What should I do with my life?

In college I paid a visit to Dr. Rosalind Ragans, or Roz, as she was informally known - my art teacher and mentor I had throughout my elementary, middle and high-school years. I went rather out of guilt. You see I attended college in the town where I grew up and where Roz still lived. I got so busy with my own life that I didn't cross the street from campus to say hello - literally, her neighborhood was just less than a mile away from the campus. I was an art major in college. Roz kind of discovered me as an artist. She was the art teacher at Marvin Pittman Laboratory School, a school that was a part of Georgia Southern University. Georgia Southern began as Georgia's Teacher College. The school was built as a place for teaching would-be educators how to do their job. All of the classrooms were built with two way mirrors in the walls so that observations could be done without interrupting the classroom. It was kind of creepy to go into the little rooms next to the classes and look through at all of the activities going on. Roz was at the school when I went to 1/2 day preschool as a 5 year old. Even the preschoolers had art class! I attended Marvin Pittman from preschool all the way through 9th grade and Dr. Ragans was my art teacher all the way through. For some reason she had favored me from the first class I had with her. She later told my parents that I was one of her favorites.

When I moved to Statesboro High School for 10th grade I didn't get along very well with the art teacher there. In my High School Artist mind she was not very good. I continued to view Roz as my teacher. I went to her house several times a week for private lessons. One year when I was middle school age she bought an old homemade potter's wheel at an auction and brought it to Marvin Pittman. Roz had polio as a child and because of the weakness in her left arm and leg could not exert enough force on the clay to use the wheel. She wanted her student's exposed to lots of methods of making art. Because she could not use the wheel herself she told he the basic techniques and I struggled through learning how to use the potters wheel on my own. Each summer Roz was the teacher for High School Summer School art classes. She asked me to be her teaching assistant when I was just a middle schooler. For the help I gave I received High School elective credit! As a result I taught pottery to high school students each summer from 7th grade through 10th grade.

On the visit to her house in college she proudly showed me a copy of her soon to be published book, ArtTalk. Roz had developed an amazing technique for teaching art to elementary and middle school students. In fact, her book has been the authority on art education for many years. It has been translated in to many different languages and has gone through many different revisions. When she pulled out the new copy she told me to open it to a certain page. There, in full color, was one of the pictures I had drawn when I was in kindergarten. I don't remember if she then took me to the files where she had with lots of my work or if she told me to look up another page number, and another, and another. But I remember seeing lots of my early work. She had kept many of my pictures and had some published them in her book. The last one I looked at was a large pencil drawing that I had done while looking out of her front window. I called it, "View from a Southern Window." It featured her window and the huge Southern Pine trees just across the street from her house. As a high school junior it was one of the pictures in my portfolio when I applied and was accepted into The Governor's Honors Program. I also submitted the picture to the Georgia Art Symposium, a juried art show for High School students then held at the University of Georgia. I was selected from among a small group of students across the state to travel to UGA for the opening of the show and for a weekend of classes and seminars on art. After the show I gave the framed picture to Roz as a thank you for the many years of teaching me and mentoring me. From that exhibit a few pieces were selected to be displayed in the Georgia State Capital building in Atlanta. My drawing was selected, and I had to borrow it back from her so it could hang in the state capital the spring of my senior year. I received a call from someone who curated the capital's artwork telling me that two pieces from the show had been chosen to be in the permanent collection. He then asked if I would donate the piece to state of Georgia. I told him no. It was not mine to give because I had already given it to my teacher. He begged. I refused. Roz said I was crazy. But she still had the picture on her wall and, as I remember it, had published it in her book, showing the development of a young child into an artist.

