Chapter 9: Orders to Seminary — An Unimaginable Offer
Martin Luther established three things that make for a good theologian: Oratio, Meditatio, and Tentatio. These three Latin words, in English, mean “prayer, meditation [on God’s Word], and intense spiritual suffering.” We may find it rather interesting that “intense spiritual suffering” would be on the list of things that he credits as being essential for theological formation. During the first semester of seminary, you discuss these three elements in great length and, applying them to my situation, I began to get a slight picture as to what Luther was meaning by this.
Make no mistake, I am not trying to say my situation was one of “intense spiritual suffering” compared to what many Christians have experienced in their lives when facing persecution or other tragedies. However, it was certainly the most “on a limb” I have ever been in my entire life, as I truly went each day not knowing what tomorrow would hold and had very little control over the way anything occurred. Still, Lieutenant Commander Burleson’s call that morning serves to be one of the defining moments for my life, even now. It put things into perspective for me: yes, we have to work hard and yes we need to “pull our weight” when it comes to the tasks set before us each day, but God is far more in control of everything in our lives than we will ever give Him credit for. I use this as a comfort now when facing uncertainty. I think “well, God got me through that alright, He can certainly get me through __________.” This experience has helped shape the way I understand God’s interaction with us, and my ability to have more confidence in the face of the unknown things in my life. After all, it is certainly true what the Proverb says:
“The heart of man plans his way, but the Lord establishes his steps.” – Proverbs 16:9
Anyway, my command had accepted Lieutenant Commander Burleson’s phone call and promptly withdrew me from the May board. This marked a key moment in this journey: a critical question was answered: Is this even possible? The answer was a definite yes. I now had to face the question: what does the timeframe look like? It was the beginning of May, and I only had one month before I’d need to have my move arranged and begin packing if we were going to make it to the Seminary for Summer Greek.
Lieutenant Commander Burleson, Lieutenant Commander Byrd, and I got together the week after he called for an in-person lunch. They expressed their joy at my desire to pursue this lateral move and assured me that, even if God was not calling me into the Chaplaincy, they were happy to help someone follow an internal call into the pastoral office. He told me the way forward would be one that would be trial and error as, to his knowledge, nobody had before attempted to do something like this. That being said, he was confident that it would be possible once we got the right backing from the command, which he assured me he would procure.
After lunch, I had a way forward (and a whole ton of paperwork to fill out). As with all the other hurdles, I could close the book on this one and now begin to prepare for the next: how do I get to Seminary? I will fully admit, by this point I was building a lot more confidence that God’s Will was for me to be at seminary that year. I figured, He had plenty of opportunities to close the door on the whole thing and yet He hadn’t done so yet. This gave me a bit less tentatio [Spiritual suffering] and far more peace of mind. I let myself relax for the weekend (aside from completing my paperwork) and decided to attack the next problem first thing Monday Morning…
I had a fresh outlook on the world as I walked into the redesignation office on Monday morning. My Lieutenant was excited for me, that I was able to start making headway and let me know she would support whatever I needed to make sure all the paperwork gets through. As we were discussing the next steps, Lieutenant Junior Grade Spreng, the second in command of the redesignation section, posed an idea.
“You know, we give 6 month temporary duty orders to people in redesignation in order to allow them to go to some OJT [On the Job Training] opportunities for career development… going to seminary would be developing your career… maybe we could just give you these temporary orders for you to go to seminary while your paperwork gets ironed out…” His statement was one that was clearly just him thinking out loud, but it was obvious that he couldn’t come up with any logical reason this wouldn’t work.
“Could that work?” I asked, “An OJT normally means I’d be connected to a command… at seminary there isn’t really a military presence I could interact with.”
“I mean, you’d be working with your recruiter there and, as long as you kept up with your paperwork and answered your phone whenever we needed you for something, I don’t really see why we couldn’t send you there.” My Lieutenant chipped in.
I was blown away. Never in my military career had I imagined I’d be offered orders to go to a private college and study to become a pastor while on active duty. Not just this, but I hadn’t even been the one to propose the idea. In fact, I would not have even considered asking for something so bold. To put this in non-military terms: this would be the equivalent of your full-time job offering for you to move away from the company while receiving full pay and benefits in order to further your education while they have full knowledge that you have no obligation to ever return to the company.
“I just want to clarify, are you offering that this is something I can do, or are we just bouncing ideas at the moment?” I asked. I needed to make sure I wasn’t going to get my hopes up only for this to be backed out of, last minute.
“Honestly,” started my Lieutenant, “I’m completely fine with it. I don’t see any reason why we can’t make this happen.”
I was speechless. How could this even be possible? I thought to myself. In all of my various predicted outcomes that would end with me at seminary in June, I never once thought this would be the way I would get there.
After a rather extended pause, I asked my Lieutenant if she would be okay with me detailing all of this in an email and sending it to her, to ensure I had a record that there was no deception as to what I was doing. I didn’t want to risk there being any chance that, somewhere down the road, the command would accuse me of inventing a fake OJT and going AWOL [Absent With-Out Leave]. She thought that was a great idea and agreed to send me my temporary duty orders as a response to my email.
I walked out of her office still in awe. Four days earlier, I was hours away from ending up in some random career field in the Navy and now I not only had a path out of the Navy, but I also had a way to get to Seminary in time for Summer Greek. The craziest thing about it all was: the only part of it that I really played a role in was dropping out of flight school. Everything else literally fell in my lap (obviously, by the work of God). The cherry on top was that, at least for the first few months of my transition, I was now going to have a paycheck and insurance.
With my largest hurdles behind me, I now proceeded to knock out all of the administrative things I needed to do before transitioning to seminary. Medical exams, checking out of the unit, and perhaps the biggest thing of all: planning a move…
Note: I hope that, at this point in the story, you can see how clearly God showed His hand as I went through this process. While I am winding this story down, there are still a few more key moments that happened in extraordinary timing. I anticipate that I have 2-3 more chapters of this left to write to fully cover everything that occurred. I want to sincerely thank all of you for following along up to this point, and for the wonderful encouragement many of you have given me to continue chronicling these events. I pray this will help encourage you to continue to look to God as your source for all things. If you would like to keep up to date with these articles as I release them, please consider subscribing below!
