Maturing in Christ Is a Lifelong Event. Don’t Stop.
Maturing in Christ Is a Lifelong Event. Don’t Stop.
Ask Todd today where he is in his walk with Christ and he does not reach for a testimony with a tidy ending. He says he is still a work in progress. That answer, it turns out, explains almost everything about how he and Gina have built a marriage, a business, and a life of quiet investment in people most of the world overlooks.
Todd and Gina met in an art class in Villa Rica, Georgia. She was a tenth grader, he was a ninth grader, and they were friends first. When he turned sixteen, she asked him out. They still argue amiably about who was chasing whom.
They married in 1989 at the Bremen Church of Christ, right after Todd graduated from Georgia Tech, then moved to Greenville so he could start a sales career with Johnson Controls. Gina worked in administration until their first son, Capp, was born in 1994. Christian followed in 1998. Today they are partners in Total Comfort Solutions, which solves air conditioning problems for businesses across South Carolina and Georgia, and they have been part of the Holland Park church family since the year they were married.
They also have two grandbabies, and Gina will tell you that is the headline.
"Having two grandbabies for the first time has just been absolutely amazing," she says. "I had no idea what it would be like to be a grandparent." Her favorite part right now is playing pretend with her granddaughter. After raising two boys, getting to do the girly things for the first time has been a lot of fun. There is also, she says, the magic in their eyes.
Growth, and the complications that come with it
Todd's list of what is exciting him sounds a lot like a list of what is stretching him. The business is growing and spreading geographically, which raises the question of how you get people across a wide territory to share the same values and offer the same consistent service. He serves on the leadership board at church, and the church is growing too, in an up and coming part of Greenville full of people who are not steeped in church tradition and are simply curious about Jesus.
Growth is good. Growth is also, by definition, change.
"I think we all are comfortable finding our comfort zone and living there and staying there and trying to protect it," Todd says. "Especially if it's enjoyable, if it's a good time of life. And so just realizing that change is where God works. Change is where God shows up and teaches us new things."
That does not make it painless. "It's frustrating, because you're having to figure things out from a different perspective," he says. "You have to figure out how your values show up in a different stage of life, a different setting." Raising children, running a small business, keeping up a house: those responsibilities eventually go away, and you have to find different things to make life engaging. The adjustment period can be a little challenging.
Gina's assessment of that: "Yes. Absolutely."
When faith became her own
Gina grew up in church. Her mother had drifted out of church for a stretch, but sent Gina and her brothers on the bus. Her oldest brother, sixteen years her senior, became a preacher, so then they went with him. Eventually her parents came back and she went with them.
She was baptized at nine years old. "It was like, hey, they're getting baptized, do you want to get baptized?" she says. "I was in and out of church a lot over all of my life." But it did not feel like hers.
At seventeen, she noticed a boy at school and decided he probably attended First Baptist, so she would go over there and see. He did not go to church there. They started dating anyway, and she started going to church with him. But the real shift came later.
"It wasn't until we got married and moved to Greenville that my faith became my faith."
The mechanism was ordinary and relentless: people at the church they still attend today asking whether she wanted to come to a Bible study, whether she wanted to ride along, whether she wanted to be part of this thing they were doing. God started speaking to her through Scripture and through those people. Around thirty-three, she decided she wanted to be baptized. This time it was her decision.
"I would just say our church family, the whole group of them and all that they've done over the years, has been where my growth was."
Taking cues from each other
Todd's story runs almost the opposite direction. He was probably at church the first day after he was born. His parents took the family faithfully and treated it as important. But faith was not something the household discussed much outside the building.
"We knew church was important. We knew God and faith were important," he says. "But we didn't grow deep in faith at all."
He was baptized at sixteen, and he says the salvation story is really what happened from there.
He remembers Gina walking up to the preacher after a service in Greenville to ask what kind of Bible he was reading, because she could actually understand that one. Todd had grown up on the King James Version, which is not the easiest place to start. The preacher told her, she got a copy, and she read it. Then she found a chronological Bible, which filled in some of the blanks. Gina had started going to church with Todd, but later in life he took his cues from her when it came to actually reading it.
Then he joined C12, a peer group for Christian business leaders, and learned to start his day with reading and prayer. He has been doing it for a long while now. Gina started doing it too.
"Our relationship together has led to a lot of our spiritual growth," Todd says. "Just kind of being challenged by what you see the other one doing."
That is his whole philosophy of formation, really. Be around good Christian folks who are growing themselves, watch what they do, and try to do it yourself. "Not necessarily as a mentor mentoring you," he says, "but just observing."
The sentence that shaped their family
Early in their marriage, Rick and Cynthia Brown walked across the church and introduced themselves. Todd and Gina did not know anybody there yet. The Browns became some of their closest friends, and through them Todd met Cynthia's father, Don Buck.
