8. Guided Life Commitments
8
Guided Life Commitments
The LORD took me from following the flock, and the LORD said to me, “Go, prophesy to my people Israel.”
Amos 7:15
Our life, from one standpoint, is a long string of decisions. Some are small-scale, short-term, and of little or no consequence. What we decide to wear, what we choose from the restaurant menu, which seats we book at the theater are decisions that in the long run, other things being equal, make no difference and so do not matter. But some decisions are far-reaching, and we know before we make them that they will be; these are decisions, for instance, about education, career, marriage, location, church affiliation, or adoption of children. Understandably, we face the making of such decisions with some angst.
It is true, of course, that we can never be sure what is going to come of our decision making. What feels like major decisions may, after all, have no effect, and apparently trivial decisions may prove momentous. Small-seeming decisions do sometimes turn out in God’s providence to have life-changing consequences—decisions such as accepting an invitation to the party where you first met Mr. or Ms. X, or attending a conference that led to an unexpected career opportunity, or turning to the day’s set Scripture passage and finding in it light from God, shining directly on a knotty personal problem. Such events bring joy; they are precious reminders of the guardian grace and covenant care of the God we serve. And then it is also true that unanticipated circumstances will suddenly negate long-term decisions that were carefully, even laboriously, made before the Lord, so that one has to start all over again. At such times we need to remind ourselves that God does all things well and that he knows what he is doing with us when we don’t. In the present chapter, however, we leave these realities on one side. Our concern at the moment is with the making of decisions that we expect to be life-shaping hinge-points on which we think our future will turn. We hope that what we have to say will go some way to relieving the tension and anxiety that the making of such decisions can bring.
We shall describe such decisions as vocational, and the guidance of God in relation to them as vocational guidance. We do so because the language of vocation is so deeply embedded in today’s Christian usage, where it reflects the idea that any life-strategy decision, correctly reached, is in fact being made in direct response to a “call” from God to engage in that form of service. (Vocatio is Latin for “call.”) Hence people committing themselves to pastoral ministry or monastic life are often said simply to “have a vocation.” Though neither the Hebrew nor the Greek words for “call” are used in Scripture in quite this way, the language of “being called” to a particular walk of life (to minister, or to marry, or to relocate, or to change jobs, or whatever) is firmly established in the Christian church; and among evangelicals, at any rate, it determines expectation of experiences to a remarkable extent—not always helpfully, as we shall soon see. We note in passing that the world has borrowed Christian vocational phraseology and watered it down; in secular usage, vocational guidance has nothing to do with God and ordinarily relates simply to employment; and since many jobs today are short-term, it rarely rises to the point of offering any form of life-strategy. But in Christianity the thought of vocation as a personal, life-embracing mandate from God continues in unabated strength. We shall discuss it with full recognition that this is so.
Vocational Guidance: Its Nature
In the Bible we read of spectacular encounters with God that left the persons concerned in no doubt at all that the Almighty was insisting on changing the direction of their lives. Moses was confronted by a burning bush and a voice that ordered him to leave the relative comfort of quietly tending his father-in-law’s sheep and return to Egypt (where he was wanted for murder) to convey an unwelcome message to Pharaoh and to lead a ragtag Israel out of the country to an unknown Promised Land (Exodus 3). Christ met Saul on the Damascus road when the latter was on his way to torture and kill Christians, and turned him into Paul, Christianity’s most outstanding pioneer missionary and theologian (Acts 9; 22; 26). Gideon, the farmer’s son, was commissioned out of the blue to deliver Israel from the Midianites (Judges 6). Countryman Amos, preaching in sophisticated Bethel and now told to leave, testified: “I was a herdsman and a dresser of sycamore figs. But the LORD took me from following the flock, and the LORD said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel’” (Amos 7:14–15; cf. Jer. 1:4–8; Ezekiel 2–3). We speak of each of these transforming encounters as a divine call, and the word fits. They remain, however, exceptional events, recorded in detail because of the significance of the ministry that followed, and there is nothing to suggest that they are set down in Scripture in order to establish a universal pattern.
