Introducing Gabriel Stanford Espedal

Getting ready for Christmas has us all busy, so I am tardy in posting our new blogger's biography, my apologies. Introducing my friend Stanford, in his own words:

QUOTE I am from Honolulu, Hawaii (born November 1, 1951). I grew up in a non-churchgoing family. My parents were of protestant background but did not practice.

I began exploring the mysteries of life as a hippie in late 1966. LSD became my sacrament and marijuana my food for meditation. Thinking myself on the fast track to Buddhahood, I realized this path led to the deadest of dead ends. I quit drugs and was initiated into Transcendental Meditation. From TM I graduated to Zen Buddhism and became a member of the Diamond Sangha of Hawaii.
I first became a Christian on June 3, 1972. I met an evangelist named Cleo at a Jesus People coffeehouse in Waikiki, and after a four-hour conversation decided to receive Christ and be baptized. The baptism took place in the Pacific Ocean.After a study of different churches and their doctrines I decided to become a Lutheran. I also decided to study for the ministry (I was then 21). After finishing a pre-theology course at Bethany Lutheran College in Mankato, Minnesota, I went to Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary in Mequon, Wisconsin, graduating with a Masters in Divinity in 1982.

In July of that year I was ordained a pastor in Wichita Falls, Texas, and served as a Circuit Rider for two missions and several preaching stations.I met my wife Dawn after graduation from seminary; I was home for a month and she was on vacation in Hawaii, and we met in church. We were married on May 11, 1983, and have six children.

I was a Lutheran pastor for nine years. Six of those years were spent in an independent mission in El Cajon, California. But as I continued to study theology and church history from outside of a Lutheran confessional perspective it became clear that there was a major discontinuity between ancient Christianity and the Reformation.

I had long been interested in Eastern Orthodoxy. After several years of reading and discussion with an Orthodox priest friend, I was ready to convert. I was chrismated in the Orthodox Church in July 1991.In 1997 I came to see that the full reality of apostolic Christianity could only be where PETER is, and became a Catholic of the Byzantine Rite.

I expect that some of my writing on the Rosemary Tree will be on the relations of the Orthodox Churches and the Catholic Church. UNQUOTE
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