Day 53 – When is it time to grow up?
I grew up in Greenville, NC as I have talked about several times before. That being the case, from the first grade until I graduated from college at East Carolina University, I was in the same town. Mama remarried my freshman year in college and moved to northern Kentucky with my new stepfather Swede Nixon, so all family was gone. I was in the football dorm with the team and totally absorbed into campus life so it really didn’t feel like the same town.
I remember one spring, when I was younger, I was riding with Mama down 10th street and we drove by the ECU campus. I could see all the students getting ready to graduate and for some strange reason, that’s when it hit me that soon, in 6 or 7 years, I would be graduating from college and then what would I do?!?
Perhaps in the dark and foggy regions of my brain I had the thought that Daddy never made it after he graduated from ECU, what if I can’t make it.
Yes, you could say that the thought was totally illogical because I wasn’t him, and I would make better choices, and I had more drive, and whatever else would come to mind…BUT the thought still haunted me.
Fast forward, I am walking out of the Psych Building at ECU after having taken my last exam in college. I sit down on the front steps of the building, that fresh pleasant spring morning, which was always so nice in Greenville. I could smell the honeysuckle in the air and see the brightly colored azaleas blooming everywhere. After a minute of reflection, I said to myself “That’s it, I finished.” I wasn’t afraid at that point because I had a plan, at least I thought I knew where my future was headed. My next step was to go into the ministry and be ordained. The real process took many turns, with a few bumps along the way, so let me do a quick recap.
My freshman year in college, I didn’t think about anything but playing football and going to class…in that order. Midway through my sophomore year, I had those experiences with God that I shared about on Day 37 – Finding God. So now, I was just into the excitement of the moment with God, football and just enough classes to get by.
By my junior year (they didn’t have “red-shirts” at ECU for football players back in the day, so it was 4 years and done) I was starting to think about how I could combine God, football, and a job to support myself. I was a Geography major and a psychology minor so my thinking was that I would teach Geography in high school and be a high school football coach. Then I thought about just being a high school guidance counselor and coaching football and that sounded better.
This meant that I would need to do my student teaching in the spring of my senior year to be able to have a “Bachelor of Science” degree. As that time approached, football was done and I was living in the home by the campus with my friends and fully into the work of the ministry we were doing, that I talked about on Day 39 – Lum’s and other cool places to hang out. If I did my student teaching, I would probably have to move out of the home and be gone all day in another city.
This was not an option for me, so I decided to switch to a “Bachelor of Arts” degree which was a non-teaching degree. I would skip the high school teacher/coach concept and go full-time into the ministry. Of course, I did this on my own without talking to anyone in my Geography department because I figured this is what I wanted so that’s what I will do.
The policy at East Carolina was to have a meeting with your department head just before graduation your senior year. I showed up for the meeting and it was going well, until the head of the geography department looked at my transcript and said, “Wait a minute, we don’t offer a BA in Geography with a Psychology minor, only a BS degree. Apparently, I had slipped through the cracks, and this was a dilemma. I didn’t see it that way because I was done, they had to fix something because I was going to graduate.
I’m not sure what happened, but by the grace of God, a few weeks later I got my “Bachelors of Arts” degree, and I was out of there. I went on to get my Theology degree and my ordination and have never looked back.
To answer the question I started with, “When is it time to grow up?” I would say that depends on your definition of “growing up”.
I love the quote by George Elliot, “It is never too late to be who you might have been”. At 72 I’m still growing up, shifting, and changing and I plan to do this for the rest of my life. I still have dreams and desires I want to accomplish and just like that time when I met with the department head…never tell me what I can’t have or can’t do, because I am on a journey, and nothing will stop me.
Recent Comments