In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, it became common among evangelicals to expect something of this startling kind whenever far-reaching decisions had to be made, particularly with regard to career and marriage. People hoped and prayed for, and expected, some sort of supernatural indication from God as to what they should do, and in its absence they felt obliged to say, “Well, I haven’t received my guidance yet.” What kind of indication was being looked for? At the very least, a powerful feeling of “rightness” in connection with one of the options, or possibilities, between which one was trying to decide. But was their expectation of guidance by distinctive feeling, or vision, or voice, in such cases really warranted? Moses, Paul, Gideon, and Amos were being directed to forms of service that they themselves never would have dreamed. Therefore, only through a conscious encounter could God communicate to them the task he had in store for them. Decisions about whether, or to whom, to commit oneself in marriage or whether to offer for the pastorate, at home or abroad, hardly come in that category. Expecting special, supernatural direction for these and similar decisions was surely a mistake. We do not question that a settled sense of rightness and peace ordinarily accompanies a right decision as distinct from a wrong one; our point is simply that in many decisions of great consequence it is still unwarranted to expect, and in effect demand, some form of direct, informative encounter with God. That is what “supernatural” refers to here.
Certainly, the fallout from the mistake, if mistake it was, has been decidedly unhappy: bewilderment, depression, guilt, inaction, desperate dependence on inner urges, random decisions at the end of the day—all because no supernatural indication of this kind of desire has been given. The root of the mistake, it appears, was twofold: (1) an underlying mistrust of Christian reasoning, as not in itself a sufficiently spiritual activity, and (2) an undue reliance on significant gusts of emotion, whether euphoric or gloomy, to show how one stood with God in relation to this or that particular problem. What was needed was a recognition that this almost superstitious preoccupation with how or what one felt, so far from being a sign of deep spirituality, was an eccentricity, a somewhat zany spin-off from the romantic movement in Western culture; and what was also needed was a recovery of confidence in Christian reason, even without the icing of supernatural signs on the cake of cogent, biblically based thinking. Such a recovery would be a return to the way of making vocational decisions that had pertained in the Protestant world for three centuries, before the latter-day infection of “feelingitis” set in. Such a recovery would not be anything new; on the contrary, it would be a restoring of the tried and true after a period of unsuccessful experiment with something else. It is important that we recognize this.
From the mid-sixteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, Protestant teachers did not discuss career choices as such, but from their approaches to recruiting future clergy, they clearly agreed that career choices should be made in terms of two questions—first, what options do your circumstances allow? And, second, which of these options are you best fitted for in terms of interest and ability? Then, of course, many, perhaps most, young people were hemmed in by family considerations plus the iron railings of social stratification—whereas, hundreds of career options lie open today. Then, too, in the matter of holy matrimony, most marriages were arranged, more or less peremptorily, by parents; whereas, today couples make their own decisions on such matters.
Yet the way to pray about these matters has not really changed. With regard to a career, the proper prayer is: “Give me clarity as to what line of work I can happily follow for life, should the form of employment with which I start last for life.” And with regard to marriage, the proper prayer is: “Give me clarity as to whom I can loyally and wholeheartedly love for life, assuming many years together before death brings about a parting.” The answer to both prayers will be, precisely, the clarity that is asked for, and the sign of its attainment will be an inner peace that says in effect, “You need not churn over this matter in your mind any more; now you know, so you can proceed.” Through weighing pros and cons before the Lord, along perhaps with prudently taking advice, the person who prayed has now gained rational clarity from the Lord, and that is the conclusion of the matter.
