Might as well get started on that essay…
-Discuss the events, circumstances and persons in your life that have affected your faith and your sense of call. Describe how others have encouraged you to explore theological study and/or the possibility of a church vocation.
When I was six years old, my neighbor invited us over to bake cookies for the homeless. After we’d baked the cookies, she read us the Christmas story, which I had heard before. She then continued to the Easter story which I had not heard before and I heard for the first time about how Jesus died an innocent man for my sins. It did not really impact me that much at the time, but the story stayed in the back of my mind as I got older.
When I was ten, my friend Emily invited me to come to church camp with her. There, I heard about Jesus again and got to interact with other ten year-olds who were “on fire” for Jesus. I dedicated my life to Christ that week and then promptly ignored that move for another two years.
When I was twelve years old, my decision started weighing on me as I started pondering the thought that if all of this Bible stuff was really true, I really should start believing it. That was when I started to pray and read the Bible stories books that my Christian relatives had given me as a child.
When I started high school, severe depression hit and I began to really understand my need for God. It was during the last part of my freshman year that I seriously dedicated my life to Christ. My life did not get an easier, but I at least had help dealing with my life for a change.
While my neighbor might have led me to Jesus, the people who influenced my call to ministry the most were the leaders of my church college group and the chair of my independent major committee. Dane, Kathy, Joan, Gordon, and Laurie saw a need to provide support for the Christian students at my university and they formed a program that did just that. We would all go to church together on Sunday, eat lunch together at the church, and have Bible Study. Every Tuesday night, they would come up on campus and eat with us so that they could get to know us and meet our friends. Over the three years I spent at the university, we had long talks about school, family, and my depression as they were the ones who finally got me to seek treatment. Through my discussions with them, I started discerning that my possible career in medicine or pharmacy was not going to be about serving the Lord, but rather about serving myself. They emphasized the point that our work can be a ministry in itself and that started changing my direction of study. At that same time, I was engaging in Mark Study through my school’s chapter of Intervarsity, which was a manuscript study of the Gospel of Mark. I discovered that I really preferred Religion to Biology and soon shanged my major to Religious Studies.
Since my major was an independent one, I got to know the chair of my major committee very well. Cindy is a professor of History at UC Santa Cruz and she was my professor for Reformation Europe. She is very agnostic when it comes to religion, but she really endeavours to teach Christianity rightly to the point that she knows the New Testament very well. It was in her class that I did a paper on Luther and found my niche in Christianity. She wants her students to understand the viewpoint of the people that they study and writing her “first person account” papers challenged me to understand the mindset of the people I studied in her Reformation, Medieval, and Saints classes. During our advisory meetings, we would talk about religion and about how the Bible views women. She encouraged me to go on for further study and was highly pleased when I told her that I was feeling called to ordained ministry.
The circumstance that challenged my faith the most was definitely my adventures with depression. It started during my freshman year of high school and continued throughout. Part of its cause was the sexual harassment that I was subjected to through most of my high school years and part of it was genetic. When I reached college, my depression and the stress disorder left over from the harassment wreaked havoc in my friendships and relationships. My first year was marked by a lot of fear and illness because my body was under attack from so much. I could not understand why all of this was happening to me and I did not believe that I could be both Christian and depressed. During my second year of college, things reached a crescendo and my college fellowship leaders finally gave me the ultimatum that I would either have to seek treatment for my depression or withdraw from school. I chose to seek treatment and was blessed to get a referral to a Christian therapist who helped me to work through the issues from the harassment and re-author my ideas about depression and Christianity. During the two years that I was in therapy and on medication, I saw some amazing things done in my life. I started discerning things rather than assuming that God would bless whatever I wanted to do and I started reflecting on where God had been so that those times could serve as reminders of God’s presence with me through everything. I am out of therapy and off medication and I still look back on those two years as the time when the Lord turned my life around.
The event that probably impacted my call to ministry the most was Urbana, a missions conference that I attended in December 2000. Tewnty thousand college students, staff, and missionaries from all over the world descended on the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign for four days. It showed me the variety of ministries that existed and through my experiences at the conference, I discerned that God was calling me to ordained ministry. I had the chance to talk to seminary students and representatives from other seminaries and found that seminary was what I wanted my next step to be. I was a Bible study leader and I found that I loved working with God’s Word and helping to teach other people about it.
-Describe your family of origin and how it has shaped who you are.
My family of origin is a variety of religions. My dad’s side of the family is deoutly Irish-Catholic and my mother’s side ranges from Episcopalian to Baha’i. My parents themselves are not religious people and my dad is relatively anti-Christian. Despite their beliefs, they have been suprisingly supportive of my decision to become a Christian. Through living with them during my formative years as a Christian, I’ve learned to be tactful about how I express my faith and to quietly disagree with them though I respect their beliefs.
My mother is my hero and I am thankful to have gotten some of her tact and diplomacy as I’ve gotten over. My father gave me his temper, which I’ve learned to control and his analytical mind. The listening skills that I picked up from my mother go well with my father’s analytical mind and I can usually size up a situation quickly upon hearing some of the conversation present.
As far as shaping who I am, my parents have instilled a love of my Irish heritage in me and much of the way I see my faith is derived from Celtic Christianity. I was blessed to have parents who were very loving and who have been married for thirty years. Their example has shown me that marriage is meant to last and I look up to them and to my grandparents who have been married twice as long as examples of how marriage should be. They always supported me in whatever I did and it meant that I grew up having pride in myself and in my actions.
I have a twin brother who is quite the opposite from me but still one of my best friends. Sean and I discuss almost everything and our discussions have taught me how to present my case. As one aspiring to attend law school, Sean likes to debate and argue, so I learned quickly that I have to back up everything I say with something grounded in its source.