I would say growing up in Middle Eastern culture, that was a huge piece of my upbringing, and I’m learning that now more than ever.  I’m realizing how important of a piece of my life that is now.  I’m not sure what role that will play down the road.

I’d say a huge piece of who I am is loss, like anyone, but God has made a lot of that hurt into incredible joy.  That’s from coming up in a house with a broken marriage between my parents and watching that turn around for good.  It was during my messy middle school years they fought and my mom called for divorce. They were divorced for six years, and then they remarried {each other}. 

I was going to be a neurosurgeon.  If you are Middle Eastern and you move to the States, you move to raise doctors, lawyers, businessmen, engineers…not pastors, not musicians, not artists.  Yeah, I wanted to be a doctor.  I dressed up in my scrubs and doctors mask, I specifically remember having like a kid’s scrubs outfit when I was five.

As I was going through highschool I was realizing these guys were changing my life, and so I just had to go do what they were doing.  I didn’t have a perfect high school career, I wasn’t some kind of angel, but I definitely started diving into more of the right things. So God called me to ministry at least for a period of time, if anything.

The next five years?  Right now I’m pursuing an MBA, I see an urban context, something that has to do with ministry and infusing that into social justice, and building and collaborating with a team of people that are similar minded.

The next fifty years?  Be a good husband, father, and follow Jesus.  As long as I’m doing all that well, I’ll be in the right place.  At that point I can be called a man of integrity, a man of my word, a loyal friend.