A further limitation on evangelical thinking about vocation at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was the idea that there are just four really worthwhile vocations for men: missionary, pastor, physician, or teacher—and just four for women: missionary, teacher, nurse, or the wife of a man committed to one of the men’s halo-ringed four as listed above. We should be glad that this way of thinking has become a thing of the past and has thus cleared the road for the truer insight that honest, faithful, honorable work of any sort, done as best one can and as helpfully to others as possible, glorifies God. So a believer may see his or her work as hallowed, whether that work involves handing fast food out of a window, cleaning offices late at night, bartering at the stock market, caring for children, plowing a field, balancing accounts, repairing a car, or (even) composing a manuscript. God gives his people all kinds of skills and interests and opportunities, and he receives their praise not only in verbal form, but in the form of all kinds of work well done in his name. What turns work, which might otherwise become drudgery, into a vocation is not the nature of the work itself, but the fact that it is done for the glory of the Lord.
Let us be quite clear about this. Work means, precisely, useful, creative employment in the service of God and others—just that. Skills are involved in work, but salary may or may not accompany it. A lot of our work is unsalaried. Homemaking is a case in point; yet homemaking fulfills a crucially important calling from God at the most significant time of a child’s life. Homemaking parents serve God and others in a profound way by caring for their children and by creating a home in which the entire family receives physical, emotional, and spiritual nurture. Homemaking as a call from God is sometimes overlooked, as are the para-homemaking aspects, as we may call them, of church life. Carolyn has enjoyed observing a distinguished scholar occasionally spending Sunday mornings playing with toddlers in the church nursery and an elder digging out the church’s cesspool because he would not ask someone else to do something unpleasant that he was unwilling to do himself. We need to get our minds off the equation that vocation and career equals profession and status and earnings. The reality of vocation extends far wider than that. All Christian voluntary work is vocational.
In saying all this, we would not lose sight of the fact that the four haloed professions are indeed precious in God’s kingdom because of their outstanding potential for doing good to others. On the contrary, we do ourselves highlight them as options to be considered by all whose interests and skills might incline them to one or the other, and we urge all pastors and youth leaders to see it as part of their responsibility to do the same. (“Fostering vocations” is what this aspect of ministry has traditionally been called.) Our point is simply that the holy four are not the only ways of living that count for God. But it remains, as true as ever it was, that these four are of high value in themselves, and that recruiting young people to their ranks is signal service of God. For the young person or an older person with career-change in mind, the question boils down to this: what is it that I can do well and happily, and among the things I can do well and happily, which will be the best for the honor of God, the extension of his kingdom, the benefit of my neighbor, and, through all these, my own job satisfaction? Facing this question prayerfully, the God-guided Christian’s mind may well find itself settling in one direction, and this may properly be seen as the call of God, whether to one of the five-star four or elsewhere. The question should, indeed, be kept before us until this happens. God’s faithfulness as our shepherd guarantees that he will continue his guiding care whenever a decision has to be made.
The criteria for making vocational choices have to do with following God-given information, interests, and skills on the one hand, and God-given responsibilities on the other. When, for instance, you are responsible for the welfare of others in your family, you have to make sure that the work that you choose enables you to fulfill those responsibilities. Parents of young children are rightly giving highest consideration to their children’s welfare when they opt, as they sometimes do, for a second or third choice vocation because they cannot pay for both family food and their own education at the same time. Or they may choose a job near grandparents or good schools even though it means lower pay or less prestige. Or they may decide not to accept a promotion because it would mean interrupting their teenager’s sports opportunities. Likewise, adult children will consider the well-being of their aging parents and, perhaps, reject a move to another state or refuse a job that allows no time for doctor’s appointments and errands with their parent. Family members of people with special needs make lifelong career adjustments in order to provide for their children or siblings or parents in ways that few less-encumbered people could begin to understand. Yet Scripture ascribes real dignity to those kinds of sacrifices. “But if anyone does not provide for his relatives, and especially for members of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Tim 5:8). Christians who have honored these family responsibilities will often be the first to testify of their joy in God’s redeeming work, even though outsiders might see principled choices as vocational sacrifices.
