While I’ve come to the end of my reflections on the importance and risks of Hope, I’m certainly aware that I exhausted neither all that could be said on the subject nor, in three examples, all of my own experience with hope in its various forms—although it’s certainly possible that I exhausted my readers!  But, even so, as I thought back over what I did say, I became aware of how many important and good things have happened in my life that were not the result of nor were even foreshadowed by hope. Indeed, as I look back on them with profound gratitude, I could not even have imagined them beforehand as objects of hope. 

And so, while there have been many such “good things” in my life, I’ll share just three with you, on the possibility that they might trigger for you a fond reminiscence of a similar happening in your own life.

The first incident, and its aftermath, happened during my first year in graduate school, which was a Divinity School—or, as most of them were called “back in the day,” a Seminary—in Louisville, Kentucky.  I was as green as a leaf in spring!  While I had been away from home (which was Ft. Smith, Arkansas) for four years at a college in Oklahoma and had done a bit of traveling in Oklahoma and Texas as the “song leader” in a revival team, that was pretty much the extent of my travels, other than a couple of train trips to Virginia with my mother when I was a youngster to visit with my Grandmother. Furthermore, most of my friends who continued their “preparation for ministry” chose the Southwestern Baptist Seminary in Ft. Worth, Texas.  I’ve long since forgotten why I chose Southern Seminary in Louisville, close to 700 miles and 10-12 hours from home—probably on the recommendation of one of my college professors—but, while I’m grateful that I did, I’d never been there, I knew not a single soul there, among neither students or faculty, and had no plans, strategies, or hopes for establishing relationships.

I don’t recall now how I met this guy from Missouri, probably in a class, but his name was Brooks Faulkner and we just “hit it off” from day one.  We ended up through the next three years studying together countless hours, engaging in a friendly competition for grades, and, with his wife and mine, socializing on a regular basis. The friendship was strong and valued by us both, but neither of us could have imagined its true intensity and durability.  When Brooks completed his basic divinity degree, he left Louisville for Nashville, Tennessee and a position with the Sunday School Board of the Southern Baptist Convention while I chose to stay at the seminary and pursue the doctoral degree that I felt would best prepare me for the teaching career I hoped for. 

End of story? Not by a long shot!  Over the next five decades, Brooks moved on to a sterling and nationally known career with a Southern Baptist agency called LifeWay, eventually focusing on help for pastors who experienced “burnout.”  He spoke at conferences all over the country, wrote seven books, and was honored a number of times for his work.  I spent most of those same years at Mars Hill College as a teacher, then academic administrator, and later in a ten-year post-retirement career in academic administration at Gardner-Webb University.  Both of us are now, of course, retired.   

And here, finally, is the point: Brooks and I met for the first time in 1958.  My most recent visit with him at his home in Smyrna, TN was just a few weekends ago but over the past 62 years, we often went multiple years—sometimes as many as six to eight years—between visits with each other, but whenever we got together, we simply picked up where we left off and it was always as if no time had passed!  We caught up, we marveled at the way our minds still worked in concert, we finished each other’s sentences, and we always parted in the same way—“I love you, brother”—and we still do!  While I have a few other close and cherished friendships, this is one I never could have anticipated and is unlike any I have ever known or will ever know again.

The second incident and the life-changing things that followed, happened almost the same day in August of 1968 that my family moved to Mars Hill to begin my career in higher education.  We just “happened” to move into a duplex on a residential street in this small town, and it just “happened” to be across the street from a faculty member and his family—his name was Jim Thomas, often known as “T” by friends and even students. He had been at the college for a few years and “happened” to be the chair of the Department of Theatre Arts.  He and I also “hit it off” from the start and formed a friendship that broadened and deepened over the years—we “hung out” together, discussed and bickered about institutional issues, played countless hours of racquetball and tennis, sometimes as competitive opponents and sometimes as doubles partners. 

But that conversation he and I had sometime around that move-in day, turned out to be the life-changer. As we talked about our backgrounds, he learned that I had been a Speech and Theatre major in college—primarily because acting in a couple of high school plays had given me an outlet to overcome my teenage poor self-image and low self-confidence, i.e. if I put on “greasepaint,” I could become anyone I wanted to be!  And so I “followed my bliss” and enjoyed the acting and speaking during the college years, as well as discovering that both had some relevance for preaching or teaching.  In the ten years after college, however, I had never done any acting at all, since in seminary, my attention had turned to biblical studies, theology, and philosophy, the latter of which had become my passion, the reason I was hired at Mars Hill, and the focus of my teaching. But “T” was centered on my college major and kept pressing me to “come and do a role in one of our productions.”  My response was that I was barely staying a week or two ahead of the students in my classes and suggested he ask again in a couple of years. 

