An Autobiographical digression

It had to be the story of Jonah and Nineveh - "God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it." Most take this as a story of God's compassion, of God's undying love for God's creation and a willingness to forgive if people will only repent and return to right relationship with God.

I'm having a very difficult time with today's prompt. I'm sure there are many things I have changed my mind about, many things I have wished others would have changed their minds about, but faced with the prompt I can think of no specifics, and I think the best writing (fact or fiction) is often found in the specifics - the way details are chronicled such that one cannot help but related to them. Are not our minds always changing? So right now, at least, it's a slog for me.

Confession time: I hold a Master of Divinity degree. I had thought, at one point, that I wanted to be a pastor, until I - huh, there it is - until I changed my mind! I had had a mystic experience my junior year of college; something I've never really told many people about. It was the mid-1980's, well before cell phones and Google maps, and I had a few weeks between studying at the Goethe Institute in Brehmen over the Summer and matriculating into Albert Ludwigs Universitaet, Freiburg im Breisgau in the Fall, so I chose to take the train from Brehmen to Koblenz, and then ride my bicycle along the Rhine river south to Mainz. I hand't really planned things out - I just set out with a few essentials, my camera, and a guide book and figured I'd ride as long as I felt like riding, stop along the way when I felt like it, and find hopefully find a hostel to sleep in at night, or else I'd camp out. One evening as the sun was beginning to set, I knew I was getting close to a hostel but wasn't exactly certain where it was. I left the road and started pushing my bicycle up the hillside through a vineyard toward where I thought I should be going when I was surprised to find a small clearing in the vineyard, with tiny stone chapel, open on one side with a stained glass window set into the far wall above a granite platform providing just enough room for one or maybe two people to kneel. Overcome with emotion, I dropped my bike and knelt in prayer, at which point I though I heard God calling me to go to seminary.

Here I will insert a caveat: I was raised Roman Catholic. So Seminary, to my 20-year-old self, meant becoming a priest. And becoming a Catholic priest would have meant a lifetime of abstainence. While I had not had a lot of relationship, I was not a virgin and I knew I really did not want to give up sex for life! But this chapel experience was, if not transformative, at least instructive. Fast forward to my return to California and my senior year of college, and the head of the theater department calls me and asks to meet with me. I had been very active in theater my freshman and sophomore years, originally thinking I wanted to pursue a career as an actor, so I figured maybe he wanted to talk with me about an upcoming show or something, but as it turns out he just wanted to reconnect with me, find out how my year abroad had been, and ask what I was thinking about for my future. When I told him I had a vague notion about going to Seminary, but hadn't really begun any research he surprised me be telling me he was an ordained Baptist minister! That year he helped guide me through my research into schools, held me accountable through the application process, and celebrated with me when I was accepted at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.

And so it was that I went straight from college to graduate school - for so I would come to realize (at least for myself): seminary is just graduate-level academics, the subject of which happens to be theology. And I was good at it! I had ended up graduating college with a double major in English Literature and German Language, and I found the skills I had built in my undergraduate years translated quite well into studying and writitng about theology. Now at the risk of leaving out a number of details and many other stories, I'll fast-forward seven - I think it was about seven - years. It was that long because I had run out of money and had to start working full time, so was now back at school only part time. And I was facing an exam in Church History that I felt wholly under-prepared to sit for. Sure I was good at writing creative and interesting theological papers, but history was another thing altogether. So I'm standing outside on the balcony waiting for the classroom where my exam would be to empty out, and I was beginning to panic, thinking..."I'm going to fail this exam...I am really not up for this and I'm going to fail this exam. What if I fail this exam??" and I heard a very distinct and gentle voice ask: "So?" "God??! What if I fail the class?" Again: "So?" "So??!! I mean, what if I fail out of seminary?" and again the voice answered me "So?" I was getting kind of angry at this point: "Whadda ya mean 'So?'???!!" I practically shouted inside my head. "So," said the voice, "everything will be OK. This is what you wanted for yourself, and that's fine. But when you are ready to hear what I have for you, come and ask me..."

I passed the exam, and the course, and ten years after I started, I graduated with a Master of Divinity degree that, when I finally did graduate, I knew I would likely never use professionally. Maybe I God changed my mind. Maybe I changed it myself. I can't completely say. But my mind was changed. And maybe that was when I began to find a real relationship with God, as God became less of an object for me to study and write about. Twenty-eight-plus years later I still don't have it all figured out - maybe even less so, but I had definitely changed my mind about a career in ministry, and that ended up being for the better in so many ways.

— Zachary