A Man’s Best Seminary…

I was 20 years old, living in Kansas City, and had almost completed the Master’s Commission (a 9-month, intense, focused discipleship “program”). My leaders were Lloyd and Brenda Rindels. Lloyd use to always tell us it was a spiritual greenhouse of sorts, that each person in those 9 months would actually mature 10 years. Quite often with God, we get more than we put in. That is good news!

Toward the end of the 9 months, Michael Sullivant came in to pray and minister prophetically to each person on an individual basis. Toward the end of the word he was giving me, his wife stepped in and said, “A man’s best seminary is his wife and kids.” Looking back, the word was especially accurate in the sense that God told me to “go a secular route to prepare for the same thing.” My heart was to prepare to be a pastor/preacher/teacher of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Yet, through a series of events, He redirected me away from a theological path to that of Philosophy. Philosophy is one of the chief delights of my heart. I cannot explain that, but there is not a day that goes by that I am not thinking about philosophical issues and how I might connect people in this world to the Gospel of Jesus, our wonderful hope, the only hope, the sole bridge (John 14:6; Acts 4:12) that stretched across the dark chasm that sin has dug between God and His creatures. Now I know that God was offering me some peace for the direction He would take me. It is as if He said, “Don’t worry, my son. Though you will travel another educational path than that which is expected, I will see to it that you will have your ‘seminary’. I will give you a wife. I will give you a son. And there, in that real-life classroom, you will learn, be convicted, be lifted, be inspired, see my heart on a deeper level, and learn more of what I want from you.

In about a month, I will have been married 5 years to the love, passion, and friend of my life. Her name is Allison Condrey. And lately, as I struggle to lay down my life like I am called to, I see her give and give and give. At moments when I do not see how anyone could take one more step, she somehow does. She gives again. She sacrifices again. She shows me the kind of heart that Jesus would have had to have in order to hang, bleed, gasp for breathe, and die on a stupid, ordinary, plain Roman cross alongside criminals. I am not challenged to merely muster up more determination. Rather, I am challenged to put my nose to the ground and cry out to the Holy Spirit, the Great Change Agent, to transform me. May God give me the Jesus heart I see in my wife.

Philippians 2:3-8 NIV
[3] Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, [4] not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others. [5] In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus: [6] Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; [7] rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness. [8] And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!

I could write more concerning my son, but that is for another time.

A man’s best seminary is his wife and kids.