Hello everyone, My name is Lenny Van Essendelft. This is my first ever attempt at writing a blog and I am very excited to do so. I think I will start off my telling you a little bit about myself. Most of this information can be found in the about me section as well. Let's get started shall we? The Beginning:
I am the son of Leonard and Kathleen Van Essendelft, born on November 25th, 1990. My parents are wonderful people, my mother is a Social Worker who owns her own practice, Family Care Counseling Services and has been counseling people for over 25 years now. My father is a bi-vocational Pastor. For those of you who do not know what that means, it is a pastor who works a second unrelated job. My father is the pastor of Middle Island Baptist Church and also the production engineer at HI-TEMPCO, which is a company that coats product with a high temperature coating to help with the endurance of the product. It's really interesting stuff I promise I'm just not the greatest at explaining it because I don't understand much of it to be honest. I grew up in the church being as my grandfather was the founding pastor there and my mother was and still is the worship leader. When I was four years old I can remember in pretty vivid detail the night when I put my trust in Jesus Christ as savior. It was the night of a pretty scary storm, and I had run into my parents room because of it. My parents and I had a talk and the topic of death had come up. My mother asked me if I wanted to put my trust in Christ and that night I did. Now lets be honest, I can't tell you that my life chanced super significantly, that I went from being in a gang, or was a murderer or a rapist and now I was a follower of Christ. Well I could tell you that but it would be lying and honestly how many four year olds do you know that are running around doing stuff like that? But I can tell you this, that God started to work in my life. I don't remember this but my parents tell me that I used to have an anger problem and would throw tantrums often but that slowly started to change. Let's jump forward to my highschool years shall we? My highschool years were pretty uneventful. I didn't walk off the deep end, start hanging out with the wrong crowd, going to parties and getting drunk and sleeping around. I was a good kid. When I was 14 years old about 2 weeks before my 15th birthday I was diagnosed with type 1 juvenile diabetes. No it was not because I was over weight. No it wasn't because I ate terribly. It is a genetic disease, I would have gotten it whether or not i ate 3 pound of sugar an hour or half a pound of sugar a year, doing these things would have triggered it at different times. But anyway I spent about a week in the hospital during that time and learned a lot more about diabetes then I ever wanted to before. I questioned God a little bit during this time, asking things like " Why would you give me a disease that will change my life forever?" You know the basics. The answer to that question didn't come until college but thats a little bit later. Something that I have been doing since I was 4 years old is play baseball. It is one of the things that I love the most in life. My goal was to play all through highschool for the school team, get scouted and get a scholarship to a school and play baseball for them. I made the school team my sophomore year of highschool, but was a benchwarmer the whole year. My junior and senior years of highschool I didn't even make the team. I'll be honest, I cried after the week of try outs were over. My dreams were gone, crushed! How was I supposed to get scouted if I could not even make the school team? Then I decided to go to the Word of Life Bible Institute in Schroon Lake, New York after seeing the life change that had happened in a few of my older friends who had gone. The first meeting we had as a campus there was a call to dedication and I responded. I rededicated my life to Christ and the two years that followed were full of life change and the hearing of God's calling on my life. It was at Word of Life that I realized that God wants me in ministry and for the time being it is Youth Ministry. The Present: So right now I am the Youth Pastor at Middle Island Baptist Church as well as playing on the worship team sunday mornings and leading the evening service. I am currently engaged to my beautiful Fiance, Jen and we plan on getting married in July of 2015. I have graduated from Word of Life as well as Liberty University online, getting a bachelors in Religion. After I get married Jen and I will be moving so that I can go to seminary and get my M.Div. I love working with the youth in my youthgroup and being involved in the process of their faith, it is such an exciting time. Thank you for sitting and taking time to read a little bit about my life. If you have a question or comment please feel free to leave it in the comment section. -Lenny Van Essendelft
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
LennyFollower of Christ, Youth Pastor, snowboarder, guitar player Archives
November 2019
Categories |