In this edition of The Baptist Courier, most of our readers will meet for the first time a new columnist, Edwin Leap, who practices emergency medicine in the Upstate and is a deacon and Sunday school teacher at College Street Baptist Church in Walhalla.

I say most of our readers because many Courier subscribers in the Upstate already are familiar with his regular columns in The Greenville News.

Of his writings, Leap told the Courier, “I feel that this is my calling, or one of several, I should say.”

And so we should say as well, for Leap is a former flight surgeon with the West Virginia and Indiana Air National Guard and the United States Air Force Reserve. He is a consultant to the Department of Defense on issues related to the medical management of weapons of mass destruction and has lectured extensively on that subject.

He is a contributor to Emergency Medicine News, a national trade publication. Leap is a member of the Physicians Resource Council at Focus on the Family and has written for the Focus on the Family magazine.

“I write about faith in a real-world way – and quite candidly,” he said. “It’s hard not to have a ‘practical Christianity’ when you work in an emergency department, are married and have four home-schooled children. So, taking that experience and building on it, I feel that I can make readers laugh, cry, think or feel encouraged. And I can illustrate how our faith is applicable and necessary ‘where the rubber meets the road.’?”

Leap and his wife Jan are natives of West Virginia and graduates of Marshall University there. He graduated from the West Virginia University School of Medicine and completed his emergency medicine residency at Methodist Hospital of Indiana.

They are parents of four children – Sam, 13; Seth, 11; Elijah, 9; and Elysabeth, 7.

Welcome, Edwin, to the Courier’s lineup of regular columnists.