4

But I Wanted to Be a Veterinarian

I had continued to attend church after my eleven-year-old Easter epiphany. But after my brief childhood encounter with religion, I devoted the majority of my time, energy, and interest to work and sports. Because I loved life on the farm—making things grow, caring for animals, riding horses—I began thinking and dreaming of veterinary school. I didn’t care much for school, though I knew that it would probably be important for my future.

I was a little surprised the afternoon my dad showed up at my high school and pulled me out of class early in the spring of my senior year. I had barely climbed into his pickup when Dad started talking about my going off to college in the fall, and how pleased he and mom were that I had received a scholarship to the University of Kentucky to study veterinary medicine. (This was about as close to my dad saying that he was proud of me as I was probably going to get.)

He knew that, even with the scholarship, I was going to need money of my own for transportation and other educational and incidental expenses. “So,” Dad went on, “I found you a job where you can earn a good bit of money before you head off to college.”

While Dad was a blue-collar worker and a part-time farmer who didn’t have many financial resources of his own, he was known and respected around the community as a hard worker. Even if he couldn’t directly help provide for me financially, he could leverage what he did have in the way of friendships, reputation, and personal contacts to provide me with an opportunity to make my own way. I appreciated that.

“You found me a job?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he explained. “I talked to some friends who work at the Kraft Foods Cheese Factory. They say that they have a job that is yours if you’ll take it.”

“Really?” I responded.

The big food conglomerate had a nearby cottage cheese processing plant. A lot of local people earned enough to support their families working there. Dad knew that I planned on finding some kind of summer job to earn money before college started in the fall. He also knew that I hadn’t had any success yet in my job search. We both knew that a job opportunity at Kraft would be more promising than anything that I would find on my own.

“It sounds great,” I told him. “Thanks.”

But he didn’t want me to thank him until I had heard the rest of his news. “The thing is,” my dad said, “the job starts tonight. The 7:00 p.m. to 3:30 a.m. shift, Monday through Friday, forty hours per week until you leave for college.”

Tonight!? I looked at Dad as my mind raced through all the possible ramifications. I have nine more weeks of school before graduation. Varsity baseball season has already started. And then there’s my part in the senior play.

Thinking out loud I said, “Probably wouldn’t leave time for any extra-curricular activities.”

Dad agreed, “No, it won’t.” He knew what I was thinking. “They say that they need you to fill the job tonight. They can’t hold the position open until your school year ends.”

“I’ll be honest with you, Nik,” Dad added. “I don’t have any doubts that you can do the work. You’ve always been a hard worker and a fast learner. I know that you’ll do a great job for Kraft.”

“But what concerns me,” my father went on to say, “is your school work. Can you keep up your grades over these last nine weeks of your senior year with that kind of schedule? “

“It would be a big challenge,” I had to admit. “I need to think about that.” But there wasn’t much time to think. At that moment, Dad was pulling into the parking lot of the Kraft factory and telling me that if I wanted the job, I needed to go in and talk to the people in the personnel office right then.

Less than an hour after my father had picked me up at school, I filled out a job application and was hired to begin working at Kraft that very night. The decision had been fast. But that didn’t mean it was easy.

I dreaded having to tell my baseball coach that his starting second baseman and number two hitter was quitting the team. It wasn’t much easier telling the drama teacher that I would be dropping out of the senior play. I hated letting anyone down. I hoped that my friends, classmates, and especially the other guys on the baseball team would understand. But I didn’t have any serious second thoughts about what I had to give up. I knew what was the right and practical thing to do.

My new job was about two miles from home. It required hard work—which had never really bothered me. The all-night schedule, however, was brutal. Starting work after supper wasn’t too bad, but by the time I would clock out every morning at 3:30 a.m., all I could do was stumble home exhausted and literally fall into bed.

I somehow managed to fall out of bed every morning in time to drive my beat-up pickup the three miles to school—and I wasn’t absent once the rest of the school year. I am sure that all of my teachers soon noticed that I regularly dozed off in class—despite my most creative and heroic efforts to resist doing so. When one of them asked what was going on with me, I explained about the job that my dad had found for me to earn the money that I needed to start college the next fall. Evidently, word got around. My teachers were especially gracious that last semester of my senior year.