Don had an ordering principle he lived by: God first, family second, work third. Todd heard it, took it, and built a life on it.
"He has probably never even thought about that since," Gina says. "But he said it to Todd, and Todd has done that all of our married life. And then we started having kids, and they have seen that in him."
She draws a conclusion from it that is worth writing down: sometimes it is not the quantity of the relationship. Sometimes it is just a moment in time.
How they found JUMPSTART SC
A friend from Todd's C12 group, Eric Foust, introduced the group to JUMPSTART SC. Eric had employees who had come through the program, and he helped Todd see that this thing existed, that there was a program inside the prisons doing this work.
Todd is candid about why it registered at all. "I don't know that I would have been interested if Matthew and Hebrews didn't say that you should," he says, pointing to the passage about the least of these. "Just that notion that we need to be concerned about what Christ is concerned about."
What convinced them was not a pitch. It was an event at the Poinsett Club where person after person who had been through the program stood up and told their story for two or three minutes.
"What we noticed about JUMPSTART SC is it worked," Todd says. "What we noticed is changed lives." He was struck by what those men and women were excited about: family, work, the basic stuff, the things he and Gina value most. And the sheer enthusiasm for it.
Gina had a different reaction. "I was just in tears, and I don't cry very much," she says. "I was like, I want everybody I know to come if they do this again, so they can see this."
She recognized the machinery immediately, because it was the same machinery that had grown her own faith. Iron sharpening iron. Friends who ask how your spiritual life is doing. The friend who handed her cassette tapes about keeping an appointment with the King every morning, which is how she started her own morning time with God.
"I know that is an important thing for the JUMPSTART SC program," she says. "For them to have community."
Todd puts it as a question with an obvious answer. He and Gina have been blessed with Christian friends and examples all over the map, in Virginia and Tennessee and North Carolina and Alabama. But where are the people who spent much of their lives in prison and have found those same influences?
"They're here," he says.
An honest word about capacity
There is a version of this profile that would not include what comes next, and it would be a worse profile for it.
When JUMPSTART SC staff came by asking Todd to help drum up attendance for an event, he told them plainly that it was not something he had time for right now. No two year runaround. No maybe. Just a direct answer.
He is still a little uneasy about how it sounded. "Part of me wants to say I'm sorry, and part of me wants to say, well, that's true," he says. "You have to be careful not to wear yourself out emotionally or time wise, and to continue to do the things that God's got lined up for you." You cannot do everything. You have to prioritize.
Right now their commitments are sons, grandchildren, a growing business, church leadership, and the steady work Gina does celebrating people with showers and events. One son has two children of his own now. Time is a limited resource in that house.
So for this season, they participate from the periphery, and they are honest about calling it that. They describe themselves as investors.
They also have their own definition of an impact report. "We look at the annual impact report," Todd says. "But that's not the impact report to us. It's the other booklets we get, the ones with the stories in them. The pictures. That's the impact report."
He points to the dozen stories they heard at the Poinsett Club that night. "We feel like we know those people. We feel like we grew up with those people."
What they hope their grandchildren see
Todd is skeptical that legacy gets built through speeches. "I don't know how you build a legacy of that other than doing it," he says. "Sitting around talking about it probably isn't a great idea, although we probably should be better at that. Just sharing what we value and why."
Still, if his grandchildren and great grandchildren someday read this, there is one thing he wants them to catch.
"The American way of success is financial success and notoriety," he says. "That's not the success Jesus preached about in the Sermon on the Mount. The meek shall inherit the earth. And it's important to support and participate and help and encourage." Then the part that sounds like a man reporting evidence rather than reciting a value: "When you do, you realize there are a lot better stories, a lot more interesting life and people there, than in the successful places."
He hopes that causes someone, generations from now, to pause and ask whether they are showing that they value the same things.
Still in progress
Asked for a God moment he would want to pass on, Todd lands somewhere simple.
"Maturing in Christ is a lifelong event. Don't stop."
You can have your eyes opened to things that never registered before, he says, and it can change your perspective. It is actually better when that happens later in life, so you do not become fixed in your thinking. Then you go back and read God's Word after all of that, and it reads like a whole different story. It becomes richer.
That is why JUMPSTART SC makes sense to them. It is the largest concentration of people they have ever seen repent, turn, and change in a way you can actually watch happen.
"Life change," Todd says, "in almost every aspect of their life." He thinks of a line from a song they sing at church, about dead things coming alive.
"That's God. Dead things come alive. That includes lives."
Ask Gina what she is grateful for, and she goes back to an art class in Villa Rica.
"Meeting this guy when we were in high school," she says. "And just to see what God has done in our lives over all these years. The life he has given us and our children. Moving us here and putting us in a church home that has helped us grow in our faith. The friendships we have, and our children and the friendships they have."
She sums it up in five words: "It's just been a fully blessed life."
