I was born in Hopeulikit, Georgia (yes, that is actually a real place) and raised just outside of Middleground (yes, that is also a real place), just outside of Statesboro. Mama was a bank teller. Daddy and his brother founded and operated one of the first quail hunting preserves in Georgia. They worked hard every day. We were not financially rich, but my sister and I never went hungry. We never belonged to a country club or went on fancy vacations, but it didn't matter. We had what we needed.

Growing up on a quail hunting preserve in south Georgia in the 1960s and 1970s, I learned how to and communicate and interact with people from polar opposite extremes of the socio-economic scale. On one end were the day laborers, the cooks, bird cleaners, bird packers, housekeepers, and others, mostly uneducated African-American men and women from the community. On the opposite end were the wealthy, powerful members of his exclusive hunting club, mostly middle-aged and older white men, who paid handsomely for the privilege of hunting bobwhite quail on the preserve. Over the years, I watched my daddy talk to both groups in a variety of settings, and what struck me the hardest was the fact that daddy treated every person the same, with respect and dignity. If you only heard his side of the conversation, you would not have known which end of the spectrum the other person came from.

And it wasn’t just the way he talked to people. He treated them with equal dignity and equal respect. If someone truly needed help, he would help them. It didn’t matter the person’s name, race, national origin, ethnicity, or other immutable trait, because those things don’t matter. What matters, and the lesson I learned, is that we are all human beings, and we can either treat each other with respect and dignity, some may call it love, and have a pleasant, peaceful existence, or we can treat each other like something less than human and have a miserable, unhappy time. The best part is that God gave each of us the power to choose how we treat each other. I try hard every day to choose respect and dignity, things I consider to be expressions of love.

Even with the strong, positive example set by my parents and the Christian values instilled in me, my path to success was not easy. Like many others, I battled and overcame mighty obstacles along the way. In early childhood, by the grace of God I survived a near death experience that landed me in the intensive care unit of our local hospital. Hospitalized for days, I vividly remember the pain of countless morphine injections throughout the days and nights, the terrifying hallucinations that followed, and the overwhelming fear of death. Surviving a near death experience, even at such a young age, left me knowing that grit and determination will get you through the toughest challenges.

A few years later, a bitter legal battle destroyed my daddy’s family. I was old enough to witness my family’s pain and suffering but too young to understand the impact it was having on me. When it was over, I was left with a feeling of emptiness, like part of me had been taken against my will. For years, I struggled to name that emptiness. I felt that if I named it, I could fill it. It wasn’t until my late teenage years that God showed me the way to fill the void. Even after I knew, I didn’t want to believe it. No one in my immediate family was a lawyer. I didn’t know any lawyers. What would make me think that I, a nobody, could go to law school and become a lawyer? So, I quashed the idea, until I couldn’t.

In 1990, three years out of college, married, living in a home that daddy and I built, with no debt, and no children, I yielded to the calling and began studying for the law school admission test (LSAT). I was focused. Failure was not an option. In fact, I never thought about failure. The voice inside my head spoke loud and clear. I knew my destiny. The LSAT and law school were mere formalities. My LSAT score garnered a partial scholarship for the first year of law school, and my grades secured additional, full tuition, scholarships for years two and three. As I completed law school, I could literally feel my emptiness subsiding, and what a satisfying feeling it was. All the pieces were coming together, in the right order, at the right time, and I knew it.

Four years into my career, my wife and I were eagerly awaiting the birth of our second child. Suddenly and unexpectedly, just after Christmas, with my unemployed wife in her seventh month of pregnancy, the partners announced that the firm was being dismantled due to budget constraints. The two partners, along with few staff members, would remain, while the senior associate and I, together with the rest of the staff, were without a job. It was the first time in my life that my employment had been involuntarily terminated.

I should have been terrified. But, again, I wasn’t. Sure, I was anxious and nervous, but God filled me with confidence in myself and in Him, that I would not only survive, I would thrive. Knowing that the partners wanted to change their practice area from insurance defense to representing only plaintiffs, I offered to open my own firm and take full responsibility for all insurance defense cases. We reached an agreement, and within two weeks, I was up and running in Statesboro. That was January, 1998. Since then, my life, my career, and my faith have had ups and downs, but through it all, I have stayed true to God and his calling, and that has made all the difference.

My marriage of 31 years is strong. My family is strong. My faith is unwavering. My career is no more and no less than a manifestation of my being. It’s who I am. It sounds cliché, but I truly don’t feel like I have worked in 29 years. It’s the human connection, the satisfaction of helping a fellow person, that fills the void. Nothing else can do it.

I truly believe that the only way to real happiness is by following the teachings of Jesus Christ, my savior and my redeemer. Jesus said, "Do to others as you would have them do to you." Luke 6:31 At the end of my life, my prayer is that I can look back and say that something I did or something I said made someone's life a little better. Then, I will consider mine a life well lived.