Life seemed a lot more manageable after graduation when I could sleep in every morning. The weeks rolled by, the paychecks rolled in, and I began to focus on the future. The reality of college loomed larger and larger on my personal horizon.

My job at Kraft wasn’t particularly fun or exciting. It was the sort of mindless, physically demanding work that confirmed the wisdom of my decision to pursue a college education. It was the kind of job where the simple work ethic that my parents had instilled in me served me well: Life is work. Work is hard. Work is what it is. You do what is expected of you—and you do it well.

I was doing just that one summer night—working all by myself in a back corner of the Kraft Foods Cheese Factory, struggling to clamp lids on five-hundred-pound containers of what we called stirred curd. We were preparing our plant’s product for shipping to yet another food manufacturing facility to be further processed and then packaged as the final form of cottage cheese sold in grocery stores.

The far recesses of that factory were so quiet that night that I nearly jumped out of my skin at the sudden sound of a voice asking: “Nik! Are you tired of running?” The words were so clear and so close that I whirled around to see who had managed to sneak up on me.

There was no one there. Odd. I turned my attention back to my task, thinking that my mind was playing tricks on me. Ten minutes later I heard the same voice: “Nik, are you tired of running?” I looked around again; no one was there. What in the world is going on?

Wary now, I kept looking around. There was not another person near when I heard the voice a third time, “Nik, are you ready to stop running and serve me?” I suspected that a co-worker was playing a trick on me. Quickly, though, I sensed in my heart that the voice that was speaking to me belonged to God.

I didn’t realize that it was possible to question or even ignore the Holy Spirit. I was so surprised by what was happening that, all by myself in the back of that food factory, I made what seemed like the only possible response under those circumstances: I gave God my life. And because I had never been told anything different, I simply assumed that a person could be saved and called to serve God in the very same moment. That’s exactly what I believed was happening to me. I answered God’s voice and I put my life in His control.

On the one hand, what happened to me that night was both unsettling and unexpected. For the longest time I had wanted nothing more than to be a vet! The first real step on the road to that life dream was set to begin in less than a month. In my limited experience, “serving God” was what “preachers” did. And the prospect of being the pastor of a little country church in the hills of Kentucky was not of much interest to me.

But now, it seemed that God wanted me to do that. What does God have in mind? Does He know what He’s doing?

On the other hand, what happened that night in the factory was so real that I had to tell someone. I simply couldn’t NOT talk about it. So I sat my parents down the very next day and explained how the voice of God had spoken to me. I told them that I had been saved. I explained that I had not only accepted Christ into my heart and given Him my life, but that I now planned to “serve” Him.

My folks’ reaction was not so much negative, as it was neutral. Looking back now, I realize that my story must have seemed strange to them; Mom and Dad simply had no reference point in their own personal experience to process what I told them had happened, or to begin to understand the implications. From their perspective, it sounded as if I was suddenly discarding my long-time dream of becoming a veterinarian for what must have sounded like some mystical spiritual experience. I’m sure that they, too, equated “serving God” with preaching.

Disappointed that my parents couldn’t understand or accept what I was explaining, I next went to talk with an older pastor who had known our family for some time. He smiled and listened with interest as I told him about “The Voice” that I had heard in the factory and the part about my accepting Christ. When I went on to explain about feeling called to serve God, the minister’s response was, shockingly, more negative than that of my parents. He looked me right in the eye and said “You really don’t want to become a preacher, Nik. Churches will eat you alive! That kind of work can kill a man.”

I was surprised by the vehemence of his reaction, yet I had a pretty good idea what he meant. I had grown up in a small community where most everyone went to one of three churches, yet always seemed to know what was going on in the other two. I had also attended various country churches from time to time with my grandparents and visited a number of others in the area when my brother had sung in a traveling gospel quartet during high school. Based on that exposure, I guess I had such a narrow view of ministry that I had simply assumed that such things were the necessary downside of any decision to serve the Lord. I figured that I would just give in and say, “Okay God, I guess I will have to do this because you are God—but I’m not going to like it.”