Vocational Guidance: Its Elements
The reality of vocational guidance, we now see, comes down to choices and decisions which are either wise or foolish, either godly or ungodly, and God guides us by teaching us to make appropriate decisions. He guides us vocationally through the means of our thinking, our consulting, our reflecting, our praying, our allowing him to convince us that this, rather than that, is the way that we should be going. Throughout that process God prepares us for decision, directs us in decision, and nudges us for any necessary course correction after decision. He is our shepherd leading his sheep, yet watching over them as he does so, and keeping them secure under his care. Bursting the bounds of our illustration for the moment, we should remind ourselves that it is the Triune God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) who is our Shepherd, who sets us on track, and he keeps us on track until journey’s end. In doing this, God works through means, and the aim of this part of the chapter is to map the means he uses. The central decisions are the vocational decisions, the big, long-term, life-shaping commitments that God prompts us to make, but flanking these are the preparatory and triggering means that precede and the sustaining and course-correcting means that follow. For examples of all these, we propose to focus our attention on three Bible characters: Moses, Nehemiah, and Paul.
Let’s first introduce them.
Moses was a man with terrific gifts, who yet was deeply tempted to diffidence, and who had a furious temper that he could not always control. A flawed man? Certainly. We all are. But a great man in God’s kingdom, nonetheless.
Nehemiah was a wonderfully resourceful person. We guess that he was tempted constantly to bull-at-a-gate self-reliance, and that when in his memoir he tells us, as he frequently does, that he prayed and got others praying too before any action was taken, he is acknowledging this fact and testifying that God enabled him to overcome temptation again and again on this point. “Pray before you act” is a crucial and universal rule of spiritual health.
Paul was by nature a visionary, a pioneer, an opportunist, and a little ball of fire, long before the Lord got hold of him. He was tempted, so you find as you read his story, to a boldness that verged on foolhardiness. God, it seems, sometimes had to hold him back from doing silly things. (Look at Acts 19:30–31.)
Our temptations often arise out of our greatest strengths. Where we are strong, there Satan seeks to make us weak through being off our guard, relaxing our watchfulness, and lapsing into self-reliance without quite realizing what we are doing. Again and again we, the people of God, fail in this way. Wisdom says, “No, no, learn a different habit,” but we turn a deaf ear. We can never trust ourselves, never. All three of these characters we are to study will give us warning here.
Preparation for Service
We start by noting how, long-term, God in his providence prepared these men for the vocational tasks he had in store for them. A few words from the Bible crystallize the preparation in each case. First, Moses “refused to be called the son of Pharaoh’s daughter” (Heb.11:24). Found as a baby in a bulrush basket, Moses had become Pharaoh’s daughter’s foster child. He was brought up in the palace, rubbing shoulders with royalty, speaking Egyptian, learning Egyptian wisdom, and accepted as an Egyptian grandee. But, having presumably learned Israel’s faith and his own identity from his mother, who had brought him up as Pharaoh’s daughter’s hired nursemaid, he maintained contact with his birth family, he felt outrage at Israel’s enslavement, in a fury he killed an Egyptian for beating up on an Israelite, and as a result, top person though he was, he had to flee the country. All of this prepared Moses for his mission of publicly defying Pharaoh and spending forty grueling years as Israel’s leader.
Second, Nehemiah tells us, “I was cupbearer to the king” (Neh. 1:11). Nehemiah was a Jewish alien at the Persian court—really a high-class slave. The cupbearer’s position was high-risk employment, for the cupbearer’s job began with sampling the food and drink that were prepared for each royal banquet, so that if it were poisoned (a not unknown ploy) he, rather than the monarch, would be the victim. We can see why the Persian king would recruit a non-Persian for this post. But the cupbearer’s position was also one of privilege; kings regularly used their cupbearers as confidants and counselors. Artaxerxes’s attitude to his cupbearer was no exception; clearly he liked and trusted Nehemiah, appreciating his loyalty and admiring his ability, and the warmth of their relationship was God’s preparing of the way for Nehemiah’s mission as restorer of Jerusalem.
