TRANSITIONS

I had just arrived in my old college town for a Christmas time visit with my long-distance boyfriend (who became my husband) when God spoke in my life about transitions. At that juncture, I was a professor at another college, and as I got ready for church that Sabbath morning, my college spirit watch, with the college name on the front of it, dramatically broke and popped off my wrist, as though shot off from a place it no longer belonged.

At church later that morning, the pastor preached about transitions. “God can reach us more readily,” he said, “when we are in a time of transition. Transitions are often uncomfortable, but that sense of imbalance makes us more aware, more ready to learn, more available for God to move us where He wants us to go.”

Well! I was getting a sense of what the year ahead might hold.

Indeed, the next year held transition for me. I got married and acquired three stepchildren. I moved to where my new husband lived. I took up a new job, for the first time leading in higher education administration. And through it all, God was at work, guiding my life in ways I couldn’t see until I was down the road. These were all opportunities for rich rewards and the strengthening of my heart towards God.

AIIAS is a place of constant transition and opportunity. Students are ever coming and going from this institution, which means transition for them, and transition for those of us who stay. Yet, as that pastor preached long ago, transitions are an opportunity for growth and God’s work in our lives.

As I emerged from the auditorium a few nights ago following vespers, I encountered three seminary students on the doorstep in quiet conversation together. One of them, by the time you read this, will have graduated and left to pastor a college church in his country—yet another transition. “Do you think AIIAS has been helpful for your ministry?” I asked them. Their faces lit up in wonder at the question. “Oh, YES!” they chorused emphatically. “You can’t even imagine,” one of them exclaimed. They told me that their study at AIIAS had completely transformed their thinking, their views, their approach. They are eager to put that to work in their home country.

We are deeply grateful for the work of transition that AIIAS accomplishes in the lives of people. Transition to a broader worldview. Transition to deeper ways of thinking. Transition to wiser ways of leadership. Transition to a more diverse group of friends. Transition to new and more effective approaches in one’s own family relationships. Transition to wiser understandings of people, and of God’s Word.

“See?” God says in Isaiah 43:19, “I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the wilderness and streams in the wasteland.”

Let us not waste the opportunity of a transition.

Ginger Ketting-Weller, Ph.D., is the president of the Adventist International Institute of Advanced Studies (AIIAS).

By Ginger Ketting-Weller