Asking God for Guidance
In early June 2023, the university president where I worked called me to his office. His call came a few days before I left to participate in a week-long Advanced Placement Reading event. The president did not inform me why he wanted to see me, but I was confident he wanted to discuss an upcoming accreditation visit.
For colleges and universities, successful accreditation visits are vital to keeping campus doors open because accreditation agencies control whether the campus can receive federal grants and loans, referred to as Title IV funding. Accreditation visits require all campus offices to successfully meet a multitude of standards accrediting bodies are responsible for ensuring.
At my university, I led the office primarily responsible for consolidating input from the campus offices into one large document the accrediting body would use to determine if our campus would maintain accreditation or not. In our university’s previous 2018 accreditation visit, I had established a consolidation and editing system that resulted in our campus meeting all standards for the first time. Our campus was using the same system to prepare for the 2023 visit, and because of the visit’s importance, I was confident the president wanted to discuss how our consolidation and editing efforts were doing.
To my surprise, the president did not ask me about the accreditation visit. Instead, he asked me if I liked my job. He told me that during his prayer time, God had brought me to his attention, and he wanted to hear from me why God was pointing me out in his prayers.
I told him that I did not like my job. Adding to my response, I acknowledged my role at the university was important and that I would perform my duties so we would have another successful accreditation visit.
The president asked me what role I would prefer to have. When I told him that I did not know, he asked me to pray about what role God wanted me to have. I told him that I would and that I would let him know once God had given me an answer.
A few days later, I flew to Tampa Bay, Florida to participate in the Advance Placement Reading event, where I scored 1,200 essays. The essays were handwritten by high school students who were hoping to test out of college composition courses. My experience and status as an English Professor allowed me to participate in the event. This was my first time as an Advanced Placement scorer, and I was excited about the experience.
Scoring about 200 essays per day forced me to use most of my cognitive faculties for eight hours each day. The benefit of such intense cognitive focus was the dreaming portion of my brain was left unguarded. Simultaneously, my mind was doing two things: scoring essays and dreaming. The fleeting thoughts normally drowned out by competing daily concerns were running wild, and I was aware of them.
Those fleeting thoughts were God’s responses to the prayers my university’s president had asked me to conduct. For hours each day, I scored essays and listened to God simultaneously. Attending the Advanced Placement event in Tampa Bay allowed me to hear God tell me what my spiritual gifts were and how He wanted me to use those gifts. For more on How Discipled Warriors Got Started, see the Hearing from God blog for a discussion on the gifts and what God wanted me to do with those gifts.