Third, Paul told the Jerusalem mob: “‘I am a Jew, born in Tarsus in Cilicia, but brought up in this city, educated at the feet of Gamaliel according to the strict manner of the law of our fathers, being zealous for God’” (Acts 22:3). A Roman citizen by birth (v. 28) as well as “a Hebrew of Hebrews . . . a Pharisee” (Phil. 3:5), Paul was providentially equipped for unitive ministry in cross-cultural, Jewish/Graeco-Roman/pagan evangelism, for developing Christian theology into a full-scale philosophy of history with Christ as the center, and for writing nearly a quarter of the New Testament. To be sure, he started as a ferocious persecutor of the church, a Christian-killer in the most literal sense, but he came to see even this as providentially overruled preparation for the ministry he was to have. “Formerly I was a blasphemer, persecutor, and insolent opponent. But I received mercy because I had acted ignorantly in unbelief. . . . I received mercy for this reason, that in me, as the foremost, Jesus Christ might display his perfect patience as an example to those who were to believe in him for eternal life” (1 Tim. 1:13, 16). Thus God prepared Paul for the spectacular leadership role that he was to fulfill.
God’s long-term preparation of us for service to come remains a reality, though in the nature of the case, we often do not recognize this preparation for what it is until the ministry itself becomes apparent. Prior to that, significant events in God’s plan for us will seem simply bewildering. The dashing down of Moses’s dream of championing the Israelites when he had to become a refugee from Egypt, and the official authorizing of Paul to clear Damascus of Christians (Acts 9:1–2), looked at the time like the exact opposite of what was to come. J. I. recalls how when at age seven a road accident permanently damaged his skull, blighting his boyhood; yet eleven years later, since the injury unfitted him for military service during the Second World War, he was able to go to school at Oxford, where he became a Christian. His life changed completely, and he began moving into a ministry that continues to this day. When the place of seemingly purposeless and damaging events in God’s plan of blessing becomes plain, this revelation brings joy; and it belongs to the life of faith to be sure that such events are preparation for fruitfulness in God’s good plan, even though one cannot yet see how.
The Triggering of Commitment
Commonly, if not invariably, God orchestrates circumstances that bring to a head the issue of life commitment to a vocational task. The divine purpose evidently is that the memory of this decisive moment may keep vivid in the committed person’s mind the reality of his or her vocation. God dealt so with Moses, confronting him with the burning bush and the command to return to Egypt in an encounter that clearly he could never forget.
God dealt so with Nehemiah, when the king said to him: “Why is your face sad, seeing you are not sick? This is nothing but sadness of the heart” (Neh. 2:2). Nehemiah, a passionately patriotic and God-fearing Jew, had been fasting and praying since he heard the bad news of leveled walls and low morale in Jerusalem. Believing, what his friends had evidently told him, that he himself had what it would take to set Jerusalem on its feet, he had started to pray that God would “grant [his servant] mercy in the sight of this man” (Neh. 1:11)—in other words, that King Artaxerxes would actually send him to Jerusalem. But he could not raise the subject himself, and he and his friends had prayed in these terms for three months, during which nothing had happened. Now, however, in one sense out of the blue, the king’s words were opening the door to actually fulfilling the prayed-for request. Since it was officially death to appear less than joyful in the king’s presence, Nehemiah’s heart must have been very heavily jolted at the king’s form of words, but he prayed and plunged in and straightaway found himself authorized to go and rebuild Jerusalem, just as he had longed to do. That moment when the king’s words put him on the spot must surely have stayed in Nehemiah’s memory all his life. God also dealt in this way with Paul. We may be quite certain that Paul never forgot what had happened to him on the Damascus road.
