Summer Doubts

What is the shortest distance between the certainty of an epiphany and the disaster of unemployment?  And I use the word disaster here, not hyperbolically, but very literally, for disaster breaks down into dis-astros, or no star.  In other words, a disaster means to find oneself with out stars to guide you, in the vastness of confusion and unknowability.  In any case, suffice it to say that the short distance between my graduation day epiphany and the situation I found myself in during the autumn of 2009 was four years of graduate school.  All this graduate education was supposed to confer certainty in my chosen path; it was supposed to be a needed stepping stone between life as a student and life as a teacher.  Instead, my years as a grad student only served to increase my doubt and confusion.

The first sign of this was actually not the string of Ph.D. program rejections I received in the spring of 2009.  For me, the first inkling of doubt came in the summer of 2007.  It was about this time that I realized my work at seminary was not going to be a sufficient preparation for the doctoral programs to which I wished to apply.  In other words, my three years of grad school were indeed a step toward my goal, but were a smaller step than I would have hoped.  That summer I painfully acknowledged that I was not where I needed to be, that I would need, in short, additional schooling before I could confidently apply for doctoral programs.

Perhaps the second sign of trouble was that this 'painful' realization came as something of a relief.  By the summer of 2007, I had been in higher education for over six years and was becoming, for lack of a better term, restless.  The prospect of five to seven more years of school, without a chance for a break, seemed to me incredibly daunting.  True, I still greatly desired my chosen career, but the path required to get there seemed, at least for the moment, a grueling, punishing journey. 

Thus, the chance to delay this doctoral journey by extending my master's education seemed to me a breath of fresh air.  I reasoned that as long as I needed more master's work, I might as well do it somewhere interesting.  I thus hatched the plan to study in the United Kingdom, and thus to definitively break my routines, get the fresh air I needed, and return to the States renewed and ready for the slow march into doctoral studies.  Besides, I thought, this would only put me one year behind in my career goal, for I could put in my doctoral applications soon after arriving in the UK. 

So it was that this summer of doubt did not shake my plans.  The strength of my certainty endured as I made new, better plans for the future without sacrificing my eventual vocational goal.  And while I today do not and cannot regret the decision to go abroad, for this was of course an enriching experience, it is clear to me that if I had stopped to really think through the source of my summer doubts, I might have averted the disaster that still loomed in my future.