One on One with Dennis Smock

By Our Town Gwinnett Staff

Everyone has a passion. Everyone has something that intrigues them and drives them to do what they do. If you are like most people, you have had several of these passions during your lifetime, but there is always a single, underlying passion that drives everything. It is the foundation for everything that you do. And though all others are secondary, they are all related to your primary purpose in some manner. For many, their primary purpose does not fully manifest itself until the time is right, until everything they have experienced has been nurtured and matured to the point of action.

So, let us learn more about Dennis in his own words. My name is Dennis Smock. I am a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology. For the longest time, I seemed to simply go with the flow – albeit the flow saw me do things without truly pursuing them. Most people who do pursue them never get to take part in the manner that I was able to. I got to be part of a team that was tasked with putting together a computer monitoring system for a nuclear power plant. I got to be part of the team that designed many recognizable buildings in Atlanta, L.A., San Francisco, and Times Square in New York. I have a patent in my name. I was VP of Creative Services for a $45 million/year retail design/build firm. I was adjunct faculty at a small design college. I was a nationally recognized consultant and had several trade articles published. I was also able to be involved in the music scene and have many stories to tell – but none of these things were my passion.

It is funny how God will use a still, small moment to get your attention. About twenty-five years ago, my wife and I were sponsored to go on a three-day church retreat. The men go one weekend and then the women go the following weekend. During those three days, and the following few weeks, my purpose, my passion, slowly started to come into focus. The number of people in my community who had been on previous weekends like this numbered over one thousand, and they had only the US Postal Service to stay in touch. I was asked to put together the email addresses that they had and use these as a basis for mass email communications. These early communications were simply to notify people of upcoming events and urgent prayer requests. I soon found myself wanting to send out positive messages, and so the daily devotionals were born. Recipients started asking if these could be shared, so I opened the list to anyone who wanted to receive them.

I worked from home during the early years of the daily devotionals. Continued on page 22