Washing the Mud from Our Eyes
Learning to See
The first time I walked onto the campus of Drew University, I thought I was looking for a seminary. Thirty years later, I realize I had walked into one of the deepest wells from which I would spend the rest of my life drawing water.
At the time, I could not have known that. I was simply a prospective student wandering across campus, exploring every nook and cranny I could find. I browsed the bookstore, examined theology books displayed there and on shelves outside professors’ offices, studied bulletin boards and photographs, wandered through Seminary Hall, peered into classrooms, and tried to understand the character of the place. If I was going to spend the next three years of my life there, I wanted to know its soul before I ever sat in one of its classrooms.
Seminary Hall had seen better days. The floors creaked beneath generations of seminarians, and the walls bore the unmistakable marks of a building that had been loved far more than renovated. It possessed the kind of character that cannot be manufactured. It can only be earned through decades of faithful use.
What captivated me, however, was not the building itself.
It was the people.
Students hurried between classes. Professors lingered in the hallways, deep in conversation. Everywhere I turned, someone seemed to be discussing theology, ministry, Scripture, or the Church. The building buzzed like a beehive, but these were unlike any bees I had ever encountered. They were seminarians.
Only years later did I understand what I had sensed that afternoon. Heather Elkins would eventually teach me the Hebrew word ruach—breath, wind, spirit—but I had experienced it long before I knew its name. Seminary Hall felt alive, not because of its architecture, but because of the people who inhabited it.
The first person to embody that spirit for me was Randall Hand, the Theological School’s Director of Admissions.
I remember Randall as an older gentleman who welcomed prospective students with genuine kindness. I remember almost nothing we talked about that day. I remember something more important.
I remember how he made me feel.
Before I had attended a class, before I had submitted an application, before I had earned a place in the community, Randall somehow communicated that perhaps I already belonged. It was not salesmanship. It was hospitality. He loved Drew, and because he loved Drew, he wanted others to discover what he already knew about it.
I did not have language for it then. I simply knew that I wanted to become the kind of pastor who made people feel the way Randall had made me feel that afternoon.
Years later, I would apply to Duke for a Th.M. The people there were gracious, professional, and encouraging. I remain grateful for that experience. Yet as I reflected on both schools, I realized something important.
Drew had welcomed me.
Duke had evaluated me.
Neither approach was wrong, but they were profoundly different.
Randall never made me feel as though I needed to prove I belonged before I walked through the door. He embodied something I would spend the next quarter century trying to practice in my own ministry.
Before I ever sat in a classroom, Randall had already begun teaching me what pastoral ministry looked like. I have rarely encountered anyone who understood hospitality more naturally.
I arrived at Drew from rural Mississippi carrying a degree in Biological Engineering from Louisiana State University. At first glance, engineering and theology seem to have very little to say to one another. My experience suggests otherwise.
Engineering had already disciplined my mind. It taught me to examine assumptions, assess risk, respect reality rather than preference, and understand that actions almost always have second- and third-order consequences. Above all, it taught me that truth does not fear investigation.
The engineer came with me. Drew simply gave him a different set of questions.
Before classes even began, another student knocked on my dorm room door. His name was Brady. He stood there rather sheepishly and asked whether there was any chance I wanted to go get a beer.
I remember exhaling with a smile.
We have been friends ever since.
Brady had spent time living in a Buddhist monastery doing translation work. His experiences, questions, and perspective were unlike anything I had encountered growing up in Mississippi. Long before any professor began lecturing, my education had already started. It simply happened over a beer instead of behind a lectern.
Then classes began.
Nothing in my Mississippi upbringing had prepared me for the conversations that filled my first semester. We debated God and gender, inclusive language, BCE and CE instead of BC and AD, race, hermeneutics, textual criticism, and questions about Scripture that I had never before imagined anyone asking in good faith.
At times, I was convinced the questions themselves were dangerous.
I would be dishonest if I claimed I embraced all of it immediately.
I did not.
I was defensive. I was unsettled. Looking back, I was also naïve. My upbringing had given me many gifts, but it had also left me with assumptions that I mistook for self-evident truth simply because no one had ever asked me to examine them.
I also mistook questions for attacks and disagreement for disrespect. It took years before I understood that honest questions are not the enemies of faith. More often, they are among its greatest allies.
Looking back, I realize I had misunderstood what was happening. Drew was not trying to dismantle my faith. It was asking whether my convictions were sturdy enough to withstand honest questions. If they were true, I had nothing to fear.
Drew never asked me to surrender my convictions. It asked me to understand them well enough to explain them, defend them, question them, and, when necessary, refine them. It consistently chose the harder path.
No two faculty members better illustrated that than Tom Oden and Heather Elkins.
Theologically, they could hardly have been more different. They even engaged in a public dispute over language used in worship that eventually found its way into published books. Yet sitting in their classrooms, I never felt that either wanted to manufacture replicas of themselves. They wanted students who understood why they believed what they believed and who could carry that discipline into questions they had never personally addressed.
Obery Hendricks challenged assumptions I had never questioned. Herb Huffmon introduced me to textual criticism in ways that were both uncomfortable and liberating. Heather Elkins gave me ruach and taught me to recognize the breath of God in places I would never have thought to look. Even conspire, she reminded us, once meant “to breathe together.” Tom Oden gave me the Great Tradition.
