In 1996, I began my freshman year at Topeka High where I got the opportunity to pursue my first love - art. Early in high school, my grandma Pinter was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. Within a year, she went from full-time work at a bank to full-time residence in a nursing home. Consequently, I spent a lot of time with my grandpa during my high school years, waterskiing and working for him as a house painter. My grandma died in the spring of 2000 and shortly after that, while grief was still very fresh, the youth group went on a servant event to Chihuahua, Mexico, where I began to get to know Kendra Schmidt. It was during my late high school years that mandatory church participation turned into voluntary participation and even some leadership.

In the fall of 2000 I went to Concordia University in Seward, Nebraska to study art. In the summer of 2002, my family experienced what felt like a horrible déjà-vu. My mom was diagnosed with Pick's disease, a rare, sister disease of Alzheimer's. Just like my grandma before, she quickly lost cognitive and communicative abilities. That same summer I began to date Kendra, who was now studying at Valparaiso University in Indiana, about six hundred miles away from Seward! In the meantime I began to plan and design three murals for an art servant event, entitled Flowering Your Faith, in which forty high school youth gathered at Faith Lutheran for a week to paint and learn about the Trinity. Kendra and I finally got married on June 25, 2005. After a blowout, month-long honeymoon traveling to Alaska, Kendra and I moved to Saint Louis, where I began seminary and Kendra started work at Stephen Ministries. Meanwhile, my mom continued to progress in her disease and ultimately died on December 7, 2005. Shortly after my mom's death, Kendra and I went through Stephen Minister training, in order to process this great loss and learn to help others who were grieving.

During our seminary years, Kendra and I were placed at Abiding Savior Lutheran Church in south Saint Louis. Kendra and I both enjoyed regularly leading the junior high youth Sunday school, and we coordinated and led a Grief Share group, drawing from our Stephen Minister training, which ended up leading participants into another 12-week class entitled Equipping Caregivers, that sought to equip those who had experienced personal grief to walk alongside others who were suffering in similar ways.

Kendra and I were placed for our vicarage assignment at St. Lorenz Lutheran Church in Frankenmuth, MI. Vicarage helped us grow in many ways – through the people we met and through the opportunities for service in that place: from the standard vicarage duties of preaching, teaching, and visitations, to designing and leading two sermon series in Advent and Lent respectively, which both included the use of visual arts to preach the Gospel, to working alongside the media director to find creative ways to use the new plasma television screens in the sanctuary, and many more. At St. Lorenz, I had a veritable basketball team of pastors, 5 in total, from whom I was privileged to learn about pastoral ministry, in addition to an excellent office staff and a very qualified staff of teachers in the Lutheran day school. Kendra enjoyed a full year of music: from playing bassoon in the band, to singing with the choir and praise team, to accompanying the weekly bible study group for special needs adults. To top it all off, we experienced some huge highlights in our personal lives during the course of this vicarage year: my dad, Rick, got married to Pam on January 5, 2008, and we discovered on Mother's Day of 2008 that Kendra was pregnant with our first child!

After moving back to St. Louis to resume my final year of classes, we were greatly blessed at the birth our daughter, June, a very healthy and happy girl. On call night, April 22, 2009, we were excited by the news that I had been called as an associate pastor to Trinity Lutheran Church in Davenport, IA, and we celebrated one month later my completion of the Master of Divinity program at Concordia Seminary in St. Louis. I am so excited for whatever God has in store for Kendra and me and our growing family in the coming years. May His Spirit guide us forward in the service of Jesus Christ and His Church!