I grew up in a home where God was rarely mentioned or honored.  My father was an alcoholic and at times verbally and physically abusive to my mother, brother and I. My mother was away from home often as she worked extended hours as a nurse.  My parents divorced when I was eleven.  Many of my closest relatives drank and did drugs. As a child seeing this, I thought that most families lived this way. It didn’t take long for me to realize that this way of life was devastating my family.

When I was about eight years old my brother, two cousins and I began attending church with my grandmother.  A year later I was baptized and became a member of a church.  Yet I did not understand what it meant to have a relationship with God. Around this time my mother began attending church with us. For the next eight years I regularly attended church until I graduated from high school.  But I had no desire whatsoever to live for God. 

Shortly after my parents divorced, I began to realize that I had a great need to feel acceptance and love from others which I never felt that I got from my parents. My life began to revolve around what others thought of me. I thought if I got good grades my parents and teachers would love me, if I worked out hard my athletic coaches would love me and if I did what my friends were doing they would love me. Before adults I was respectful, smart, hard working and dedicated and with my peers I was stealing from stores, drinking alcohol, experimenting with drugs, cursing, watching and looking at pornographic materials and talking about sex (though I was at this time still a virgin). In my mind I had the best of both worlds, acceptance from both many adults and my peers. Even though Halloween only came once a year, I wore multiple masks every day and I thought I had most people fooled.

At 17, I moved two hours away to go to college at the University of Pittsburgh. At this time away from my grandmother and mother, I made a decision to stop faking the God thing and stopped going to church. I excelled in my studies as well as on the social scene. I saw my education as the ticket to my success which would bring satisfaction in a promising future career and my college friends as the source of satisfaction during my college years. All the things I had begun to do to try to gain the favor of friends in Middle and High School, I was doing even more now. At the age of 19, I entered into a sexually immoral relationship. During the next three years, my lifestyle led to two unplanned pregnancies, one ending in an abortion and the other in an unexpected marriage.   

By the age of 23, I was married and a father and planning to enter into graduate school. Now married my lifestyle was still the same as when I was an unmarried college student. Because of this, our marriage was terrible and my focus was still to make a mark through my education and future career. During this time, some men invited me to go to a Promise Keepers event where the speakers that day talked about how Jesus Christ came to die on the cross to forgive our sins and give us a relationship with God so that we could be the men that God created us to be. They invited all those who wanted a relationship with God through Jesus Christ to come down the aisle to the stage. I sensed I needed Jesus but my pride would not allow me to go down that day. I did not want the guys who invited to know that I did not have it all together.  I went home and continued to live life as I had always known it.  Three years later I found myself not satisfied in my career and headed for a divorce that seemed inevitable from the start.

At this point in my life, I experienced an emptiness and despair that my soul had never known before.  I realized for the first time in my life that I needed God.  At the age of 26, I asked Jesus to forgive my sins and invited him into my life.   

Since giving my life to Christ, He has changed my life from living to please people to now being focused on growing my relationship with this awesome God who gave His Son Jesus to die for my sins and rise from the dead that I could have a forever relationship with God. Four months after coming to Christ, my childhood Pastor asked me to preach to the youth on a Sunday morning.  On that day, February 8, 1998, I became fully persuaded that God had called me to preach the gospel of Jesus Christ to a lost and dying generation of youth.

Because of the great love that God has shown me, at the end of 1998 I left from my promising career to be available full-time to take the message of Jesus Christ to high school and college aged students throughout this country. After serving briefly with a couple of ministries, I joined staff full-time with Campus Crusade for Christ in 2003. 

On December 29, 2001, I married my wife Terea* who has served in ministry with Campus Crusade for Christ since 2000. My wife is such a gift from God to me. When I think of how I messed up my life so much before, my marriage to Terea* is a daily reminder to me that God is indeed good and forgiving. God has given us two daughters and a son (Selah, Kaela and David Jr.). God has also given me a pretty good relationship with my oldest son Sukari.