, were facing. I went into the Dr. Rice’s office to find a very gangly looking man who struck me as very energetic and eccentric.

He knew who I was from church, and he was very encouraging to me in my journey with mental health matters up until this point. He shared with me his personal beliefs that were David and Paul alive today and sitting before a board-certified psychiatrist they would likely be diagnosed with bipolar, highlighting the extreme highs and lows of the psalms. He prescribed an as needed medication to help me get sleep and then he sent me out with prayer and a charge to use my gifts for Jesus. It was in this 2013-2014 season of my life that I felt the uneasiness of college begin to ramp up in my own heart. Lisa and I decided that it wasn’t the best time to plant a church in New York, and I attempted to regain my job at Kirby Woods to no avail. With no other place to go I turned to a seminary friend who was an associate pastor out at Hickory Withe, and I assumed the role of Kids Pastor for the next 11 months. After that time, I convinced Lisa that Florida was where we were meant to be and together with our four boys we headed to Tampa, FL.

That year in Tampa was the greatest year in my adult life. My wife and I were teaching at a Christian school together, I was getting healthy. You can see the joy in my eyes in the top left picture where Ezra is sitting on my shoulders. I was sneaking away during my off periods and teaching my kids’ preschool classes the importance of stretching and exercise. I was leading a Young Adults life group at Idlewild Baptist Church, and I was assistant coaching basketball. We were minutes away from purchasing a house would have kept us in Tampa for the foreseeable future but missed out on that house and ended up getting carried away by the winds of change. Lisa took a head coaching job at a Christian school in Lakeland, and I chose to leave the school I was teaching at and follow her there. That was a difficult six months and in the middle of the school year we decided to move back to Memphis and rejoin the staff at Hickory Withe where we would stay until my mental breakdown in 2020.

As I look at the pictures of my boys I am amazed at how well they have turned out despite their father’s erratic movements in life. My resume is filled with 2- and 3-year stints as I have allowed the ups and downs of my disease to catapult us around the country. While I regret not providing a stable structure of one or two schools for my children to grow up in, I am confident that they know they are loved and cared for deeply. I wish that I would have had the diagnosis a lot sooner so that I could have made adjustments for my mood shifts and the stormy seasons before they knocked our family off-course. Our return to Tennessee found us surrounded by familiar friends and faces and we were able to regain joy in our journey through coaching, pastoring, teaching and loving our family, together.