The Earring

Book 4 Part 2

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David drove the two hours to school once a week to spend a day in the library doing research and to confer with his committee chairman. Juggling school, family, and church provided more than adequate stimulation for the five semesters it took him to research and write a dissertation, defend it, and find his way down the aisle to the tune of Pomp and Circumstance. While the boys, Nicole, and I cheered, my husband became Dr. David Webb Lander.

While the title had academic value, David quickly demonstrated that knowledge sometimes has no practical affect on daily life. The graduates were warned to be careful not to catch their long doctoral sleeve extensions on the stair railing as they exited the stage. I have the photo to prove that my husband promptly forgot the most practical advice he received while at seminary. As he started down the stairs with a huge victorious grin on his face, his right sleeve caught on the stair railing, stopping his triumphant march in mid-stride and forcing him to halt and release his accidental tether.

The day after David's graduation ceremony, we got a call from Daddy.

"Hello there, Dr. Lander," he said. "How would you like to submit a resume to be the new preaching/evangelism/worship and whatever-else-is needed professor at Rimrock Baptist College in Billings, Montana? The preacher guru is retiring at the end of the summer."

"That's an interesting proposition," David said. "I didn't care for teaching high school, but I think it might be fun to teach preachers."

A new challenge, the possibility to use his new degree in a different arena, David was intrigued. He put together a resume with his new title and educational achievement and sent it to Daddy. I feared that even if the college didn't want him, our tenure at our inaugural church was coming to an end. David had done everything he set out to do. He was looking for a new outlet for his preaching skills.

Understanding David's personality, I knew better than to try to talk him into staying because the boys and I liked our current living situation. As far as he was concerned, this was not a logical reason to stay. I needed something more.

The one thing about David that seemed inconsistent for someone with his logical bent was his spirituality but even that he came to partially through logic. He concluded that believing the Bible required faith, but disbelieving it required the same amount of faith. Neither was a logical decision, in that it could be proved. After considering the claims of the Bible, he asked himself what he would lose if he used faith to decide to reject Christ.

"If I chose to disbelieve the Bible," he told me once, "and I died and discovered the Bible to be true, I would lose everything. If I chose to believe the Bible and died and discovered I was wrong, I would lose nothing."

Since he had chosen to believe the Bible and commit his life to God, figuring the will of God into a decision became logic rather than mysticism. So, I played the 'spiritual' card.

"Are you sure this is what God wants you to do?" I asked David. "Have you even prayed about it, or are you just looking for a new challenge?"

"I have prayed – am still praying," he said. "What about you, have you prayed?"

He had me there. Here I was asking him to consider God's will when I hadn't really given God a chance to reveal His will. We both agreed to pray.

After a week of prayer, and even some fasting, neither of us had a definitive answer from God. We both knew what we wanted, but neither of us was certain we knew what God wanted.

At that point in the impasse, a phone call came from Montana. They wanted David to send them a preaching video. Wonder of wonders, they wanted a preaching professor who demonstrated the ability to use the skills he proposed to teach.