Chapter 7: The Waiting Game – Studying, Setbacks, and the Countdown
In my life, there have been four major things that I dove into “head first”. The first was joining the Marine Corps. I decided on September 24, 2011 while buying a pair of hiking boots at a surplus store that I needed to join the Corps, so I did. The second was marrying Rachel, although this wasn’t spur of the moment in the sense that we didn’t know each other (we had been friends for years prior to getting engaged), our first date was our engagement, and we were married 5 months later. The third was going to flight school. I came home from a training I was attending prior to my second deployment to Iraq and, after having worked with a lot of pilots in the course, I decided I was going to become one of them. And the decision to drop out of flight school, which I recognized on March 26, 2022, as I have detailed in earlier chapters.
Rachel and I on our first date (and engagement) on June 30, 2013 in San Diego, California
Does this make me impulsive? Certainly, I am not naïve about that fact. Although, those who know me know I am meticulous in planning just about everything else in my life, making these decisions more the anomaly than the norm. Would I encourage anyone to make such major decisions “on a whim” in their lives? Definitely not, although I certainly can understand the conviction someone may feel to jump into something and, if there is no convincing them otherwise (and the task they are jumping into is noble/God pleasing), I would support them.
I wanted to establish this because, as I drove home from my visit with Chaplain Holland, I realized the point I was hitting in this whole process: the waiting game. With all four of these major decisions, they involved a whole lot of excitement and activity up front, then what felt forever like waiting. March 26 – 31st of 2022 were those exciting days for me, as you have seen by my need to write 6 chapters to cover as much of the events as possible (and that required withholding many sub-stories and rabbit holes that didn’t make the cut). I still had the command interviews to do and the tests to study for and recruiters to call, but the events began to space themselves out a bit further.
I spent Thursday afternoon and Friday calling a couple of officer recruiter’s offices over and over again but never got any answers or call backs. Meanwhile, I had my first command exit interview with the Lieutenant Commander. He was much more sympathetic to my situation, informed me that he was also a Christian and was impressed at my willingness to follow a conviction in this way. He then sent me on my way with encouraging comments. I think the entire meeting took less than 5 minutes.
The first of my textbooks for passing the entry exams arrived on Friday afternoon. I decided to allow that to become my focus, in order to keep me from dwelling too much on the answers I wasn’t getting. Over the course of the next week and a half, I read 1,500 pages of textbooks spending most of my time sitting at the edge of the water at the beach on the Naval Air Station Pensacola. There were a few awesome qualities about this beach. For starters, it wasn’t public access. I rarely encountered any other people during the times that I was there, and the scenery was beautiful. Another awesome thing was: it is the beach the Blue Angels train over. I got to watch them practicing on Tuesdays and Thursdays which, if you have never had the opportunity to see, it is quite breath taking (especially when the scenery around is also beautiful).
My typical study spot on the beach in Pensacola as I prepared for my Seminary entry exams
Throughout this week, there was a lull in my emotional state of being. I was not feeling anxious as things were moving forward as they should, although I was having the darndest time getting ahold of a recruiter that would work with me. The few that I talked to pawned me off to others and none would give me a straight answer about anything (or really tried to understand my situation as I described it to them). As I reflect back on the situation, I am thankful that I failed the tests on my first try. Having so much to study in so little time really consumed all of my thoughts and kept me from focusing on the thousands of unknowns that still surrounded me.
I passed all of my entry exams on my second attempt except for the Old Testament exam, which I failed by one question. Thankfully, you get three tries at each. Pastor Kueker set me up to conduct a study-session with a tutor on the Old Testament and, after the session, I successfully passed that exam as well. I was grateful that, with the help of the textbooks and the tutor, I was able to take all three of my scores from 60’s to high 80’s on the exams in less than two weeks of studying. I saw a clear answer to prayer in that, although I will admit I hadn’t been too anxious that I wouldn’t pass them after studying.
As I was conducting my studying, I was also checking out of flight school and completing my command interviews. I cannot say enough about how wonderful the command was. Every person I talked to was encouraging and excited for me to pursue the seminary. Aside from the initial interview I had with my Lieutenant, I was met with absolutely no opposition from the command. In fact, most of my officers (including the Captain who was the Commanding Officer of flight school) shared with me that my willingness to do this was also an encouragement for their faith. I felt blessed that God would use me in this way.
When you drop out of flight school, you are placed into a section for redesignation. The entire goal of this section is to help officers find a job that will suit them well in the Navy, rather than being a pilot. They make it very clear that the Navy is not interested in having officers who are apathetic or hate their job, so they have a lot of programs in place to help you figure out how you want to proceed. Because everyone in the group is in a similar position: they are walking away from something they had been working toward for a long time, it causes you to form a pretty tight bond with each other.
The command was very intentional about not shaming or looking down on those who dropped out of flight school, either because they decided it wasn’t what they thought it would be, or because they failed the training. Thus, the redesignation section was a very relaxed section to be in. We met a couple of times a week for a training or class, but otherwise we were free to our own devices.
Still, even with it being relaxed, there were deadlines to meet. Every month a redesignation board met which was essentially the “officer draft”. Everyone in redesignation needed to submit their packet to the board of the career field they wanted to transition into, along with their resume and justification as to why they would be good for that field. Then, the heads of those career fields would pick the officers they wanted based on the quotas they had. Every prior flight school student would submit their top three jobs in hopes that they would be able to go into the field they wanted.
At the same time, there were “On the Job Training” (OJT) opportunities offered where a student leaving flight school could go “try out a job” by working at a different unit for a month or two before submitting a packet for the redesignation board. These OJTs were great opportunities to make some contacts in the field you were hoping to get into, so you could leverage them when you submitted for the board. Typically, those who conducted OJT before the board would get the field they hoped to be in.
Up to this point in the blog, I have tried to avoid getting too technical with military systems because, up to this point, there was not a need to understand them. However, both the redesignation board and the OJT program played a critical role in how God orchestrated my transition to seminary. In fact, one of the clearest moments that I saw God’s hand working in my situation came shortly after a conversation with my new Lieutenant, who ran the redesignation section.
As I conducted my initial interview with her she confirmed that what I was doing was a first. However, she let me know that I was now reaching a point where the “rubber meets the road”. Her job was to make sure everyone in her command was placed into a new job, which meant anyone refraining from submitting to the redesignation board needed to either be establishing or on an OJT experience.
“Ensign Simmons, I can appreciate your situation and will do everything I can to accommodate it, but the Chaplaincy is not an option for the redesignation board. Submissions for the May board are due next week and, if I don’t have word from the Chaplaincy Program manager by then, you’ll need to submit your packet for redesignation into a different job.” She informed me. “I wish I could give you more time, but that’s the way things work here.” All of the anticipation and anxiety about the dead-end that was the officer recruiters slammed into me at that moment. I had a week to not only start a dialogue, but also to convince them to contact my command and assure them what I was trying to do was possible and the biggest problem of it all was: I still had no idea if it was even possible…
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