Letter to the Baylor Line, the Bench is Waiting

One Saturday afternoon, my wife and I were walking to a Baylor football game and we decided to take a quick break on a swing that was located in the middle of campus. As I looked around, I found myself quickly calmed by the robust trees that provided a restful shade on the ground beneath, by the beautiful colors that came from the landscaping that adorns the Baylor campus, and by the sound of birds singing joyful melodies. Even though I know that there are countless places around the world with more dramatic scenes of nature, I caught a glimpse of what God must mean by finding rest that day on the Baylor campus.

Not only was my rest soon interrupted by the need to get up and go to the next thing (the game), it was interrupted by a shade of sorrow that I felt, knowing that I spent 5 years as a student on this campus and never experienced anything close to the level of rest I had just experienced. Even though I continue to have this sorrow rush through me any time I think about all the opportunities that I missed as a student at Baylor, I want to make it clear that I do not feel any regrets. To me, sorrows become regrets when you do not learn lessons from missed opportunities and mistakes, and use those lessons to make a positive impact on the world.

By God’s Grace, I have been able to get back on the path towards identifying and achieving my purpose in life. Unfortunately, it took me until somewhere between my 28th and 30th birthdays to get back to where I felt like I was back on this path towards my purpose. The years between graduating from Baylor and my 28th birthday were spent building the foundation of positive habits that are important in identifying and fulfilling my purpose in life. Think how much further along in the path towards achieving my purpose I would be today and think how much more of an impact my life could make on the world, if only I would have taken more advantage of the countless opportunities to build positive habits while I was a student at Baylor.

I stand here before you humbled by the personal and professional accomplishments that God has used to place blessings into my life. Many of the lessons that have contributed to these were learned at Baylor. As sure as I am standing before you today, I know that God had so much more planned for my life and I know that He has so much planned for your life. I can only ask for His forgiveness, do my best to follow His plan moving forward, and share the lessons that I have learned in the hopes that it will make a difference in the lives of others. You are just starting your path towards whatever purpose has been chosen for your life. It is my hope and prayer that the 3 lessons discussed in the rest of this letter will take hold in your life and inspire you as you move forward. Those lessons will include: Trust the Process, Let Christ In, and What you Do for Fun Today Becomes Tomorrow’s Habits.

TRUST THE PROCESS

Have you experienced something in your life that moves you every time you think about it? Is there a topic that you feel your heartstrings pulling every time you hear it mentioned? That is possibly God working in you, calling you to a particular purpose. For me, that “tug” at my heartstrings is rooted in being separated from my brother by over 2000 miles, from the age of 5 to the age of 32. My brother was born with multiple life-altering health issues and after living with our birth mother for the initial years of our lives, we were placed into separate foster homes and then adopted by separate families.

Fortunately, our families understood our bond and the void that this separation caused, and they allowed us to maintain contact through letters and phone calls. As we maintained contact throughout our childhood years, I observed my brother’s growing faith in Christ, despite the health complications he faced. Inspired by this, I knew from an early age that I was being called to build upon the initial years of my life and the inspiration I received from my brother’s resilience, to dedicate my life to serving those who came from similar backgrounds.

As I approached my time at Baylor, I realized that the gift I was given to use to serve others was the ability to identify strengths in people that they could not identify in themselves. My inability to take advantage of many of the opportunities I was afforded at Baylor was rooted in not establishing a VISION for my future. I failed to establish a road map for how I was going to achieve the God-given purpose I was given. I did not identify a vision statement, like “those from foster care will know their purpose, because I dedicated a significant amount of time to helping them establish their personal vision.” Additionally, I failed to understand the step-by-step process of “building a toolbox” of resources, skills, and experiences that were important in achieving my vision, as well as those resources, skills, and experiences that were important in identifying and navigating around possible obstacles standing in the way of achieving my vision. We are trained in our “immediate gratification” society to see tasks that serve as steps in a process as tedious, pointless, or dead ends. If we aren’t seeing results today, we do not have time for that particular task. In my own Baylor experience, I found myself asking questions like, “When am I going to get my assignment done?” When am I going to study for the test coming up soon? How am I going to maintain my image as “Dan Wilder,” my fraternity’s unofficial social coordinator? Whether it was receiving grades, maintaining my student athletic training scholarship, or growing my fraternity, each of these questions were based in the immediate goals that I had.

If you are not careful, immediate goals become your “end all, be all.” They become your identity. They become your, “If I don’t accomplish this, I can’t be happy” or “If I don’t accomplish this, my life is over.” While attention paid to tasks with immediate results, like assignments and tests, are a very important part of achieving a long-term vision, each of these tasks are one stepping stone in a large set of stepping stones that are required in achieving your vision. These tasks should be generously accompanied with an attention to tasks that may seem meaningless in the short-term, but are required in building a foundation that sustains your path towards achieving your long-term vision.

Now, you may be asking, “what are these tasks that seem meaningless now, but are important later?” I am glad you asked! When I was in your shoes, I did not know the answer to this question, either. In the years since I left Baylor, I have realized that it is impossible to answer this question, unless you have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

LET CHRIST IN

While at Baylor, I had all the friends a person could ask for. I had all of what I believed to be authentic fun, and I had all the cool experiences under my belt. At the time, I felt like I needed nothing. You would think that I was well on my way to achieving my lifelong purpose. At age 21 or 22, I would have agreed with you. After having to spend 5-10 post-graduation years building the foundation for my life that I should have been building while at Baylor, I realized that I could not have been more wrong. That is what not having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ exposes you to. You are vulnerable to lies, you are like a grocery bag at the mercy of the wind, and you are a sheep to the “here today, gone tomorrow” trends of our culture.

