I don't seem to have the wisdom to know the difference between bumbling through things or the gracious gift of God in our lives. I started off as a mediocre community college student in Southern California. I decided it was a “wise decision” to avoid the draft by enlisting in the Marine Corps for four years. Bumbling? Or Grace?
In the Marines I served in Viet Nam, traveled the world, and read voraciously (who wants to get drunk and get into a fight every night?). I discovered I loved theology while sitting in a sauna when stationed in Japan. The GI Bill and a scholarship covered tuition at Westmont--then Fuller Seminary, the University of St. Andrews, and Sheffield University. Was that Grace?
After earning my PhD, I found a job teaching Old Testament at Sterling College. I remember one student evaluation that said, "If I have to listen to his whiney voice one more day I think I will die." On the other hand, I did get Teacher of the Year that year. Grace?
Years later, my career “progressed” from college professor to children’s minister at a church in the San Francisco Bay Area. A children’s minister with a PhD in Old Testament is – to put it mildly – overqualified. Yet it was in that church that I met my wife Pamela. Grace – definitely!
I bumbled into a part-time position at Fuller Seminary's satellite campus in Menlo Park when they needed someone to teach a Pentateuch class that was starting two weeks later. I taught at Fuller for the next 20 years. Grace?
Teaching at Fuller led to an additional part-time job with small groups at an Episcopal church. Late one afternoon in the priest's office I asked--simply out of curiosity!--what it took to become an Episcopal priest. He said, "I don't know," picked up the phone and called the Bishop. Two weeks later I was on a path to ordination. Grace?
One of the authors I read while in the Marines said "All humor is put-down." What? How can that be? I was intrigued and consumed by that statement, which eventually led to me to write God at the Improv. Maybe humor isn't so much "put down" but a stumbling into Grace. Thank God.
"This book gives us a playful, slanted glimpse of biblical truth, and leaves us with a sense of awe and a smile"--Kurt Fredrickson, Associate Dean of Practical Ministry, Fuller Theological Seminary