I had been just weeks away from heading off to college to study veterinary science and find my way in a bigger, more exciting world. I knew that I had said yes to God and that I would follow and serve the Lord. But now, I was suddenly wondering if, in doing so, I had just condemned myself to hard labor and an unexciting life of misery. This pastor’s reaction only served to underscore my questions and doubts at the very beginning of my personal walk of faith.

Fortunately, I received a much more affirming response when I shared my cheese factory conversion with a friend who was the pastor of a small church nearby. When I told him that I felt that God had called me to serve Him, he got excited enough to introduce me to another young preacher friend of his. The two of them prayed with me.

I didn’t really know what to do next, but I felt certain that God had called me. I honestly didn’t believe that I had any choice except to accept and obey this call. I saw no separation or distinction between accepting Christ and surrendering my whole life to Him to do what He wanted me to do. And I certainly had no clue at the time that my simple faith and obedience would lead me from a small town in Kentucky to the deserts and camels of Somalia.

I gave up my scholarship at the University of Kentucky. The only alternative I could envision was to go to a denominational college and train to become a minister. That fall, I enrolled at a small Christian college less than an hour’s drive from my home. My declared majors were history and religion—two subjects in which I had little personal experience.

I felt like I had been thrown into the deep end of the swimming pool without a single swimming lesson. Just weeks after my encounter with God in the cheese factory, here I was attending a church college and telling people that I was preparing to go into the ministry. I couldn’t help feeling as if everyone I met on campus had a better sense of what that meant than I did.

I decided to start reading my new Bible. When I did, I found a lot of very interesting stories, most of which I had never heard, or maybe just never listened to before. I knew that the Bible was the basis of everything Christians believed, but there seemed to be so much in it that I simply didn’t understand. Even what I did read and understand, I often had no idea how to apply to my own life.

My theology wasn’t any deeper than my understanding of Scripture. All I really knew was that the Bible was God’s book and that if I really believed that, then I needed to do what it said.

It didn’t take me long to get to the twenty-eighth chapter of Matthew. There, Jesus gives His followers their final instructions to go into all the world to share His Good News and make disciples. When I read that, I thought, Wow! Wouldn’t it be really great to do that—to get out of Kentucky, at least for a little while? The more I looked at what that passage said, the clearer it seemed to me that Jesus gave that command to every one of His followers. It wasn’t a separate call or a special call for some of His disciples. Rather, it was the last lesson Jesus wanted to get across to every one of His followers.

Go ye into all the world . . .

When I saw that, I considered it a clear command from God for me personally. I knew that I had to go; I knew that He wanted me to go. I knew that I had no choice. Until or unless He stopped me, I would go. I couldn’t imagine how such a thing would be possible. But I took God at His word.

I felt completely out of place. Thankfully, a number of professors and fellow students befriended me. During my freshman year some senior guys invited me to travel with them to churches in neighboring states to conduct weekend youth revivals.

Looking back, I can see that they had a genuine desire to encourage and disciple me after they had learned that I felt called to preach. But I soon realized another reason that they included me on their traveling teams. Whenever I made announcements about the youth revival in a weekend or Sunday morning worship service, people showed up for our meeting that night if for no other reason than to hear “that country boy” talk again.

All in all, my first year of college was a positive, yet stretching, experience for me. I enjoyed college more than I had expected to. I moved into my sophomore year feeling comfortable on campus, yet knowing that I still had a lot to learn.

One of my most memorable experiences that second year at college was my first encounter with a real live missionary. A man by the name of Dr. Butcher visited the campus. He gave a thirty-minute devotional in chapel one evening and shared some of his own ministry experience in Thailand. He made a clear and compelling case for more young people to answer the call to serve God overseas. He certainly got my attention. After the service, I waited around until I could privately approach Dr. Butcher. I asked him, “Let me get this straight: you’re telling me that I can go anywhere in the world to tell people about Jesus and that I can get paid to do that?”

He looked at me in a funny way, smiled slightly, and then nodded, “I’ve never been asked the question quite like that before. But, yes, that is what I’m saying.”

“Where do I sign up?” I asked. I was thrilled to know that there was some way to make that “Go ye into all the world” commandment doable. I was ready to go right then.

But I had a lot more to learn before that would happen. And I had just become acquainted that fall of my sophomore year with the one person who would do more than any other person to help me learn it. She was the one person without whom I probably would never have made it to Africa at all.