Together they taught me how to think theologically.
Their example also convinced me that pastoral formation is extraordinarily difficult apart from incarnational community. Information can be transmitted online. Formation must be fostered over time. Incarnation is not bits and bytes. It is flesh and blood. It happens in hallways, over a beer, in classrooms, in worship, in disagreement, in hospitality, and in the countless ordinary moments where people slowly become who God is calling them to be.
Even before I arrived at Drew, I had been considering spending part of my seminary education overseas. If I was going to devote my life to serving the Church, I wanted to experience the Church beyond the world I had always known. Drew maintained an exchange relationship with Queen’s University Belfast. More practically, it was the only exchange offered in an English-speaking country, an important consideration for someone whose vocabulary did not extend much beyond English. There was another reason as well. My family is almost entirely Irish by heritage. Belfast felt both foreign and strangely familiar.
What happened next was one of the greatest gifts I have ever received.
Very few students had taken advantage of the Belfast exchange in the years before I arrived. Drew possessed an endowed fellowship intended to encourage precisely that kind of cross-cultural formation. Heather Elkins encouraged me to pursue the opportunity and made it possible.
She gave me Belfast, and with it the opportunity to see the Church beyond America. It was there that I began to distinguish between the gospel and the American assumptions through which I had first learned it.
She gave me Northern Ireland during the Troubles. She gave me professors and classmates whose assumptions had been shaped by circumstances I could scarcely imagine. She gave me the opportunity to worship, study, travel, and ask questions in a place where reconciliation was not an abstract theological concept but a daily necessity.
Like so much of what Drew had already been teaching me, Belfast did not require me to abandon my convictions. It invited me to examine them more carefully. It taught me that faithful Christians often arrive at different conclusions because they have lived different stories. It did not weaken my faith. It humbled it.
There were, of course, boundaries. Certain professors insisted upon particular classroom practices. Some discouraged gendered language for God. Obery Hendricks had little patience for students quoting the King James Version in class. Those expectations were real. Yet I never experienced them as an attempt to manufacture theological clones. Looking back, I realize that Drew was never trying to tell me what to see. It was teaching me how to see.
The lens I inherited growing up in Mississippi often caused me to see the world as though I were looking backward through a telescope. Everything beyond my own experience appeared farther away, making it easier to dismiss.
Drew quietly exchanged that telescope for a microscope.
Suddenly, I could see details that had always been there. People became more complex. Theology became richer. The Church became larger. The world itself became more interesting.
My convictions did not disappear. They matured. Once you learn to see that way, you cannot unknow it.
Drew expected us to wrestle, and that wrestling was not always comfortable. There were days when I left class frustrated. There were conversations that challenged assumptions I had carried for years. At times I wondered whether the questions themselves were dangerous.
Every reading of Scripture is already an interpretation, shaped in part by the experiences, assumptions, and traditions we bring to the text. Drew did not create that reality. It simply refused to pretend otherwise. Once I understood that, I could never again confuse my own perspective with God’s.
I discovered that faithful Christians could disagree without abandoning either Scripture or Christ. They could arrive at different conclusions while sharing a common desire to seek the truth. I did not agree with every professor, and I suspect many of them did not agree with me.
Somewhere along the way, almost without my noticing, Drew exposed an arrogance and a set of blind spots I had never realized I possessed. It taught me that conviction and humility belong together.
Thirty years have passed since I first wandered through Seminary Hall. The professors who shaped me have aged. Some have retired. Some have died. The students with whom I argued in classrooms and over a beer have scattered across the world. The building itself has undoubtedly changed in ways I no longer recognize.
Yet I continue to draw from that well.
I find myself returning to Drew with surprising regularity. Sometimes it is a memory of a classroom discussion. Sometimes it is a question first asked by a professor that continues to unfold decades later. Sometimes it is the voice of Heather Elkins reminding me to pay attention to ruach. Sometimes it is Tom Oden’s insistence that the Church does not begin with us. Sometimes it is simply the reminder that faithful Christians can disagree deeply while remaining brothers and sisters in Christ.
I have discovered that wells do not nourish simply because they exist.
Someone must return to them.
My great-grandparents had a well. The water did not leap from the ground into waiting hands. Someone had to lower the bucket, draw the water, and carry it home. The well possessed tremendous potential, but until someone drew from it, that potential remained unrealized.
The same is true of the people and places that form us.
We receive no nourishment from books left unopened, friendships left untended, memories left unexplored, or wisdom we never revisit. We must continue drawing.
That is why I find myself writing these essays.
Drew was never perfect. Neither were its professors, nor its students, nor the conversations that shaped us. None of that is the point.
It became one of the deepest wells from which I continue to draw, and it taught me to recognize others.
If there is any grace in my ministry, any wisdom in my writing, or any clearer vision with which I now see the world, much of it can be traced back to that worn building in Madison where professors, classmates, and friends quietly taught a young man from Mississippi not what to think, but how to think.
They helped wash the mud from my eyes.
Thirty years later, I am still drawing water from that well.