The Sustaining of the Committed
Within the present cosmic order, or maybe we should say disorder, where the world and the devil are set against God and all his ways, vocational tasks are invariably a tussle. The ministries of Moses, Nehemiah, and Paul, to look no further, are set forth in Scripture as panoramas of almost unimaginable strains and pains. Hardship and discouragement due to constant challenges to their authority, including and policy from lower down in the pecking order, and malicious demolishings of what they have labored to build up are the recurring themes.
Moses had to endure direct challenges from Nadab and Abihu (Leviticus 10), from Korah, Dathan, and Abiram (Numbers 16), and even from Aaron his brother and Miriam his older sister (Numbers 12), plus endless grumbling from the mass of the people, to whom he was constrained to say at the end of his life: “You are a stubborn people. Remember and do not forget how you provoked the LORD your God to wrath in the wilderness. From the day you came out of the land of Egypt until you came to this place, you have been rebellious against the LORD” (Deut. 9:6–7).
Nehemiah rebuilt Jerusalem’s wall against constant opposition from Sanballat, Tobiah, and Geshem, and when he left the city much of the moral and spiritual order that he had established collapsed, so that it had to be set straight again by forceful action when he returned for his second spell as governor (Neh. 13:4–31).
Paul, goaded, lifts the veil on his own track record as follows:
Five times I received at the hands of the Jews the forty lashes less one. Three times I was beaten with rods. Once I was stoned. Three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I was adrift at sea; on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from robbers, danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city, danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers, in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, in hunger and thirst, often without food, in cold and exposure. And, apart from other things, there is the daily pressure on me of my anxiety for all the churches.
2 Corinthians 11:24–28
Yet God sustained them. The burden of leadership did not break Moses’s health. “Moses was 120 years old when he died. His eye was undimmed, and his vigor unabated” (Deut. 34:7). Nehemiah ends his memoirs with the humble yet quietly confident prayer, “Remember me, O my God, for good” (Neh. 13:31). Paul declares, toward the end of his last letter, “The Lord will rescue me from every evil deed and bring me safely into his heavenly kingdom” (2 Tim. 4:18). The last word is always upbeat, peaceful, and hopeful. God does not abandon his faithful servants.
Courage and Corrections
There are, however, times when, within an ongoing vocational commitment, God takes action to adjust and improve what we are doing, and at such times we need rational flexibility, a willingness to make changes when we are given good reason to do so. Stubborn unwillingness to change at such times, however we might rationalize it to ourselves, would be pride corrupting God’s call.
Moses, as we have already seen, accepted course correction, via his father-in-law Jethro, to help him decentralize public administration within the Israelite community. After a day of watching Moses at work settling disputes among the people, Jethro warned him, “You and the people with you will certainly wear yourselves out, for the thing is too heavy for you. You are not able to do it alone” (Exod. 18:18). Then Jethro laid out a plan whereby Moses could delegate all minor responsibilities and still maintain responsible spiritual oversight of the people as a body. Moses was wise enough to see that this was a good plan, and to accept it accordingly, and humble enough to accept it even from the hand of his father-in-law.
Paul experienced a more momentous course correction on his second missionary journey. In Acts 16:6 we find him and Timothy moving along a main road running west through southern Asia Minor, “having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit [how, we are not told] to speak the word in Asia” (southeast Asia Minor, the Roman province of Asia). They followed the road round the coast northward till they reached Mysia (northern Asia Minor) and thence “attempted to go into Bithynia [northeast Asia Minor], but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them” (v. 7). So they followed the road to its end in Troas, a western-facing seaport, wondering no doubt what God had in mind for them. That night Paul saw a vision of a Macedonian, a Greek, saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us” (v. 9). They did so, and the gospel came to Europe—an altogether more significant advance than evangelizing Asia Minor would have been.
Course corrections of this kind affirm and extend the original vocation, rather than disrupt it, and we must always be open to find that God has in mind something better than we knew.
Conclusions
Who are the Christians whom God leads to make long-term vocational commitments? In his intention, just about all of us, though the commitments themselves will vary and some Christians, alas, will turn a deaf ear to God at this point.
