Finding a Calling 1

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1. Life gets serious after high school. Up to that point, one often has little control over the formative influences on his or her life. You usually do not get to pick where you go to high school and you certainly do not get to pick your parents.

If you are privileged, as I was, you have a say in where you go to college. If you are on the college route, you get to decide what you want to major in and what job you plan to take. Some of these choices boil down to ability but there is often a good deal of freedom. Eventually, you will likely choose a marriage partner.

I grew up with an interesting sense of God's will. Although we were Wesleyans, we had a strong sense of seeking God's will. God had a will for you. The free will came in whether you obeyed God's will or not.

I do believe God sometimes has a specific will for a person. But I have come to believe that God has a lot more options for us than dictates on such things. It makes life easier when you think it's all about "praying down" the one, single option God has for you. Who is the specific person he wants you to marry? What is the specific job he wants you to take?

Again, I do believe God sometimes has a specific will for a specific moment. But there are so many variables that, if God does give us the freedom to disobey him, then it is impossible that we are still on the preferred track of history. I don't believe in a literal multiverse, but you can think of the multiverse as a model for all the different possible worlds that might exist depending on the choices each individual makes.

It is simply absurd to think that, if God gives any freedom to the creation at all, that we are on the one preferred course of our lives, let alone of history in general.

John Paul Sartre once said, "Man is condemned to be free. After being thrown into the world, we are responsible for everything that we do." Of course he was an existentialist atheist. We have the Spirit as a helper. But he was at least right that we need to take responsibility for our lives. Some use God as a crutch so that they don't have to face the weight of personal responsibility.

2. I mentioned that I was accepted at several colleges. In the fall of my senior year (1983), I went with my parents to the board of trustees meeting at Central Wesleyan College, in South Carolina. Stacey Bodenhorn had been joking with me about going there. She planned to go there, although she was a year behind me.

My dad was on the board of trustees at Central, on the finance committee. After I graduated, he would finish out his time with GMAC flying to Atlanta every week to work out of the home office there. My father was a generous, selfless man. I never thought of us as having money and my mother sometimes said that he gave all his money away. As a board member, I'm sure he felt like it was his duty at least to take me to Central to visit.

I had no interest in going there. I had become a bit of an academic snob about such things. I did not look at Central or Marion College with any interest at all. The Bostics put Tom Sloan on to me at Marion College, but it was never a serious thought. Houghton wasn't on my radar at all, although it would have fit my academic temperament the best of the colleges. I probably would have considered it too liberal at the time. A secular university would be ok because I didn't expect it to be spiritual. I could make my own spiritual way at a secular university.

But something mystical happened at Central. As we left the campus, I felt like God wanted me to go there. I didn't feel any differently about it academically. I just felt like it was where I was supposed to go. I already mentioned how hard it was for me to tell Mr. Atkinson this.

I took the SAT twice. The first time my score was blase, but the second time I got a 1410. This qualified me for a full tuition scholarship at Central. They also gave me about 27 hours of credit for my AP tests: 12 hours of history, 6 hours of calculus, 6 hours of chemistry, 3 hours of physics. Full tuition was no doubt a significant factor in my going there as well.

3. The campus felt cozy to me. It was small. I don't know if the student body was even 500 at the time. It was Wesleyan. There was no way I would have gone to a Hobe Sound. It was the right kind of "liberal" for me, that is, liberal Wesleyan. That amounts to freekishly conservative to the rest of the world. It was friendly to my type of person but still obviously full of faith.

I would turn out to be one of three chemistry majors that first year. We all had keys to the lab. During finals week there was one night when we all pulled all nighters in the science building. Central had an arrangement with Clemson to where, if I wanted, I could also complete math and physics majors from there as well.

There was an independence to it all. I sensed that I would not feel lonely at Central. I would be among Christians like me. It's hard to express how fantastic the prospect of freedom there was to me. I would be able to set my own schedule. I could get up and go to sleep when I wanted.

I was hardly ready for all that responsibility, but it thrilled me. Whenever I returned to campus from a break, I would get more and more excited the closer I came to campus. In fact, I hurt my mother's feelings sometimes when I forgot to call and tell her I had arrived safely. It was largely out of sight out of mind.

My parents were no doubt sad when they left me there on the soccer field that August, 1984. But I couldn't have been more thrilled, no offense to them at all. I'm sure that one emotional factor against going to the University of Miami was the proximity to home. I wanted to get away. I wanted to be my own person.

Central would be a wonderful place for me to mature a little. It was solid academically but, on the whole, did not stretch me (with one major exception). But it was a good place for me to grow up a little. What would have happened to me at an RPI? I fear I would have crashed and burned at an MIT. Central was a nurturing place. It was what I needed at the ripe young age of 17 when I darkened its doors.