On tornadoes, car wrecks, and finishing my PhD

Graduation (or quarantine) offers a good time to reflect on the past. As the saying goes, it marks the ending of one era and the “commencing” of the new. Although my PhD commencement is postponed to a date that is TBD, my thoughts and feelings are still mixed like every other graduate in every other context.



Why write this piece now, instead of after May 9 when my degree posts? Because this week I turned in my defended, revised, formatted, 212-page dissertation. Due to Coronavirus restrictions, I am not sure when my professors will be able to sign the signature page and then I’ll upload it to the ProQuest Dissertation database. I hope it will be soon. For the glass-is-half-empty guy in me, that means I’ve finished 99% of the work but can’t yet finish the 1%. But I’d prefer the glass-is-half full approach. I’d prefer to focus on the blessings. Let me explain why.



I celebrated Christmas 1989 paralyzed in the hospital. At four years old, a car accident on a black ice-filled Michigan highway left doctors questioning if I’d ever walk or talk again, let alone learn in a “normal” classroom with kids my age. After a few months in a wheelchair and afternoon medical rehab, I slowly relearned balance while quivering atop a balance beam and being told to enunciate words as I voiced them. My extraordinary recovery was, according to the papers, nothing short of miraculous.



God broke into my life loudly after that period. I met Jesus and vowed to follow him forever. It goes without saying that it is the best thing that has ever happened to me.



Interestingly, this is not the first time I’ve graduated somewhere and strange, life-changing events occurred. On February 5, 2008, during my last semester at Union University, an F-4 tornado ripped apart our campus in a split-second whoosh. With a strength I can only categorize as from God, I went into crisis mode and helped lead fellow students out of crumbling dorms and around downed telephone wires. Hundreds of thousands of dollars damage. Thousands of lives changed. Zero lives lost. A week later, I went back to student teaching but knew I’d never be the same.

May 2008. Bachelor of Arts in History. Union University.

October 5, 2012 was the day Jessica and I landed in Bucharest. Naively thinking I knew what to do as a missionary, I look back on those first few months and either roll my eyes or (if I’m by myself) give myself a literal facepalm. Jessica and I were basically newlyweds, having been married about a year and a half. Praise God that, in early December 2012, our supervisors introduced us to Beni and Anda Mogos, with whom we’ve served at Biserica Crestina Baptista Agapia for almost eight years. I graduated in December 2012 with my second seminary degree, a Masters in Theology.

Graduation December 2011, Masters of Divinity from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary

Finishing my PhD in this odd season, then, does not disappoint me. The oddity and ups and downs has a sort of emotional familiarity. True, it is unfortunate that I won’t don my graduation regalia, take photos with family and friends and profs, or spend a day at Disneyland (which we were planning as a surprise for our kids). But these are minor setbacks that will soon be remedied as postponement dates are announced. Six years of part-time PhD work at a top-notch Christian university, studying with some incredible scholars (in California, Switzerland, and Thailand) who pushed me to think and write and publish and teach for God’s glory, absolutely has been worth it.



And, for all this, I am thankful.

12:57

12:57 PM on Wednesday will mark four weeks since Sara set foot inside her grădiniță (preschool). That is a long time for a three-year-old. That is a long time for anybody. It is especially hard to look into her eyes and mutter truthfully, “No, I don’t know when you will go back to school.”



No doubt this experience is the same the world over. People use various terms to describe this period: strange, difficult, crisis, etc. So many unknowns. Certainty in uncertainty is a global reality. Red, yellow, black, and white.



Speaking from a spiritual standpoint, we’ve always known that life is fragile and fleeting and only God and his word never pass away. Like grass and flowers withering and falling, mankind lives grandly and dies. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.



Yet woe to the preacher who does not step down from the spiritual standpoint and enter the material realm. Fear and sickness and suffering and death should not be glossed over in the name of spirituality. God forbid.



So, we tell our daughter the truth. “There are sick people out there, Sara, and people we trust have told us to stay home.” Surprisingly, she gets it. As hard as it is, she gets it. “Daddy, let’s pray for the sick kids and sick grown-ups.” Indeed. Why didn’t I think of that?



Once there was a wise Romanian Baptist pastor whose prayers, it is said, launched a revival even in the height of Communism. In 1974, Liviu Olah wrote, “I’m convinced that what nuclear energy is to the material world, prayer is to the spiritual world.” I wonder if, for our day, “nuclear energy” may be substituted with “pandemic”?


The time has come when COVID-19 is not some distant disease in China. Many of us now know people personally battling the Coronavirus. As Sara and Liviu Olah have prompted me in recent days, let us pray. As our kids stare searchingly into our eyes, trusting that we know what to do, let us pray. As Johns Hopkins University reports climbing statistics toward a possible “peak,” let us pray. And, Lord willing, after this season passes, we will all be better for having disciplined ourselves to pray.