Right now, you are probably thinking something along the lines of, “this guy does not know what it is like being a young adult in my generation.” I know that’s what I would have said 18 years ago. Plus, your generation has more advances than any other generation has had, and you are more equipped to accomplish goals with those advances. With that said, no matter how much technology advances, human nature will always stay the same. Just as all generations prior, and all generations in the future, your generation will have to navigate human emotions as you move towards your long-term visions. You will experience happiness, fear, anger, grief, connection, vulnerability, pride, and other aspects of human nature.

Members of the Baylor Line, what is your vision? How will you feel when you start seeing your vision being accomplished? How will you feel when you are experiencing roadblocks in the path of your vision? How you navigate these feelings will make the difference between whether you continue towards accomplishing your vision or falling off track and having to start over or take time to regroup. Even with all of the advances that have been made throughout human history, nothing has ever changed the fact that each of us has to face our human nature at the beginning and end of each day. This brings us back to the importance of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

I went to church during my childhood, I believed in everything that a Christian is supposed to believe, and most of the time, I tried to follow a moral compass that was instilled in me by my parents. Looking back now, I realize that nothing in my life during college would have drawn anyone to Christ. I cringe when I think about how some people have died when they put themselves in some of the same positions that I allowed myself to be in during my college and early adult years. What would have happened if I lost my life at this point of my spiritual walk? In the same respect, thinking about this amplifies the level of gratitude that I feel for the opportunity that we all have to have a personal relationship with our Creator, and I hope this inspires that same gratitude in each of you.

Today, I have multiple experiences that can be used to position my life as one that draws people to Christ. One example is meeting a woman that has become the true meaning of life partner, despite me leaving God and his guidance out of my previous dating experiences. Another example is my daughter being born in 2018 after a miscarriage and fertility struggles, despite losing patience and starting the process of assisted pregnancy. One more example is landing a dream job in social work, despite several days and nights of feeling frustrated and angry about the job seeking process throughout my professional life. Rather than the material things I was chasing in my younger days, I believe the definition of abundance and prosperity are experiences of God’s Grace and Mercy like these. In addition to being examples of God’s Grace and Mercy, all of these experiences came when I stopped trying to navigate life with my own human understanding and stopped to rest in a personal relationship with God through His Holy Spirit.

WHAT YOU DO FOR FUN TODAY BECOMES TOMORROW’S HABITS

For most of you, this is the first time you are experiencing “independence.” You are spreading your wings and exploring your identity as a unique person. No more answering to your parents on when you go somewhere or when you get back home. No more having your parents serve as a backup alarm clock for school, when you have hit the snooze button like 6 times. Even though many of you will still be able to access help with finances and other forms of continued support from your parents, you will most likely be expected to take a dramatic step towards handling these imminent demands of adult life on your own. This can be both exciting and scary.

The scary part is that as you progress through the coming years, your safety net will become significantly smaller or even be eliminated, and you will also have an increasing amount of demands on your attention. The demands on your attention will most likely not be at a lower level than they are during your college years, until you hit retirement age. The exciting part about this time in your life is it is a chance to find out who you are. It also is a chance to establish your vision for your life. With all of this in mind, it is important that you use this opportunity to start building habits that will help you navigate the demands on your attention as you are pursuing your vision. Now is always the best time to move forward in building positive habits for your future.

As I mentioned earlier, I did not take full advantage of this opportunity to build a foundation for positive habits while I was at Baylor, so my pursuit of my vision was delayed. Not only was my pursuit of my vision delayed because I still needed to spend my initial Post-Baylor years forming the habits necessary to sustain my vision, my pursuit was delayed because the demands on my attention increased dramatically as I left Baylor and started my professional career. If I had gotten married and/or had children before my mid-20s, my pursuit of my vision would have been delayed even further. This is because your spouse’s and your children’s responsibilities become your own responsibilities when you enter into marriage and parenthood.

In addition to seeing how not focusing on building positive habits in my initial adult years affected my own life, I have seen how this has negatively affected the lives of many others. For the past 10 years, I have worked with adults experiencing homelessness and other forms of poverty. Even though there are many aspects of life that are beyond the control of those experiencing poverty, there are many things in a person’s life that a person can control if they pay attention to building a foundation for positive habits as soon as possible. A couple of the central themes that I see in adults living in poverty is that they did not start paying attention to their savings soon enough and they did not make sure they had a strong support system that would stick with them through unforeseen circumstances. Many of those I have served did not start in poverty, but they fell into poverty because something severe happened in their lives, like a death or a loss of employment, and they did not have a financial safety net to allow them to rebuild or thy did not have a strong support system to help them deal with the emotions of loss.

By bringing up this example, I am not intending to say that you are going to live in poverty if you don’t build positive habits now. I am hoping that this example shows that the decisions that are made in early adult years do matter and do make a big difference later on in life. Whether it is finding yourself living less comfortably in the future or finding yourself not advancing in your dream near as quickly as you would like, the decision to delay building positive habits will have consequences.

Baylor Line, I urge you to Trust the Process, Let Christ In, and to Start Preparing for Tomorrow’s Habits Today. I urge you to find your bench on campus and visit often, to rest in the arms of the Lord and to place the demands of your life at His feet. I promise you that it will be worth your time.