Personal sites tend to have a bio written in the third person: “So and so was born to be famous…” I suppose this means that the subject happens to be either famous or rich enough to have someone write for them, or they want a part in the feel of a rich and famous person’s presence. I am not rich, nor am I famous. So I’ve written my own biography here—the scattering of “I’s” is genuine.

If the United States were a dart board, and you were aiming for the dead centre, you’d want to end up somewhere around Kansas—where all the big, boxy-shaped states are. I was born just to the west of this jumble, in a box big enough to just about contain the British Isles: Colorado. I grew up not far west of Pueblo in the subtly-named community of Pueblo West. It welcomes visitors with a huge, stucco sign saying: “Pueblo West, A Planned Community.” I have no idea what they planned, but it consists, more or less, of several thousand houses scattered across the semi-arid desert of west Pueblo County. Colorado’s big rectangle is roughly half mountainous and half dry wasteland. Some of my fondest—and earliest—memories come from the times we left the desert and spent time in the mountains. In the mountains, things grow: the land itself grows up taller than anything you can imagine. Trees, shrubs, deer, elk, bears and streams are all alive and present. In the desert, everything is brown, grey or yellow.Plants are stunted, twisted and tortured. If they are not tortured themselves, they’re built to torture others with spikes, thorns and smell. The ever-present features of my childhood were dust, wind and sun.

Unfortunately for my parents, I wasn’t meant to live in the desert, so raising me must have been difficult. I spent most of my time pretending to be elsewhere—somewhere green and pleasant. A lot of the context for this green, rainy world came from a powerful love of reading. My parents instilled it in me through the simple means of loving books. I was always waiting for my folks to finish their latest books, so I could get on with whichever series it happened to be. I devoured C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkein, David Eddings, and James Heriot.

From about the age of seven, I found school boring. My parents decided that I needed a challenge, so they worked out that if I were to work through two books at a time, I could skip the third grade entirely. For my part, it was easy. It’s not a boast, really. It’s a reflection of the fact that the curriculum for kids before around sixth grade is hugely repetitive. It seems to cover more or less exactly the topics from the previous year, only adding in little novelties toward the end of the year. They call it review, and it’s meant to provide a solid foundation. For me—and I imagine for many, many more children—it awoke an unidentified feeling that adulthood puts a name to: “condescension”. I felt patronised, and annoyed that the course couldn’t assume that I could remember last year’s lessons and teach me something new. Not doing homework was a cry for help—or so my parents inferred: “The boy needs a challenge!” They were probably right, but I didn’t really mean it as a cry for help. I was just bored. Much more interesting was reading real history books, with bibliographies! In the end, I was taught at home until I had finished the curriculum at 16.

Before all that, I was given the incredible gift of rhythm. When I was younger, I was “strong willed”, which is a psychologically-sound way to describe a stubborn ass. I decided that I was going to be a drummer. For one year, I think possibly to the day, I harangued my Mom and Dad to let me become a drummer. They finally agreed and bought me a practice pad. A practice pad is a flat, sound-crushing invention which looks like a drum head on a stand and is designed to emit no noise whatsoever. The deal was, if I played that for a year, they’d buy me a proper drum. This soulless, round pad came with lessons, however. I took lessons from a local drummer for several years. He was incredibly patient to teach a six-year-old to hit a round piece of plastic rhythmically for so long. After another year, I was bought a snare drum. It was an old Ludwig, and my parents were grossly overcharged for it, but it was a step in the right direction. Upon setting it up, I found the drum so loud, I usually played it with a big rubber disc over the head to avoid flinching every time I hit it. I progressed to playing at a local school and at my church. I learned to play the Djembe, and have spent many, many hours somewhere else entirely in the enchantment of rhythm.

Alongside the getting bigger bit of my childhood was the introduction to me of Faith. Taught through regular attendance at our family’s church (Calvary Baptist Church), I was well-equipped with doctrine and acquired that peculiar dialect of Christianese. What really taught me Faith, however, was my parents’ vision of God being present in their lives. They actually lived as if God cared about what they did. It was a natural progression from their believing so strongly to my accepting God as a primary facet of my life.

I am still finding out that it works the other way round; and that it’s God who does the accepting.

