The cool thing about growing up in Maine is it really got a lot of different culture.
My dad was a carpenter and my neighbors were like full on dairy farmers.
For my dad I learned how to use tools and my neighbors I learned how to pretty much
Jerry Rake distill out anything.
My mom was a pastor when I was a kid but due to a lot of things with my parents and my
dad kind of getting involved with alcohol it led to me really kind of just getting
rambunctious at school because my dad wasn't around for a good bit of my teenage years.
My mom would get to a point where she'd try to spank me and we'd just laugh at her and
me and my brother and at that point we were just pretty much whatever we wanted to do
we just did.
If I wanted to go skate I'd skate as late as I wanted, if I didn't want to come home
I just didn't come home.
When I came to school, when school would try to give me detention and I would just skip
it.
People gave me a hard time.
For the most part as a kid I just hit them, just really didn't care about what people
thought of me.
I wanted to kind of like prove like, well you're not going to call me this or you're
not going to call me that.
I just was kind of just rough necked, fun boy kid who came down to it.
I was always down to scrap but for the most part I just wanted to skate and to me in school
it just got in the way of skateboarding.
There was probably years I didn't miss a day of skateboarding and I would put them on my
watch and be like, if I skated four or five hours a day and some of my best friends were
you know they were dealing half the weed in the town so it was really easy to get that.
Of course along the weed is definitely a gateway drug and you just go from one thing to the
next thing.
When I was 18 I ended up breaking my next snowboarding, fell 16 feet out of my head and
got up and rowed down, did jumps on the way down, did spins on the way down, you know
twist and everything like stuff where football players would break their neck, get up, shake
it off and then they're paralyzed because they shook it off.
God kept his hand on me and I realized that whether it was keeping me safe going down
the hill the rest of the way I snowboarded down was keeping me safe from my stupid decisions
to be someplace I never should have been, doing stuff I shouldn't have been doing and
even showed me ahead of time, look you're screwing up.
I'm going to protect you because God has a plan for us, the Bible says I've prepared
works in advance for you to do and I believe that and I believe that there are different
things like my mom being a pastor, my dad being a carpenter, my neighbors being farmers,
there was little things that God allowed me to pick up from those different people that
today are like key parts of who I am, whether it be a carpenter or whether it be preaching
the gospel.
God had those fundamentals right there as a start, it was a matter of me really adhering
to God's word, I knew God's word, I believed in prayer, I believed in God, I didn't ever
doubt it, I knew he was there, it was just am I going to line my life up with that and
am I going to allow that to be who I am and not just oh if I'm out doing ministry or if
I'm going to be in a church or something like that but is that who I am?
After getting my halo off in June or something by September, just under a year later, I went
from a broken neck to now I have full sponsors on everything because when I got my halo off
I came back twice as hard because I was all pen up, I just want to get back skateboarding,
I just want to get back skateboarding and the Lord just opened it up as I gave it to
him so the Lord I want to use this for your glory and for your honor and I just kept praying
that prayer again and again, the Lord I want to use this for your glory and for honor and
so he started opening those doors for sponsorship and then I had all these like cheesy bumper
sticker Jesus shirts that I would just have all over me because I just wanted to represent
and I would like put worship on like during my runs and things like that like whatever
I could do to just try to like make some statement about the Lord and so I was just trying to
I was just this hick of a Jesus freak just showing up to the contest like I'm just going
to get gnarly and somewhere or another let's you guys know that I'm into Jesus.
When I was 1998, I turned pro at Woodward Skate Camp and the Bible says a door got opened,
a door got shut, a door got shut, no man can open and I really believe you know after praying
for years of Lord I want to use this for your glory and for your honor you know the Bible
says that seek first the kingdom of God and he'll add all these things to you and so I
was like seeking the Lord, the Lord I want to use this for your glory and for your honor
and just praying that and being in my word and when someone says Jesus died on the cross
what we really need you to know is that the blood price that was required for our sin
that price was paid when he paid it he rose again from the dead proving he had the power
over life and death proving he had the power to give up his life and then to take it back
and then when he took it back when he rose and ascended into heaven and he said behold
I'm coming soon Jesus also said you know behold I stand at the door not anyone who hears
my voice and opens up the door I'll come in and be with him and him with me and God wants
us to come into his house to just to have a relationship unlike any relationship you've
ever had.
We have these things that are in us that God is for one reason another loud in our lives
and those things basically prepare us to be able to be connecting with other people and
for us to escape or and so we just decided hey this is the way that we're going to use
our passions our desires the things that we love but we're going to use it for God's
glory and for God's honor.
Looking back and even there's things coming up that the Lord's doing with me that I could
have never foreseen and just you know the way that I maybe had a desire to preach through
the magazines to share God's word to share the good news you know the grace that's been
poured out on our lives through skateboarding through that platform and to me there's nothing
more important than I could possibly do in my life is to share the truth of who Jesus
is and what he's done for us.