How may we become clear as to what long-term commitments God is calling us to make? By considering what our circumstances allow, and, within that frame, what our interests and skills suggest to us, and, within that frame, what in our hearts we would most like to do for God and for others, out of gratitude for Calvary, and love for people, and a desire to make a difference for God in the world.
How do we sustain a long-term vocational commitment, once we have made it? By putting our heart into fulfilling it as it stands, and by reviewing it from time to time before God, asking him to show us if there is anything in our conceiving or handling of the task that he wants us to change. Perhaps there will be, as with Moses and Paul; perhaps not, as apparently with Nehemiah.
Should we regard a sense of personal inadequacy as reason for not taking on a vocational task that has our heart? Not necessarily; if we have some of the qualities needed for fulfilling the role, it may be that we should trust God to supply the rest as needed. In face of uncertainty here, we are likely to be helped by taking advice from persons who know us well.
When should we consider ourselves set free from a long-term obligation that we have assumed? When circumstances no longer allow us to fulfill it. But until that happens, we should understand our obligation as having the nature of a vow to God, and so as continuing to stand.
Carolyn tells of a pivotal guidance event that seems even more mysterious to her now than at the time, yet it included many of the principles of vocational guidance that we have explored in this chapter.
Like many of her era in the rural farm country of southern Ohio, college was not a widely assumed goal for her as a high school student. No one in her family had ever gone to college; few of her friends or neighbors intended to. Yet John Reno, a Christian teacher in her public school, suggested to her that she might consider such an option. He even provided a small extra class of three students (while he monitored a large study hall at the same time) in order to grant some semblance of college preparation in mathematics. He mentioned that she might consider a Christian college, perhaps a place called Wheaton.
Carolyn dutifully went to her county library a dozen miles away and began to study their shelf copies of college catalogues. There she discovered materials from several dozen Christian colleges in various parts of the country. As she looked at the educational backgrounds of their faculty members, she noticed a common thread: many had done undergraduate work at Wheaton. She then studied Wheaton’s catalogue, found it less colorful than most, and far more expensive than her summer job savings could support.
She applied anyway. By now she was beginning to sense what she thought might be the call of God to this mysterious school that she had never seen. Cost loomed high as an obstacle. She applied to the Kettering foundation for a science scholarship—and received one that would cover half of a year of college expenses, but in the interest of economic use of funds the scholarship committee stipulated that she must attend a state-funded school in Ohio.
Was God now leading in some other direction? Had God through circumstances closed the door to her first choice and opened the door to an even better way? Why this continued nagging pull toward a school she’d never even seen? Age eighteen is young to make such important decisions, but Carolyn reviewed her research, her motives, her thoughts—and she prayed. Two weeks before classes were to begin, she told her employer that she hoped to work for another year before going to school in order to earn funds. Then she wrote a letter to Wheaton postponing her entrance for one year and (dreading the pain of dropping the letter into the mailbox) left it standing on her dresser for a few days. Was she foolish to turn down a university education due to begin in two weeks, in exchange for a (possible) education at Wheaton now more than a year away? Was this God’s guidance or personal foolishness? Hard to say—at the time.
In the few days that the postponement letter to Wheaton rested on her dresser, the representative from the scholarship called. “Was she set to go to school? Where should he send the payment?” Carolyn expressed her thanks and apologies, and told him of her resolve to go to Wheaton later. He said, “Wait, let me see what I can do.” Two weeks later she was on a train to Wheaton, her grandfather’s trunk packed with school necessities, scholarship in hand.
It was a small decision—really. Thousands of eighteen-year-olds make a similar decision every year. Only with hindsight, can Carolyn see how God-guided was that whole process. From her God-given intelligence, to the example of her hardworking family, to the advice of her Christian teacher, to her library research, to the kindness of a scholarship representative, to the considered reasoning about the kind of person that she wanted to become, to the nudging inner pull to a place she’d never been—God guided it all. The impact of that decision was momentous. But that’s another story.