Skipper Pickle

Meet Skipper

My parents were missionaries, so I’ve lived in a lot of out-of-the-way places, usually right before where the pavement runs out: French Louisiana, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Spain.

I came to Christ when I was 7 years old, at a Billy Graham film crusade being held at the church where my father served as associate pastor. I was too young to understand the theology of it all. What I understood was the increasing weight oppressing me, and the abrupt lifting of that weight after praying to receive Christ, and the brilliant joy that overwhelmed me afterward.

So mine isn’t one of those stories about how the seed is finally planted and at last begins to grow. It's the one where that’s the BEGINNING of the story, and the story is about how the tree grows, how the branches twist in an unruly manner, how the roots are nourished or not, how the Gardener must prune the fruitlessness away...

My grandparents ran a summer camp in northeast Oklahoma, and it was a family business that we all worked in at some point. If my count is right, I’ve spent about 12 months of my life living in a platform tent, and a lot more than that working with young people in transformational settings. I’m a writing teacher by training who fell into educational software for about 25 years before coming on staff at Watermark.

I met the ever-lovely Anne Frances at John Brown University (she asked me out first!), and we married in 1988, then promptly went off to Ecuador to teach at a missionary kid boarding school for three years. We have four children, two of whom have flown the coop, and two of whom are in college. We’ve lived in Richardson since 1998.

I collect comic books, play table top games, listen to a lot of audiobooks, and keep a Studio Ghibli movie handy in case of sudden guests. If you have a Daniel Amos playlist, we are already friends. If you’d like to talk about politics sometime, I can promise that it will be a very short conversation.

And, yes, it’s really my name.