In the same way if say we would send a missionary to some far-off place to
bring Jesus to those people, claim that for Christ,
it'd be a lot of preparation goes into that -- a lot of work. It's the same thing
with some of these fields of occupation: a doctor or a dentist or whatever.
It takes all this preparation so that a Christian can get into that
space and do an excellent job, but also in a sense lay claim to that as this is for Christ.
Yes.
That's a really interesting concept.
Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying.
That's really neat.
It's in a way what at least gives you the ticket to get in that process. It's not to say
there's no risks involved.
Sure.
A part of going to a secular university is
that they change your mind about things, okay? That influence is both say in
the ideas, especially if you're in the humanities -- the liberal arts -- it's
embedded right into the ideas, but I tend to think even just in the practices of a
secular university. What orientation is like.
How the classroom experience is even structured. There's something just built
into those experiences which will cause the Christian to struggle somewhat.
So, you have to be aware of that. You recognize this. There's these skills.
They're kind of dormant in and of themselves. You bring
them to life. You animate them with the Spirit of Christ.
It's going to fundamentally alter how you deal with those things.
There's even possibility there you could do Christian nursing.
So in a way college isn't the end. That can be a means to something that
has so much more meaning in life. Maybe people just don't quite walk that
path always as they should.
That's how I like to see it.
It's not the end. It's the means to the end. For myself that's not
where I started off.
That's an idealistic thing, but
maybe if people approached it like that.
It's awfully fun to reflect that
back on everybody else because I haven't done it myself.
So everybody who wants to go to college maybe they should do it that way.
Just don't do it the way I did it,
but now that I've actually gotten there...
That is really really interesting!
That makes a lot of sense though. That approach I think in a way
could help especially the next generation to understand the
practical, realistic value of college and how it can be used for God's Kingdom.
It can feel kind of ambiguous like, "What's the good of all of this?"
If nothing else, even if you don't think that
the education should be necessary, that you could do the same thing that an engineer did.
Not a lot of folks are willing to say that, but with this mentality that
if I just had enough experience, the education's kind of redundant.
You could learn it on the job. You'll notice some difficulties there
right away, I think because most people don't say that. The reality is of our
world that if you want to be an engineer, you first got to study.
That's the way you get access to that entire field. You may not like it very much, but that's
the reality we function in. Bringing a positive perspective to the
experiences is probably going to turn out a lot better if you see the value of
it instead of just seeing it as a necessary evil.
Yeah and seeing it as just a way to get a good job.
Yeah, especially that. My own educational journey -- like I've been over some of the facts about it.
In 2011 I graduated from Faith Builders. The progression -- and you've
noticed this already -- I think is really significant in this, is that you
start off from or that I started off from what's essentially kind of a
self-focused and negative reason for coming into college, saying, "I don't feel like I'm
doing very much that's worthwhile here. I don't like my job, and I want to do
something different." So it's negative and it's focused on what I need or what I feel like I need.
That gives me access to something next
which would be Faith Builders. There's a growing sense of clarity.
There's some less ambiguity and begin to be able to serve in new ways here.
Now as I'm moving toward graduate studies starting here in August, not
an absolute certainty that this is what I need to be doing say, or that it's all
spelled out in the clouds now, and I just know how the tea leaves have fallen.
It's not that, but I do have a sense of confidence. That confidence isn't
based so much on just the inward look of like, "I'm in so much pain, and I want to get out of this"
as much as saying now, "I see this as a way of serving the people that made me who I am."
I see this as a way of helping my church to grow.
I see this as a way of learning how to even lead my family
which is really pretty challenging sometimes. You feel inadequate there a
lot as a father and growing in that. It becomes wrapped up in something much larger.
So again I think it's important to recognize (at least in my journey)
it's been significant to recognize that although I started off at
one place that was essentially about getting a different job, of getting away
from the pain, I've ended up somewhere that's much more focused on a
sense of calling in a maturing commitment to Christ and His work and at
least a growing awareness of where it is that I could fit myself into His Kingdom,
but much less about myself there.
Using it as a means of service.
Yeah that's right.
Preparing for service.
That's good.