To his credit, he backed off—for a couple of years—and then persuaded me to do a supporting role in a student production of Henrik Ibsen’s play, An Enemy of the People, that needed an age appropriate actor.  Then a year or two later, I was cast in another play whose title, along with a lot of other things, I confess I have forgotten.  Then came 1975 and the beginning of the Southern Appalachian Repertory Theatre, of which Jim was the Founding Artistic Director. The very first SART production was The Fantasticks, whose opening scene has the lead character, El Gallo, come on stage singing “Try to Remember.” Since Jim had cast me in that role, I had the privilege of offering the very first words of the first play in what would become SART’s now forty-five years of theatrical productions. 

And the rest, as they say, “is history,” because over the next twenty-five years, until he retired in 2000, Jim cast me, summer after summer, in a “smorgasbord” of choice roles in well-known plays and musicals—e.g. Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music, Emile de Becque in South Pacific, King Arthur in Camelot, Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof, Willie Stark in All the King’s Men, Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird, Nat in I’m not Rappaport, and, even in his post-retirement, Morrie in two productions of Tuesdays with Morrie, and Frank in the World Premiere of Billy Doswell’s play, Full Moon Over Montmartre, about a retired university professor and his wife’s struggle with Alzheimers.

All of which is but a small sample of what turned out for me to be a 40+ year avocational career as an actor that reached even beyond SART to other theatrical venues in Asheville and beyond. I could never even have imagined that, much less hoped for it, and yet it was a major factor that colored my life in creative and stimulating ways:

• provided a pathway to relationships with students on a different level than would have been feasible in a purely teaching or administrative role;
• made possible lasting friendships with more incredibly talented actors and technical magicians than I can name;
• became—in another story for another day— the doorway to a second avocational career doing commercial voiceovers for radio, TV, and video;
• and was the avenue that led years later to my meeting, working partnership, and friendship with Cathy Adkins, the woman who would become my cherished wife of now thirty-five years. 

All of that I owe gratefully to “T,” the guy across the street who became my treasured friend of now more than five decades and changed my life in these extraordinary and everlasting ways.

And the final “good thing” in my life that I could never have anticipated and lay beyond the scope of hope had to do with my career path.  During my seminary days and a year or so after, I was the pastor of three churches. I had suspected as early as my sophomore year in college, and “knew” after I entered the seminary, that the pastorate was not where my “calling” or my gifts lay, but I gave it my best shot. I enjoyed the preaching/teaching and the preparation for them, and gained satisfaction from counseling and comforting members of the church who faced grief and daunting personal problems. 

Know what I hated?  Honest confession: binding up the emotional bruises of folks who wore their feelings on their sleeves.  But what I hated most? The administrative tasks that went with pastoral duties in small churches that couldn’t afford to hire someone to do them.  While only at home or with unutterable mutterings in the confines of my study, I bitched and complained about all the administrative “stuff” that cluttered my life and got in the way of what was important—i.e. what I enjoyed doing.

So if you had told me prior to 1988 that I would pursue a career path in educational administration, I would literally have laughed in your face!  But it happened in a string of baby steps.  After a series of incremental and short term “semi-administrative” tasks I had been asked to do, and discovered, with some satisfaction, that I enjoyed them and (told myself quietly) that maybe I had some gifts for such things, in 1984 I found myself, with some surprise, appointed Chair of the Division of Humanities. But, I told myself, it was just a minor set of responsibilities with one course release time, not a career move. 

Then, after four years, the college opened a search for the newly created position of Dean of the Faculty, a full-time position—although it included teaching one course per semester—reporting directly to the Provost. To my own astonishment, I found myself interested and applied for the job along with another internal candidate.  The search committee was deadlocked between the two of us and the Provost was forced to make the decision.  To my surprise, again, he chose me and, here we go, it’s that “history” thing again.

Two years later, the Provost resigned to accept an administrative position at Baylor University, the Dean of Faculty position was terminated, I became Vice President for Academic and Student Affairs, and completed nine more years in that position (including one year as Provost) before returning to the classroom for two years before retiring. Then, in another total surprise, over the next fourteen years I had a ten-year post-retirement career in academic administration at Gardner-Webb University—a longer story than I need to tell.  The point being that I now look back gratefully on a career change from teaching to administration which I had never hoped for, in some ways “sneaked up on me,” and I could not possibly have foreseen.

And so, yes, sometimes good things happen in our lives that lie beyond the scope of hope. These are three of mine and perhaps they will conjure up a memory of something in your life for which you are now grateful but which you could not have seen coming.