As a preteen, I picked up a pen pal from Ghana. She told me how she was trying to save money for college. “We don’t go to college unless we have a purpose for it,” I remember writing back. We being conservative Mennonites and purpose being a vital occupation like a doctor or a nurse.
I don’t remember that anyone told me this. I picked it up from observation and a general sense that shimmered in the air, along with anecdotes from articles and sermons about the college educated man who was unable with his jaded eyes and razor words to break the faith of a simple Christian.
Sometime after high school this changed. I wanted to write; I burned with longing to expand my mind; I wanted to know things. But writing didn’t meet my inner criteria of a vital occupation, and you didn’t need a degree for it, anyway. Spending money on a wonder or whim would be frivolous, perhaps dangerous. And people were dying in Africa.
God, teach me to write, I remember praying at this season of my life. I had given up college for him. And while more sophisticated readers may smile sardonically, I sincerely believe he honored that prayer.
But the longing still simmered. I didn’t completely know why. Was it a pure desire for learning? Or did I merely want to rise in the world, to prove my intellectual mettle? I had always been good in school, and among people who think and conceptualize, I knew I could shine.
At twenty-four I audited a creative writing class at our local university, an hour’s drive from my small town in rural Wisconsin. Audited, because paying full price to get academic credit for a class I did not need would be frivolous.
I loved that class. Worlds opened to me. Words expanded like fireworks over my head. And what was most intoxicating—heady, like sipping clear water from Ponce de Leon’s fountain of youth—was the freedom of it, the atmosphere of discovery and question.
Always before I had been in an atmosphere where every question had a predetermined answer. Yes, one could ask questions and wrestle with God—this was a part of being human—but it only thinly veiled the fact that there were a “right” set of answers, a right trajectory for any human quest to take. After monsters, snakes, and brushes with evil witch ladies, the cup would be found in the place you had always known it to be.
When the solution is predetermined, the quest feels…may I say boring?
As much as I loved that class, it brought me to a crisis of faith perhaps not so different than the anecdotes I had heard. I had never rubbed shoulders closely with non-Christians, or even non-Mennonites, and I began to question everything I had ever learned about God and the Bible. I came out dizzy but with faith intact, but I still longed, more than ever now that I had tasted, for the wide-open questing portal that is college.
Eventually I did return to college, first to Sattler, a college in Boston that aligned well with Anabaptist teaching while still giving my mind room to stretch like a cat and curl its tail around ancient knowledge and new thought. And after marriage, to Lancaster Bible College, a practical choice that allowed me to complete my degree online. I would still like to get my master’s someday.
For now, I am on the other side of the equation. On the brink of homeschooling, with my oldest in kindergarten and many plans in my head about what I want to teach both my children. I find that I love educating—particularly when it’s educating my own children—as much as I ever loved learning.
Why do I want to teach my children? The answer feels purer and simpler.
I want their minds to expand, to wonder, to soak in some of the breadth and height of the universe. I want them to be capable of pursuing their interests and dreams. I want them to have resources and tools to contribute to the cause of humanity. I want them to understand a little bit of the magnitude of God. I want them to gain a worldview that makes sense, that is like bedrock to a questing mind.
Like my parents before me, I will try to give them the answers I have wrested from hard baked soil, the golden flakes of my quest—the grail still lies ahead. And like their parents before them, they will question and surge, choose this way or that, ultimately be influenced more by love than by reason, and come up someplace that I must trust God to lead them.
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This post was published first in Anabaptist World. Photo by Mahwish Ahmar on Unsplash.
I know exactly what you are saying. But it wasn’t the getting out “in the world” at college that caused a faith crisis for me. My husband and I spent 25 years in a non-denominational church that had very similar beliefs (with a few exceptions) to what I had internalized growing up Mennonite. It was after our church hired a minister that preached “Calvinism” that it blew my faith wide open. I realized that this is what most of the seminaries now taught and pushed and the evangelical church as a whole had started moving into incorporating it into their belief system. Anyone remember the book by Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology. So what was the problem? They took the Bible and changed the meaning of words so they could make the Bible fit into a “Systematic Belief” system. They pushed the idea that everything is pre-determined, even ones salvation. That is when I began to question everything I had ever been taught and I have never really recovered a faith that I can truly say I am grounded in. So maybe, you do need to stay in the lane you grew up in. That way you can blindly and comfortably go through life. At the least, if you look closely at the beliefs you have been taught, be prepared to go through struggle and chaos trying to determine just how much of your belief system is actually Biblical and how much is man made.
I so identify with this. There are so many lanes one can “drive” in, and for me, if I look at any one closely and try to understand it, I can usually at least see where they’re coming from…which in turn makes me question my own understanding. Who could possibly have enough intelligence or enough spiritual insight to get it all right? I don’t even make that my goal anymore. Something my dad told me when I was young and screaming for answers that made SENSE helped me a lot. “I don’t know,” he said once, when I was demanding an explanation, and that helped me so much more than any answer he could have given me. I began to realize I don’t need to know everything, that not knowing is okay.
From all my doubts, there are two beliefs–they feel like deep knowing–I’ve come away with. 1. There is a God. By God, I mean an all-powerful Creator who knows his creation intimately. 2. God is good. Because life doesn’t make any sense whatsoever, and my own knowledge of good and evil makes no sense whatsoever, if God is not good.
A lot of the rest of my beliefs I hold in flux, meaning I might have some details wrong, and I am okay with that. It doesn’t prevent me from choosing a path and walking in it, which is necessary to live well.
I have recently started listening to Bema podcast, and I am so EXCITED about what I am learning and the deeper understanding of the Bible I am already gaining. The hosts aim to study the Bible from the Hebrew/Jewish way of thinking, and one of the things they emphasize is LOOKING for problems and things that don’t make sense in the text, that these things then lead us to a much deeper understanding than just turning over the right rocks for a predetermined solution. I really really love what I am hearing so far. Start with the introductory Episode 0 and Episode 1 on Genesis 1, called “Trust the Story.” I just really recommend it for anyone who cannot stop questioning things and who can never quite make all the answers line up. It will give you such a sense of freedom, like maybe it’s okay to question, and maybe questions can be a part of a deeper faith.
Your quest is admirable and perhaps the best education is the efforts you are doing with your children and others in the community. I have enjoyed your books and hope you continue exploring and serving the God you love and honor. Blessings!
Thank you so much Melodie. And I get what you are saying! There is so much we learn from what we DO in life, probably more than we could ever learn in school. I am involved in writing creative writing curriculum for Christian Light, and I have often thought this is one means God is using to teach ME how to write. Because trying to put concepts into simple and succinct language and editing and re-editing the material really forces you to absorb it!