Seeing some places there too, noticing more specific and I think, real
needs that our present and kind of forming yourself around that space.
I think that's something that the younger generation is starting to react to is
like, "Oh you know those people just sit, and they just go to college forever,
get a degree in whatever, and then end up getting a job just like everybody else."
You're talking about a much more deliberate path.
Deliberate is a little bit too strong, I think, but I would at least encourage
people who are considering college to ask the question, "Is this helping me to
meet a real need? Is this helping me to find a real opportunity, or is this just
come some kind of vague, vacuous thing out there that I'm gonna try to make up
as I go?" But neither would I say -- especially at the beginning of it -- the
only thing I had there was the pain. "I don't like what I'm doing. I don't like my life."
This is a way of pushing through or past the pain. It started off
as a very negative thing -- a sense of neediness.
It's gradually changed, and this calling has become more clear. I'm getting a greater sense of
both who I am and especially I think, what opportunities God places in life.
It's become more refined and more focused on how can I give? How can I
serve? What opportunities are there for me to contribute something to the work of God?
That's kind of come around full circle now towards seminary,
but it didn't begin there. I'm glad it didn't.
If you would have went straight to seminary, you know to a graduate degree
right off of the bat, I don't know, it sounds like there's a level of
preparation that you maybe didn't intend, but it kind of happened
along the way. You gained some real life skills, and some real experiences
you wouldn't have had otherwise.
Okay that's interesting. That's kind of encouraging.
Especially in our circles to have
stories to tell that are actually from the field. You know the time, I nearly severed
a customer's leg with a fan blade that went crazy,
or you know, the time I nearly fell three stories. Those sorts of experiences I
think are really important otherwise you get really hopelessly just academic.
And not practical?
Not practical and not experienced.
That's something that I see is a real strength of Anabaptist culture is
we are very practical a lot of times. You know real world experience and
things like that almost to a fault to where you know college is seen
as maybe not as much of a path as maybe something else because we're really practical.
I like that blend, and I think trying to
find it -- that's not very easy sometimes.
If you're really interested in the practical, and you see the skills a person can accumulate, you
wonder, "What's the value of college?" Is that right?
Yeah, pretty much.
That's something I think especially the younger generation
is going to start asking those questions. "Why spend all of this money on
college when I could use that time and money to gain experience in a relevant
field and learn something practical?"
Yeah, they're fair questions.
We could just pivot a little bit here and then just ask the question:
so what's the value of college education? For myself there's -- again I
wouldn't have said all of this to begin with maybe -- but anyway my first foray
into college with the work at Penn College where I got that degree in
computer science. One of the things that bothered me was that I had to take a lot
of programming classes which I felt were kind of irrelevant to what I
wanted to learn which was networking. I had to take accounting which
made no sense whatsoever. I remember the accounting
professor beginning to kind of push on that by saying, "Hey, look you guys. I know
you don't really care about this class very much because you're here for computer
science, and you've got to take this accounting class, but I promise you," he
said, "if you're in computer science for any length of time,
you're going to be working with finances and accountants." He was right.
Frequently now and in the work that I did previously and in some of the work
that I do now, that's what you run into. If you work with computers,
you're going to be working with finances. If you want to understand computers,
you're going to need to understand programming. So I came in wanting
just a few very practical skills. I wanted to know how do I fix Windows 98?
They taught me programming instead and a little bit about Windows 98
and a little bit about Windows Server 2000. Maybe it's becoming clearer
now as I'm talking. The reason they did that, they wanted to teach me a
mindset, a prepared way of looking at computers and technology which is
founded in programming. I wanted the skills. The reason they did that is
because the skills are obsolete now. If they would have focused on Windows 98
and Server 2000, I'd be a wreck. All of that's obsolete, but I do have that
mindset, the way of kind of intuitively looking at things, and I can still figure it out
because I know how a computer works at the gut level.
They knew that because they've been in the field for years and years.
Me coming in as a novice? I just wanted a grab bag of skills and then I
could run off and flee, you know and get a great job. That's just not how it works.
You need as the novice to
have apprenticeship with somebody who's been in the field. That's ideally what
college is about -- to allow that big-picture perspective to inform the
novices who are just getting started.
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