Dear researchers of the truth and followers of Christ;

It was from my beginnings as a child that I sought to encounter ideas that might lead me to understand and communicate the truth. I should give credit to my many family members for this interest; I always did trust my family as so many of them were involved in ministry of service to the Church. These influences upon me were varied and helped form my more open-minded view toward ideas.

My most early recollections about organizational interests for dissecting many of the questions of the day began to haunt me at 5 or 6 years of age. These ideas strangely became more keen in my early teen years as I struggled with a Holy Spirit encounter that defined much of my early adult life.

My educational experience came from a typical secular educational facility.  I became disappointed and detached from this type of educational process.  I apologize for this publicly.  In a certain way to this day, I still feel that I was dishonest intellectually.  But in defense of my disappointment I do believe at this early age, I was more interested in an expository style of learning than institutional rote memorization of information.  This was due I think, to an already developing sense for systematic analysis that did not agree with some of the traditional education expectations made of me. 

However in a more practically manner, I believe that as a result I had created a problem with anxiety which compounded my meeting standardized expectations for education.  I too may have coupled this problem with an early head trauma injury in my teens that caused physical difficulty.

Since I have always been a thinker of sorts, this standardized American style of training did not impress me.  In fact I had a strong concern for it.  And since my mind wanted more, I was left with having to receive what was given to me. This was limiting.  This may have contributed to my rebellion or stubbornness and stumbling in my late teen and early twenties.  Please add to this mix a strange desire to seek out God directed interests that could assist in growing the entire church to a point of completion.

In fact this combination of very independent and divergent interests would lead me close to dire disaster.  As I believe the Holy Spirit had to literally pull me back in from very serious internal conflicts.

Basically, my creative thoughts ran toward the idea of how do we as individuals communicate and organize information in a way that we could share and grow in the same discoveries. This application also caused me to question: If we can do better at this how might it also have even more profound implications in a Christian application as well.

Hence my ideas ran to this project.  It originally was more secular in scope as it involved a philosophical dualism in its construction; but It also involved waiting a great deal of time on the Holy Spirit for permission to even construct its thesis.  But even more so it was painful to wait after completing a rough draft and the putting it down again for similar reasons.  And now I have waited upon and again now feel instructed after 25 years to restate the thesis and start some type of deployment in this project.  For this I am grateful.

I hope this letter sets up the interests that drove me to do this ADVAD / SAM Project.

Bless you and thank you for your interest.

Edward L. Gross Jr.