I'm both honored and humbled to have been asked to be a candidate for the vestry at St. Thomas'. St. Thomas' is the first church I have belonged to in more than twenty years, and by the third week I was here it felt like home. I began attending in July 2006, and by Labor Day I knew that I would become a member. The same things I liked then are the things I still like: the friendliness of the congregation, the "every day" spirituality that I find here, and the semi-circular worship setting where I see the faces of the people with whom I'm worshipping.

I was raised on a farm in Missouri, and my Aunt Mae took my siblings and me to the little United Methodist Church two miles down the highway. The church had a furnace that Aunt Mae had to get going on Sunday mornings, and there was no indoor plumbing. Wasp nests were in the corners of the arched windows and the piano was out of tune. But this was where I first heard stories from the Bible, where I learned that giving money to the church was important, and where I witnessed faith being expressed. Years later I became Southern Baptist, both because I answered the call to become a Christian and also because the youth revival that came to that small town was being conducted by a handsome and charming young man! After I moved to Kansas City, I began to gravitate toward a wider interpretation of the scriptures and a more liturgical form of worship, and so I joined a Lutheran congregation. I was active in the Lutheran Church for about six years, until I turned 30, and then I stopped attending church altogether.

During this time I became a home owner and began to invest in my career as a program manager in mental health. Feeling a need for change in 2000, I moved to DC. I certainly explored many of the "opportunities" that this larger metropolitan area had to offer. After experiencing the darker side of life for a while, I attended a Christmas Eve service at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco and felt a strong need to go back to church, specifically an Episcopal Church. After looking around for a year and a half, I was both fortunate and blessed to find St. Thomas'.

Since being here I have become a member of the Altar Guild, become an usher, and have apparently started a bread ministry (I prefer Bread Brigade) by seeing that we have homemade bread for Eucharist each week. The longer I'm at St. Thomas', the more I believe I am undergoing some sort of spiritual transformation. I continue to feel a strong need to serve and to become more compassionate in my dealings with others. These spiritual tugs fit nicely with my work managing a mental health program for seriously mentally ill adults at the McClendon Center. It also means being a good neighbor in my condo building on Capitol Hill, and a loving companion for my cat, Joey. And apparently it also means new ventures at St. Thomas'. As I said at the beginning, being asked to be a candidate for the vestry at St. Thomas' is both an honor and a humbling experience, and if elected I look forward to serving the good people of our parish and the community that surrounds us.