Reflections On A Career

TUES., OCT. 12, 1999, 5:06 PM
OFFICE, PULLIAM

Your “time to talk” to the ESG group doesn’t come for another month, and you’ll only have 15 minutes, but you might as well hear Me, Holy Spirit, now, for you will need help in selecting what to mention… and what to emphasize. Yours has been an interesting and fruitful career. If you were asked how you would “do it differently” you would be hard-pressed to say how it could have been better.

Was I guiding you, even in those early years when you had no evidence that I was involved? In relation to your career, I did have a part in your meeting and being hired by John Fox. I wanted you to have experience in a Christian school, also one in which you could coach and also have classroom teaching experience. And, as I’ve told you, I wanted you and Lenore together in this life, so I had to be involved in her interview and her decision, also. I didn’t initiate your first meeting, at the Lurline, but I liked the way that worked out.

I didn’t arrange the relationship between Lenore and Ballard, but I liked how it affected you. It gave you a chance to experience several years of coaching, which was your “love” in those early years…and… it made you compete for her in a way that was good for both of you. You still have some of that “competitive spirit,” but it is fading, as it should.

You should also appreciate that during those first years at Punahou the “tradition” of moving on to the doctoral program at Stanford was developing. So I just let it “work on you,” and you reacted as I was sure you would. You competed, in another way, and won a place in that program, preparing yourself in a good field for you, and for the future that I envisioned for you.

The return to Punahou was, again, a decision that I liked and that I “used.” You got your football championship, you had senior high teaching in appropriate courses for you (designed by you), and you had a year as a Dean. After two years, with these experiences, emotional and professional, you were invited back to Stanford. As I’ve told you, that was not where you to be for your career, but you had eight fine years there, in “preparation” for the eventual move here.

During that time there, in those early 60’s, you had your first “born again” experience, with credit to both John’s Gospel and Paul’s Letter to the Romans. You began to see how your personal, spiritual life could come closer to your professional career. I “helped” you into the alcohol studies field, which made clearer ways in which spirit was a dimension of health. And, remember, you first went to Yale on a scholarship from the United Presbyterian Church.

It soon was time for you to again relocate, and Lenore’s early life in a rural community helped in the selection of this University and this town. It was a relatively new department, and your presence “rounded out” the faculty in a positive way in those late 1960’s. Though it seemed long to you at the time, you soon were tenured and then were a full professor. Now you had ultimate freedom to see health in an holistic way and teach to this concept.

Your courses in International Health, Death Education, and Environmental Dimensions… gave you opportunities to introduce and emphasize the spiritual. The move to the Farm, with classes out there, and Peter’s death were, again, occurrences that I encouraged or “used” to influence your further development as a spiritual person who had the privilege of teaching toward spiritual health, directly and indirectly… in the life you shared with students. (Even your homebrew was a minor factor, important for a few.)

One aspect of reality is that your career ended at the end of the summer of 1997. No more classes… no more big office… But I preferred that you continue, as Emeritus, to have an influence on your student group, so here you are, in a comfortable small office, having some opportunities to retain an influence here. You earned the right to speak of spirit as a part of health, even as I helped, in some unheralded ways.