Many peoples shall come and say,
"Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD,
to the house of the God of Jacob;
that he may teach us his ways
and that we may walk in his paths.”
–– Isaiah 2:3
I left Ol’ Mizzou with a business degree and a transcript that couldn’t impress the teenager hiring busboys at Waffle House. I don’t care if you can’t decipher a balance sheet. I only care if you can balance six plates on a tray! Yet, in six weeks I’d be parsing Greek verbs within the gargoyle protected walls of Union Seminary pursuing a Doctor of Ministry degree. You’ll never convince me that God doesn’t do sarcasm.
I still hold the distinct memory of the anxiety rush I felt when opening the orientation catalogue that arrived in the mail. The crimson colored booklet was neither large nor heavy, but my hands were shaking and my fingers were fumbling as I turned each page, increasingly whelmed with the sense that they were insane to admit me, and I was loopy to hope I could keep up with my classmates. Even the faculty photos freaked me out, all outfitted in tweed, nary a hint of smile, enough letters after their names to play scrabble with, publications whose titles required a PhD to decipher. At Mizzou, I could hide amidst a class of 500, but here, there would at most be twenty-five sitting around the table. What am I doing here, and God, what were you thinking? Among our first classes was a seminar on speed reading, and even my mom could have pointed out the futility of that effort for me. In those earliest days of Greek school, we were taking a break between the morning and afternoon sessions, and I happened to walk by a classmate kicked back in a lawn chair reading from … Calvin’s Institutes! Are you kidding me? During a break? To what universe had I been deported.
Mysteriously, I survived the summer, and somehow, I made it through the next four years, a result attributable only to God’s grace, because it wasn’t talent or brains that got me through to commencement. However, when I read Isaiah’s words of hope and encouragement –– "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways” –– I recall, with thanksgiving and a smile, the heady, galvanizing journey shared with a true menagerie of peers, who equally baffled by their calling to a place named church, kept walking toward it.
Sometimes we are drawn to a path we had little to no prior thought of choosing, and though those first steps are marked with trepidation, we later discover it was the only path worth choosing. There are shepherds, wise men, a cast of Marys, and a cloud of witnesses who would say the same thing. This is a season to ponder the paths we have taken, and ask if they are the paths to which we are called by God. "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.”
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