[Note: This speech is the text for the Icebreaker Speech #1 for the Spokesman’s Club of the Portland, Oregon congregation of the United Church of God, given on Sabbath, November ].

Often I find that people ask questions that seem simple on the outside but that are complicated when one looks at them deeply. When I am asked, “Where are you from?” my first instinct is to tell them the long story that I am about to tell you. Most people are looking for and expect a very simple answer, but it is not the real answer, and to give the real answer requires much more time than people are looking for when making inane pleasantries with people they do not know or care about a great deal like myself. Today, though, I will give you the longer answer of where I am from, so that you may better understand the answer to the question, and if it is not a full answer, it is as full as I can give in the time alotted.

I was born in the summer of 1981 in the steel town McKeesport, Pennsylvania to parents who attended the Worldwide Church of God congregation in Pittsburgh. I was born in McKeesport because even though my father was a dairy farmer from the area outside of Irwin, some distance away, my father and his father were also bus driver’s with the local union, which was affiliated with the AFL-CIO and had its insurance coverage for births at the McKeesport General Hospital, so my younger brother and I were born there.

For the next three years I grew up in the countryside there in Western Pennsylvania near Irwin, until one Sunday morning while my father went to Spokesman’s club, my mother got a friend of hers to drive her with one suitcase and my brother and I, where she went to Florida to live with her parents. I spent the next ten years growing up just outside of Plant City, Florida, for the first six years with my maternal grandparents and for the next four years in a trailer of our own that we rented from a local secessionist who wanted Plant City to separate from Tampa-dominated Hillsborough County. During that time my family attended the Lakeland, Florida congregation of Worldwide and the local people thought that from the way I talked (and thought) that I was some kind of dayum Yankee, which may or may not have been true.

In 1995, shortly after the Worldwide Church of God left us, my mother remarried, and my family attended with the United Church of God congregation in Tampa, Florida, the city where I also attended high school. Though, once we moved to the place where my mother and stepfather still live, we were close to the high school, to both the people in church and school, we were from somewhere else, namely the Lakeland area or Plant City, respectively. During my time in high school I began baptism counseling and involved myself in the local affairs of the congregation, including attending a summer camp for Mr. Hulme’s group in 1998 in northern England where I was thought to be from Florida by the mostly European campers there.

In 1999, after graduating high school, I moved to South Central Los Angeles to attend the University of Southern California as an engineering and history student, and where I was baptized into the church of God in February of 2020, during my freshman year. To both the people of the congregation and the university, I was from somewhere else, namely Florida, and some of the people with whom I discussed various matters of political and intellectual interest would play “Dueling Banjos” from the movie Deliverance to assume that as a redneck my thoughts and perspectives could be easily dismissed and not taken seriously. Needless to say, this bothered me.

After finishing my studies at the University of Southern California I went to the Ambassador Bible Center in 2004. While there, the students and instructors there thought of me as being from Los Angeles, and when I visited other congregations the people there thought of me as being from the Home Office, both of which amused me when it did not bother me. After finishing ABC, I returned to Tampa, Florida, where I moved to an area between the congregations of Tampa and St. Petersburg and stayed busy attending both congregations, often in the same Sabbath, while working and getting two master’s degrees.

In the spring of 2011, I moved to Thailand for a bit more than a year to teach at the Legacy Institute in a small village north of Chaing Mai in the northern part of the country. While there I was of course from somewhere else, namely either Florida or the United States in general, to the people there. When it was time to leave Thailand shortly before the Feast of Tabernacles in 2012. When I first attending the Portland congregation here at the Day of Atonement, I was viewed as being from Thailand, as strange as that seemed. Since then I have generally told people that I live just outside of Portland and I let them reveal themselves by how they deal with that, and my way of living and behavior has been open before you all in the time that I have lived here.

As one can see from this somewhat abbreviated account, the answer to the question of where I am from is by no means a simple or straightforward one. Wherever I have lived, people have (usually correctly) judged me as being from somewhere else, but where that place I would belong actually happens to be is by no means obvious. In the end, I tend to think that where I am from is not any particular place, but rather the complicated journey that has taken me to this point. Perhaps the same is also true for you.