When I was thirteen, I spent a couple weeks in Juarez; which sprawls Just across the border in Mexico. Its impoverished population of several million stares over the Rio Grande (at this point, a dark, dirty trickle in a concrete culvert) at what seems to be the most affluent area of El Paso. I met people living in houses built from pallets and tires whose children’s teeth rotted from drinking Coca-cola because the water was not safe. I remember open sewers and flea-bitten dogs and kids. I remember the heat. We did puppet shows for children in a square and felt pretty good about ourselves for having taken the time out of our lives to make the effort.

I spent the next three years working summers for the organisation which sent us there and learning that what Christians call ‘Mission’ is more about giving back than giving out.

For two summers I worked at a retreat camp near Trinidad, Colorado. It was surrounded by mountains and full of strange people. I met people from all over the world—I loved it. This is an anthropological experience to many Americans, and, looking back I can’t help but think they all thought we were laughably ignorant (I think some of them did laugh, actually). I learnt a lot about Christianity there, but something about it confirmed in me the desire to be elsewhere. Not necessarily “not there” at that time, but some pull to experience the things that made these people different and familiar.

I also learned about the majesty of worship. It is a counter-cultural thing to worship intentionally: to tell someone they are worth your time to the point of giving up all else. Through the entertainment we’ve devised for ourselves, maybe we’ve created our own version. As a society, we seem to spend a lot of time at the alter of celebrity: Pop Idolatry, perhaps? I think, however, that it is an integral part of humanity. Giving up time for something more important and powerful is something we do naturally. The frightening thing about this trait is that it requires absolute trust, and we don’t always choose the right places to surrender.

When I was 17, after a devastating church-split and moving to Calvary Chapel Pueblo, I began saving up for a six-month training course in Scotland. Throughout that time, I had been playing in the church band and working for the Solid Ground Cafe. Solid Ground was the church’s beautiful coffee house and kiosk at the local university. I worked behind the Kiosk, manned the cafe and organised promotions for live music on weekends. It was the “coolest job in the world!” as my wife said the other night when I was reminiscing about it. Imagine a 16-year old hanging out behind the bar at a cafe in a local university providing extraordinary quantities of caffeine to scholars and reading free books from the university book shop! It began a lifelong habit of espresso and good conversation which I am never going to quit.

Exactly 11 days after 11 September, 2001, I flew for the first time. Nervous of the armed police but petrified of the plane, I boarded an AirCanada flight to Toronto. My practised air of nonchalance dissolved into what can only be described as a rictus of fright as the plane took off. I had always been afraid of heights—acrophobic, I liked to say as a prattish teenager. Three hours later I landed in Toronto to have my bags given back to me and told to walk 600 yards to another carousel and deposit them. Nine hours after that, and I was catching my first euphoric glimpses of the most stunning sight I had seen: Scotland. I loved Glasgow airport. I loved Glasgow car parks, shops, cafes (shit coffee and all). I found Glaswegians the most amazing people on earth. Americans really should get out more! For six months I learned Scottish dialect. I had to, because I was surrounded by it and for the first three weeks I kept having to say: “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch that” and being completely baffled when asked “Where d’ye stay?”

Most of what I learned was by way of struggling with the system of the course. I didn’t like the doctrine, and found it difficult to be around people who were ‘believers’ but were so different from myself. I fought internally to the point of tears and panic. It was a valuable series of lessons, I think. I could only learn them by coming up against my own inconsistencies and letting my foundations settle down again.

It was at this time I met my now wife, Wendy. I had never had a girlfriend, and had never dated. I knew after several months of late-night talks and through opening up to this amazing girl that I never would. Wendy and I made plans for me to visit her house in Hertfordshire, and she made plans to fly out to the desert and experience America. It was only during my visit at the end of my six months in Scotland, that we discovered there was no way we weren’t going to be together. That summer we were engaged. Through over a year of trans-Atlantic correspondence and expensive phone calls, we got to know each other more and were married at St. Paul’s in 2003. (I should point out that’s St. Paul’s church in St. Albans, and not the slightly more well-known building at the top of Ludgate hill.)

I moved to the United Kingdom in 2003 at the age of 19 to embark on a strict regime of losing my accent at Kings College London. I took the course: “English Language and Communications”, which turned out to be a degree in applied linguistics, and now hold a BA(hons) in same.

Realizing that this is now the third document page length of this bio, I will leave it there for now. I now live in Shropshire, and work, ironically, as an Evangelist for Talis. I consider myself less equipped for life than I did when I was seven, and think that that’s probably a good thing!