One of the most life-changing events of my life was the month I spent in Zambia at an orphanage in a rural area about an hour and a half outside of Lusaka. I went with a friend I made at Panera, a man who would become a mentor and father-figure and a woman I had never met. We stayed at an orphanage without running water and three hours of electricity a day from a generator. There was one toilet that was shared with about 40 people. After several days of sweet little hands being all over my “yellow hair”, I asked the little girls to cornrow it. I photographed many of the children and when I showed them the picture on the back of the camera, I had to tell them it was them, as many of them didn’t know what they looked like. There are not words for what I saw there, so much simple joy, so much pain. As a representative of the group I was with, I was asked to speak to a group of prostitutes in the capital city of Lusaka through a Bemba interpreter and simply tell them they were valuable. It would change the course of my life, my relationship with Christ, what I want to do with art and music. 60% of those women were HIV positive.

We bungee jumped off of Victoria Falls, one of the seven wonders of the world, on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe. We went on a safari and came close enough to touch elephants, giraffes and rhinos. There are not words for a trip like this, and what it does to you, and the words of a white American feel so woefully cliché and inadequate. But it was one of the most important, most impactful months of my life.

I grew up in Tuscaloosa, AL. Those were wild, fun, broken years. My High School experience was defined by a lot of great music, a lot of crazy stories, and a lot of angst for my parents. I needed to get away from Tuscaloosa as soon as I graduated, and life started elsewhere. My family moved to Tennessee, and I didn’t have much reason to go back except to visit friends. My group of friends peeled off for various reasons and lived vastly different lives.

Tuscaloosa... the land of Dreamland Barbecue, Alabama football, and a lot of history, some of it pretty shameful. But it has a rich heritage for such a small town. I hadn’t gone back in years, but the tornado that hit on April 27, 2011 decimated the city and a piece of my heart. It left neighborhoods and whole sections of Tuscaloosa wiped out. As is often the case in the cruelty of natural disasters, it hit the most poverty-stricken areas the hardest.

In the summer of 2013, I had the great privilege of capturing the Emerald Youth Foundation Swim team in inner-city Knoxville. A News-Sentinel photographer was a friend of mine, and he let me borrow a point and shoot camera with an underwater casing. With my own Canon setup and his underwater one, I hung out with this amazing team and watched little ones who couldn’t swim at the beginning of the summer win races against other kids all over the city by the end of the summer.

This swim team was important for so many reasons, as many as 70% of African-American children are not taught to swim, and the rate of drowning deaths of these young ones is significantly higher than Whites or Hispanic children. This swim team also gave these children a place to go after school in an area plagued by gang activity that recruited members at a very young age.

The amazing story of these children went viral on Christianity Today and is told with one of my photographs here. The author was the pastor at All Souls Church, Doug Banister, who led the team for many years, and made sure the children were fed and had transportation, and gave them great courage and confidence. The photographs were used on billboards, in the newspaper, and on promotional materials for the Emerald Youth Foundation. Deb Hardison did all the amazing designs. You can check out her work here.

Read the story here, written by Doug Banister for Christianity Today: http://www.christianitytoday.com/thisisourcity/7thcity/rethinking-3000-missions-trip.html

One of my favorite people in the world, one of my most difficult relationships. I met Willie in 2007 doing photography work for a homeless shelter in Knoxville. He taught me more about life and humility than I have words for. To write much about him would leave me in a puddle of tears. I met him in a particularly broken time of my life. He was a recovering 60 year old heroin addict living on the streets without much recovery, and I was on my own journey.