It seems every personal web page has a section on its author. I guess it’s a flag of sorts, planted in cyberspace to tell the world who you are. Well I had to write an autobiography for a class recently and I figured this would let me kill two birds with one stone.

Hello, my name is Greg Stierle. I was born in 1977 in Louisville, Kentucky. I have one older sister named London. We’ve grown up as a pretty stable, happy, well-off family who’ve experienced very little hurt or hardship. Growing up I had a few close friends, but these were all outside of school.

Outside of school is where I had most of my fun. I loved building with blocks and Lego’s, playing man hunt, hide and seek, kick the can and other such games. I feel as though I grew up in a different generation than I read about in the papers – a generation not so concerned about letting the kids run around outside unsupervised. I never felt unsafe or overprotected which seems to be a hard balance to achieve. I lived the suburban dream childhood.

High school came and was the first time since we were very young that my sister and went to the same school at the same time. My sister always made great grades and she was (and still is) beautiful. She was the most popular girl in school and everyone loved her. While it was fun having a big sister to drive me to and from school, I felt a lot more pressure to do well now that I’d hit the big time. For the first time in my life I felt like my grades would really matter, so I grew up a little and began to do homework. My mom tells me that she didn’t know I was smart until high school.

High school was when I first felt like I was becoming independent. I started getting things like a curfew and a car, and it was when I first fell in love. I had been toying with the idea of not going to college for a while but I hadn’t quite told my parents this. My big dream was to learn all about cars, buy old jalopies, and fix them up for a living. When I turned 16 I got a job at a garage pumping gas. For the most part things were pretty slow and unexciting but Sundays were a lot of fun. I worked all day Sunday -- just me and the cashier -- which made me the closest thing we had to a mechanic on duty. This gave me some experience doing simple things like changing oil and plugging tires. I never made it to being a real mechanic but I felt cool. I learned to diagnose some things. This is where I wanted to be.

I finally broke it to my parents that I was going to work at a garage upon graduation and take occasional classes at a community college. They weren’t nearly as upset as I thought they’d be. They always knew I enjoyed working with my hands. I built a greenhouse behind our garage and a wine cellar in the basement. Me and a friend also bought an old car to tool around in work on when we had time. My mom didn’t blow her top but she still made me apply to schools that I’d never consider going to "just in case". I picked out the Universities of Louisville and Kentucky and she picked out the University of Virginia and Indiana University. When I heard back from them my Mom sat me down and we made a deal. The deal was that I’d give her one year. If I went to college for a year and didn’t enjoy it, I could do anything in the world afterward with her blessing. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. We decided that I’d go to UVa. I probably should not have gotten in this good of a school but I did and I’m proud of it. I now know that the real reason I was accepted was God.

I didn’t go to church very often growing up, nor did I have the desire to. On occasion I’d go with my grandfather, but as soon as service started, we snuck out of the balcony and went to the cemetery where my grandma was buried to visit her and feed the ducks at the pond there. We’d get back to church just in time to go out to eat with everyone afterward. While I now cherish these times, I didn’t learn much about the Bible.

In college I had a hard time figuring out where I belonged. I tried the fraternity scene but everything seemed pretty shallow. I couldn’t be comfortable unless I had a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Maybe I was just overly self-conscious but I was never comfortable. I hung out with my suite a good bit, and became pretty close friends with my roommate, who went to church a lot. I started to go to some of the fellowship groups around grounds but I still felt like an outsider. He did a good job making sure that he was always there introducing me to people and helping me to feel comfortable but I didn’t see anything that made me want to change all that much. I met a guy on grounds, who wasn’t even a student who invited me out to the church where he went and I felt something different. I saw a love there that seemed to transcend the traditional barriers of race and social class, and I really felt welcome. I didn’t really agree with a lot of the beliefs they had, and my roommate didn’t either. Those people all went to church a couple times a week and read the Bible all the time on their own, and a lot of them were the kind of weirdoes who come up to you on the street and start talking about you and God. I still felt like I wanted to go until I saw they were wrong. After a couple months of going on and off, and talking to my roommate, I finally decided that I’d see what the Bible had to say, because everybody else seemed to have their own opinions that went every which way.

It took me about a month of going through the Bible with people from the church and then with my roommate before I was ready to make any sort of decision. The more I learned about Jesus the more I saw that Christianity was an all or nothing proposition. I was hoping to find something to fit into my life to complete it, but Jesus said that instead my life would have to start and end with Him. As I started putting things into practice in my life, I started changing in ways I never thought I could. This was really the proof for me that the Bible was from God. That decision has been the basis for everything I’ve done since then. I became a Christian, and my life has been complete ever since. It’s not been perfect, and things have gone wrong, but I know now why I’m alive and why I’m here and what I’m doing.

Obviously (because I’m still here) I decided to stay here at school and at least try to work a more white-collar job. I figure I’ll give it a year. Who knows where I’ll be after then, but no matter where it is I know now that my life will make a difference.