About Don: A Gen X Spiritual Awakening
My Unhappiness
As a successful business leader, I lived the American Dream, but I was a very unhappy person. There was something fundamentally missing from my life, so I chased stuff. Reputation, my physical desires, and everything that the material world has to offer us. I reduced myself and everyone in the world to objects. Things whose only purpose was to support what I wanted in an unjust system. Happiness elusive. Peace a mystery.
Spending my entire adult life trying to find happiness through materialism, my heart finally surrendered itself to God. God is love. Repentant and reborn, I have embraced a life centered on loving God, myself, and my neighbor. My whole being suddenly became filled with a deep sense of peace and gratitude after years of unhappiness and selfishness. My story of faith is unique and universal. It's also a story of God's unconditional love for a nation and a world that's spiritually famished.
Welcome to my story, and welcome to our shared story of God’s love for the world.
My Background
An adopted child who grew-up in 1970s suburbia of America, I found myself surrounded by love and blessed with the gifts of curiosity, introspection, and sensitivity. Coming of age in the 1980s, I was an outstanding student, an Eagle Scout, civic-minded, and deeply involved in church. Spending several summers as a camp counselor. My aspiration was to be a youth minister. To the outside world, I was a role model, but inside my heart, I was struggling with a secret that would unravel my reputation.
I would finally confront my secret, but the love of God inside my heart would be suffocated and buried behind the walls I created to hide my sexuality. My faith was no longer in God but in what this world could offer me. I would sacrifice my God-given gifts and endanger my life. I would pursue my every desire in my attempt to find happiness as I moved further from God. Having any sense of peace was nonexistent.
God did not give up. God's love is eternally unconditional and steadfast. Through a series of events, I would find my way back to God after fifty-five years of unhappiness.
I write weekly stories about my faith, my journey from materialism to God and my struggles and successes living in modern day Babylon.
My Now
I live in Paradise (Las Vegas) with my partner of 15 years and our cat Harry California.
Early in my life I earned a Bachelor of Arts from Lakeland College (University), majoring in history, religion, and philosophy and later a Master of Arts in Theology from the United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities.
I’m a past volunteer with for the Boy Scouts of America, Las Vegas Area Council and a former Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA) for the Eighth Judicial District Court in Las Vegas, Nevada.
You can read or listen to my weekly Saturday stories about faith and culture on my Substack page or here on my website as well.
I post a daily devotional (OK, weekdays) on Facebook, X, Linkedin and Instagram.