Autobiographies seem so pretentious and presumptuous, don’t they? But it seems like the only way to have someone else write your biography is to be either famous or dead. I’m neither - thank God. So I guess that leaves me to help you understand me. Sigh - here goes.

I was born and raised in the home my father was raised just outside of a small town in southern Wisconsin called Edgerton, a thriving metropolis of 4254 (at least that’s what the sign outside town says.) I grew up outside of town surrounded by cornfields and cattle. There’s even an airport nearby - a long grass strip about two miles from home in a small village called Albion. I call it Albion International Airport.

While waiting for the school bus in the morning as kids, my three brothers, my sister and I used to throw crabapples at the cattle across the road for fun (sorry PETA...but I think the cattle actually liked the crabapples.) We made our own fun in lots of other ways - usually along the lines of exploring, playing football and baseball until the sun went down, building forts, inventing weapons out of sticks and other available materials, using aforementioned weapons against rival siblings, and blowing things up (not siblings).

I had several other cousins in the area as well. There were actually 13 total in our high school over the course of 9 years. When I was in high school, I was related to one quarter of the baseball team. No joke. My high school football coach, legendary Jack Gregory, once said about my cousins, the Towns family, and we Bilhorns, “Bilhorns’ and Towns’...breed like rabbits.” I suppose that’s what happens when he coached probably 20-some of us total. I love where I grew up. It’s been over ten years since I lived there, and I still can’t walk through the grocery store without having a conversation with someone I know.

But I decided to go to college in a place that was the perceived antithesis of my upbringing - the south side of Chicago at Illinois Institute of Technology. Instead of going to sleep to the sound of crickets and cicadas, my slumber was sometimes interrupted with sounds of gunfire from the nearby public housing of the Robert Taylor Homes and Stateway Gardens.

But I loved my time at IIT, in part because I deeply reconnected with Jesus, growing my childish faith my own adult relationship with God, as well as and seeing friends do the same. The other part was that I deeply connected with others, developing some of the best friends a guy could ever ask for. Oh, and I got a great education at a great price thanks to a great scholarship program through the university. I didn’t just study architectural engineering; I lived in a historic landmark of a campus where simplicity became beauty, and the design grid of Mies was firmly planted upon my brain.

Upon graduation with my deg