Learning to Serve While I Wait

A few months ago, I started driving a golf cart on our church’s parking team.

It sounds like a small thing. But sometimes I am one of the first people someone interacts with when they arrive at church and one of the last people they see when they leave. In those few minutes, I have had opportunities to encourage someone, listen to them, pray with them, make them laugh, or simply help them feel welcome.

During a season when there is so much I cannot control, that has become meaningful to me. There is still someone in front of me whom I can serve.

My family and I are walking through a difficult legal season. It began after a former friend attempted to extort me. When I refused, he went to law enforcement. That part of the story was never presented at trial, but it is where this chapter of our lives began.

I maintained my innocence and went to trial. I was convicted, sentenced to 73 months, and am appealing. My current surrender date is October 12.

The thought of being separated from my wife and our two young daughters hurts more than I can explain. There is plenty I could spend every day thinking about: the appeal, the sentence, the uncertainty, and everything that could go wrong.

But I refuse to let this situation take my joy from me.

That does not mean I am unaffected by it. It means I am learning that my legal situation cannot become the whole of my life.

About six months before our first daughter was born, my wife and I decided we wanted to raise our children in a church community. We had both been raised Catholic and had become discouraged with organized religion, so we began visiting churches. Eventually, we found a Bible-based, nondenominational church that felt like home.

When our oldest daughter was only five months old, 29 armed agents came to our home in a predawn raid, and this legal chapter became very real for our family. At that point, we had only been attending our church for about a year.

We could have pulled away. Instead, we leaned in.

We joined Bible studies and small groups. We started volunteering. Eventually, we began leading Bible studies ourselves. The people in our groups know what we are walking through, and they have shown my family an incredible amount of love without judgment. There are people there whom I know we can call if we ever truly need something.

Serving on the parking team has been part of that. So has volunteering for prison ministry. This has reminded me that I still have something to give.

One of the best ways to stop obsessing over my own problems is to start serving someone else.

What we focus on gets bigger. If I spend all day staring at October 12, the appeal, the sentence, and everything I fear, eventually that becomes my entire world. But when I turn my attention toward God, my wife, my daughters, and people I can help, the legal situation becomes something I am walking through rather than the thing that defines me.

That change has affected my work too.

I love technology, web hosting, websites, and building things on the internet. God has given me talents in that area, and I believe they are meant to be used for more than simply making money.

One unfortunate reality of having a federal case is that when someone searches my name, government press releases and news stories may be among the first things they see. I never know how many opportunities disappear quietly because someone searched my name and made a decision without ever talking to me.

For a while, I responded by doing reputation-management work for myself. I built websites, created digital assets, and started writing this blog. At the same time, I began using AI heavily in development, and it became remarkable how quickly I could build a good basic website. Work that once might have taken dozens of hours could sometimes be accomplished in less than an hour.

My first instinct as a businessman was obvious: I should sell this as a service.

I began thinking through how I would market it. Then I thought about the reality that people may search my name. I thought about how little time I may have before October 12. I thought about the pressure I felt to build something quickly enough to provide for my family.

And in the middle of all of that, I believe the Holy Spirit was working on me.

Before I understood where He was leading, God began putting people in front of me who needed help with a website. They seemed random at first, but they were people I could bless. I built sites for them completely free of charge and I saw how much it meant to them. I saw how rewarding it was to use something God had given me to help someone with no expectation of anything in return.

Those early opportunities were preparing my heart.

Then I felt the Holy Spirit make the message clear: give them away.

Do not worry about selling them. Do not make this another thing you have to market and prove. Trust God to provide.

God is my source of provision.

So that is what I have been doing. I have been able to bless more than 15 people with completely free websites, with no strings attached.

I still love the work of building. I love helping someone take an idea, a business, a ministry, or a calling and give it a place online that represents them well. But there is a different kind of joy in doing it freely. I get to use what God has given me, along with tools He has made available, to help somebody else move forward.

I am not saying there is anything wrong with being paid for good work. I still have a business and responsibilities. However, in this particular season, I believe God has been showing me that I do not have to grasp at every opportunity or live as though everything depends on me.

For much of my earlier life, I chased financial security. Some of that came from experiencing periods of lack and convincing myself that if I could just earn enough, save enough, and build enough, I would finally be safe.

I became a workaholic.

Jesus said, “You cannot serve both God and money” (Matthew 6:24, NIV). I have had to ask myself which one I was really trusting.

This season has been painful, but it has also given me time I might never have given myself: time with my wife, time holding my daughters, time taking them places, time praying with them, and time being present instead of always working toward some imagined future point when I would finally have enough.

I would never choose the circumstances that brought me here. I am praying for deliverance from them. But I cannot deny that God has used this season to change my priorities.

I am also learning forgiveness.

I could spend every day angry at the person whose actions started this chain of events. I could be consumed with anger toward people involved in the prosecution or toward my former attorney. At times, that anger may feel justified. But what would it accomplish?

Jesus tells us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us (Matthew 5:44, NIV).

So I have prayed for them. And I have chosen to forgive them.

Forgiveness does not mean I believe everything that happened was right. It means I am leaving it in God’s hands. It does not mean I will stop pursuing my appeal or stop caring about justice. It means I am refusing to carry bitterness around inside me. I do not want anger to take the attention and energy I need to give to my wife, my daughters, my church, and people I can serve.

I care deeply about criminal justice reform because of what I have experienced. I hope one day to help other justice-impacted people and to be part of repairing systems that can do tremendous harm to families. I do not want to spend my life fighting people. I want to help change what is broken.

Through all of this, faith has become the foundation underneath everything else.

The full weight of the federal government can feel crushing. I am not strong enough for this on my own, but fortunately I do not have to be.

The God I worship flung the stars into space. He is not intimidated by a sentencing order, an appellate deadline, a prosecutor, a prison sentence, or surrender date.

I am still praying boldly for a miracle. I pray for a pardon. I pray that my conviction will ultimately be reversed on appeal. I pray that I will not have to leave my wife and daughters.

But I am also learning from Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. They believed that God could deliver them from the furnace. Then they said, “But even if he does not…” (Daniel 3:18, NIV).

That is where I am trying to live.

God can deliver me from this. But even if He does not, He is still God.

Even if October 12 comes and I have to surrender, I will still praise and serve Him.

Even if I have to walk through time away from my family, I will still trust that He has a purpose for my life.

A prison cannot imprison my purpose. A sentence cannot cancel what God has called me to become.

Right now, I still have people to welcome at church. I still have websites I can build. I still have people I can encourage. I still have a wife and daughters to love with the time I have been given.

I am still appealing. I am still praying for a miracle. I am still hoping that I never have to leave my family.

But I am also grateful.

I am grateful for my wife and daughters. I am grateful for my church family. I am grateful for the people God has placed in front of me to serve. I am grateful for the gifts He has given me. And I am grateful that God is teaching me to trust Him as my source of provision.

If you are walking through a fire of your own, do not let it convince you that the fire is the end of your story.

Sometimes God changes our circumstances. Sometimes He changes us in the middle of them.

I am asking Him for both.