I looked back and forth between the first picture of mine in the book and the last. There was no comparison between the two. The first looked like any old pre-school child's scribbles. There was no real form, no good use of color, no creative use of line - there was nothing remarkable about the picture. I paused on the picture, wondering why in the world this brilliant woman who had taught me so much, gave the child who drew this scribble-scrabble any second thought! So I asked her, "Roz, what in the world did you see in this picture that caused you to think I would ever develop into someone who could draw this?" as I flipped over to the last picture. She laughed and told me something I will never forget"

"Nathan, it was not the drawing that caught my attention, it was the look on your face while you drew and as you presented the finished product to me. You simply beamed with joy and pride." She continued, "And through the years I watched that grow and develop. Not only did you love producing artwork and trying new things, you loved to help others do the same thing! You took joy in helping others learn to draw, to paint, to make pottery. You loved watching others create art!" 

Some of you maybe wondering why I bring this story up. You know that my current job has nothing to do with art. Yes, I play around at home, drawing some, throwing a few pots here and there, playing around with woodworking and the like. I like being creative, but I'm not an artist. But what Roz saw grow in me way back then is still what drives me today - I love to help others grow and learn and develop. I love to watch others "get it." I love to teach, to draw out of people ideas, skills, and abilities that they did not realize they had. I love to help people make faith connections in the midst of the mundane. Basically, I thrive on helping others "become."

When I went back to see Roz again just before I graduated from college I feared she would be disappointed in me because I was leaving the expected career of art. But she wasn't - at least she didn't show it. Roz, a lapsed non-practicing Jew, gave me her blessing as I headed off to seminary.

As a collegiate minister my realm of teaching is different now, but I still get great satisfaction in watching others make connections and learn new things. I have students come to me quite often wanting advice as they wrestle with the practical question, "What does God want me to do with my life!?!" Sometimes I tell them my story. Sometimes I give them a quote from Frederick Beuchner about "calling" or, more specifically, "vocation." He wrote, "vocation is the place where our deep gladness meets the world's deep need." As we seek to discover what it is we were created for, the task is to discover the answer to two questions, "what gives me the greatest joy?" and "what do I see as the greatest need in the world?" Where those two answers intersect we can discover our vocation, calling, destiny, or whatever we would like to deem it. It is at that juncture that we find we can say, "I was made for this!" Some people even find a way to get paid to do the thing they know they were created to do! Sometimes, however, a calling is not the same as a career. Some people have to actually get jobs which then allow them to pay the bills so they can perform their vocation on the side. There are many "bi-vocational" ministers who work in a church or para-church ministry part-time or as volunteers on their time off from their "jobs," the work they do that pays the bills.

The key is getting to know yourself and being honest about what motivates you and drives you, then finding a way you can do that to meet the needs of the world. Pretty simple. Yet many people find discovering their calling or their vocation a difficult and long process. I think this is for lots of reasons.

Many people become so programmed over their lives that they really have no clue about what they really want to do. They have developed dreams around the expectation that they need a high paying job to make lots of money to be successful or happy. The first step to answering Beuchner's questions is getting back to zero by ridding yourself of the lies you have been told and have told yourself about success or dreams for the future. Sometimes getting back to zero is nearly impossible. Most of us have become so enmeshed with the subtle messages about success that we cannot see beyond a future paycheck. What we need is someone like Roz who will point out to us what they see in us. Before that conversation with Roz I was full steam ahead towards a career as an art teacher.

Midway through my college career I decided that I wanted to teach on the college level, not in elementary or high school. Through a confluence of events, over a four year period of time, I discovered that I was made for collegiate ministry, not art. My conversation with Roz was the beginning of that journey. I thought I knew who I was and where I needed to go with my life. Talking to her caused me to reflect on my art experiences, but also on other areas where I had found success. All of them revolved around a teacher who took special interest in me, nurtured me, challenged me, and pushed me to become more. A few years back I developed a purpose statement (it was all the rage in the early 90's): My purpose is to help collegians become all that they can be in Christ Jesus. Though that was composed many years ago, that sentiment still drives me to get out of bed each day and to get to work early.

I have discovered what I was created for...how about you?

*Update - Roz and I have just reconnected via LinkedIn and email. She lives only a few miles away in Lawrenceville. I'm headed over for a visit very soon!