This is how it all started, innocently enough

“You should go to seminary.”  

This was my wife’s response to me when I shared with her some bit of Bible trivia I’d come across in a book I was reading.  Looking back, I don’t know that it was my wife speaking to me so much as it was God speaking to me through her.  This was fairly evident when she expressed such surprise that I’d taken her off-hand remark and spent most of the weekend researching seminaries in Oregon and what it might look like for me to attend.  

This initial flurry of activity turned out to be nothing more than that.  We looked at the cost, our budget and the season of life our family was in.  We decided that there was no way for me to attend seminary without taking out student loans, something my wife was loath to do given that we’d just paid off my grad school loans a few years ago.  I was disappointed.  Having been out of academia for 14 years--something I was originally planning on spending my whole life in--I was feeling a desire to return.  I had also been recently considering how I could be doing so much more for my church and God’s Kingdom with my gifts of teaching and knowledge.  God designed me to be a teacher, a researcher, an academic and I was currently doing little to nothing with these talents.  

So for the time being I put away dreams of going to seminary.  Still, every time I’d hear someone mention seminary or see an advertisement for one, I’d go back to my research notes, back to those web sites I’d visited before.  But then I’d remind myself that this wasn’t the proper season and I’d again push it to the back of my mind.  

I enjoy my current position at work--an administrative desk job with a flex schedule.  It is, though, a rotational position, meaning that I could rotate back to my original position which involves shift work, including nights and weekends.  It’s not that I’m “too good” for that, but I’ve done my fair share of those odd, life-interrupting schedules over the years and I’m thinking that I don’t care to do that again ever, if possible.  A temporary, two month reassignment back to my original position in early 2011 really confirmed for me that that kind of schedule is simply not conducive to what I want for me or my family.  

I needed a Plan B.