I serve at the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho.

Growing up I was blessed to receive a K-12 Catholic education. Throughout all of those years I was formed by generous and holy people. During my high school years I came to understand there was a tangible difference in the lives of the men that were forming me in my education. There were something different about them. They had an understanding of who they were and a joy that was contagious. As I got older and left for a public university the faith became an intellectual affair and my relationship with Christ never moved from the head to the heart. As I was going through the motions as a Catholic in college I had never forgotten the example that was given to me in high school. I began pondering and praying about why these men’s lives were still deeply embedded in my thought and I knew it was because they lived out of an ordered identity and because of their deep devotion to Christ. It was not just that they knew they were sons of the living God, it was rather that they strove to live intimately with Him through the Eucharist every day. This seemed simple to me. So I began, my junior year, to try and spend time daily with Christ in the Eucharist. The sunburn one receives from the glow of the Eucharist in Adoration comes to tangibly change their soul. As I began spending this time before Christ, He allowed my heart to be set ablaze by his own. By returning each day to prayer, Christ was slowly transforming my heart. I realized that this relationship with Christ was a lived reality and I needed to share it with others. I began leading a bible study that same year. The way in which this endeavor filled me with life created an ache within me to study the good, true, and beautiful again as I had in high school religion class. I then returned to Bismarck and studied Catholic Studies at the University of Mary and continued leading a bible study. By the end of my college career I realized all of the wonderful gifts I had been given through the Catholic education of the Diocese of Bismarck. I had also come to encounter and participate in the work that FOCUS was doing in attempts to spread the Gospel to all corners of society. May fiancé and I decided that we must give to others the gifts that had been so graciously given to us. We had decided that FOCUS was the best way for us to reach a group of people that have never heard the gospel, who are being formed on university campuses that are educating with no knowledge of this Gospel, and who are leaving the church in droves simply because no one is there to proclaim them the good news. I know I am called to proclaim them the good news. As I am beginning this process, however, I am realizing that Christ will inevitably use this mission to bring about the deepest of conversions not in my students, but my own soul.