Book Reviews

Reflections The Journey Continues Part 3

by Jerry Pitts
06/30/26
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Chapter 9

Education and Transformation

GED and Early Failure

To understand why returning to school in 2016 carried such deep meaning, I have to go back to the beginning of my educational story. The opportunity to pursue a Graduate Certificate in Pastoral Counseling did not appear in a vacuum. It mattered because of everything that came before it, every experience that had shaped how I saw myself as a learner.

Education had never felt like a natural fit for me. In my early years, school was not a place where I felt confident, capable, or even truly seen. Instead, it often felt like a place of exposure, where my struggles were more visible than my strengths. Rather than building a sense of belonging, those experiences left me questioning whether I had what it took to succeed in an academic environment at all.

By the time I was sixteen, I had already stepped away from high school twice. When I finally took the GED, I barely passed. At that age, I did not have language for what I would later understand about the way I learned. I only knew the feeling of sitting in classrooms and believing that everyone else understood something I could not seem to grasp. I knew what it felt like to be embarrassed by my own struggle. I knew what it felt like to work hard and still feel behind. Over time, those experiences began shaping the way I saw myself. I was not simply a young man who struggled in school. In my own mind, I became someone who believed he was not made for academics.

That belief followed me into my first attempt at college. In my mid-twenties, I tried taking two evening classes—Accounting and Psychology. I wanted to believe I could do it, but the old fear came with me. After the midterms, I quit. I did not even go back to find out my grades because I was certain I had failed. That decision seemed to confirm what I already believed about myself. College was for other people. Serious academic work was beyond me. I had already missed my chance, and I would have to accept whatever future belonged to a man who had not finished high school.

Looking back now, I can see how dangerous that kind of conclusion can be. Failure is painful enough when it happens, but it becomes even more destructive when it turns into identity. For years, I carried labels that were never meant to define me: dropout, poor student, not smart enough, not college material. Those labels did not come from God, but I wore them as though they were true. I did not yet understand that God was not finished with the very place where I felt most defeated.

The first crack in that old identity came during a six-month military school after I had given my life to Christ. The curriculum included algebra and science, and I had never even taken algebra in high school. In the natural sense, I had every reason to be intimidated. But by then, I was beginning to learn that my limitations did not intimidate God. I told Him that if He had gotten me there, He would have to show me what He could do. In the end, I graduated as Honor Graduate with the highest GPA in the class. That moment did not erase every insecurity, but it opened a door in my mind. Maybe the story I had believed about myself was not the final story after all.

Mississippi College and a New Identity

That possibility became a calling when I was thirty-one. By then, I was a husband, a father of four, and a man with responsibilities that could have easily become reasons to play it safe. I still had a GED. I still had a history of academic struggle. I still knew what it felt like to walk into a classroom and wonder whether I belonged there. But I also felt the Lord calling me to pursue a degree in Christian Studies, and once that burden settled in my heart, I could not ignore it.

Janice’s encouragement mattered deeply in that season. She did not remind me of my past failures. She did not ask whether I was sure I could handle it. She simply supported what I believed God was asking me to do. There are moments when another person’s faith becomes a bridge between your fear and your obedience. Janice was that bridge for me. Her belief did not remove the challenge, but it helped me take the first step.

I enrolled at Mississippi College not as a polished student, but as a man trusting God one class at a time. I had to learn how to study, how to think academically, how to keep going when assignments felt intimidating, and how to silence the fear that I would eventually be exposed as someone who did not belong. But God met me there. With His help and Janice beside me, I did more than survive. I began to flourish.

In May 1998, I graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Christian Studies and Philosophy. I even made the dean’s list several times and was in the honors program during my junior and senior years. Even now, I can look back on those details with amazement. The man who had once barely passed the GED was now graduating from college with honors-level work behind him. That was not simply academic progress. It was redemption touching an old wound.

The blessing widened beyond me. Because of the scholarship I received, Janice was able to take six hours a semester for free. She eventually enrolled full time and graduated only a semester behind me with a Bachelor of Science degree in Elementary Education, finishing with Cum Laude honors. That part of the story still brings me joy. God did not only open a door for me. He opened one that blessed our family. Our children watched their parents pursue what once seemed impossible, and in doing so, the Lord began rewriting what our family believed could happen when faith and obedience met opportunity.

That season changed my identity. I did not stop being someone who had struggled in school, but I stopped letting struggle have the final word. Transformation did not erase my past. It redeemed it. The GED, the failed college attempt, the shame, the fear, and the years of believing I was not capable all became part of a larger testimony. God was teaching me that the place of greatest insecurity could become the very place where His grace was most clearly seen.

Master of Arts in Professional Writing

Years later, after Janice’s illness, her homegoing, the long journey through grief, and the new beginning God graciously gave me through Vicki, education found its way back into my life in an unexpected way. It was not something I had planned or pursued on my own. What seemed small at the time became deeply significant. That first program in pastoral counseling stirred something in me that had been dormant, awakening a renewed sense of purpose. It became my first step back into academic life after loss, a step that reminded me God was still opening doors I had not considered walking through.

Once that realization took hold, it began to shift the way I saw the future. I started to wonder what else God might be inviting me to steward. What began as a single opportunity slowly grew into a deeper awareness that this was not just about returning to school—it was about rediscovering purpose, one step at a time. Writing had already become an important part of my life. In 2011, I had written Reflections: My Personal Journey in obedience to God, and that experience had awakened a passion in me. Over time, I came to understand that writing was not merely something I did to remember. It was one of the ways God allowed me to serve. Words could carry testimony. Words could preserve memory. Words could encourage people I might never meet. If writing was part of my calling, then I wanted to take it seriously enough to grow in it.

On April 12, 2019, I enrolled in Liberty University’s Master of Arts in Professional Writing. That decision felt like stewardship. I was not chasing a degree simply to add another credential to my name. I wanted to sharpen a gift God had already placed in me. I knew I could either grow older wishing I had taken writing to another level, or I could prepare myself to use that passion more faithfully. The program gave me structure, discipline, and room to grow as a writer.

Fourteen months after starting that first class, I completed the degree and graduated with high distinction honors. That accomplishment carried emotional weight because it reached back into old places of shame. I remembered report cards from years earlier that had brought frustration and discouragement. Now there was a different report, a different testimony, and a different word being spoken over my educational life. The grades mattered, but the healing mattered more. It felt as though God was redeeming not only the present, but also the younger version of me who had once believed he would never be capable of work like this.

That master’s degree also prepared the way for what came next. The writing program strengthened my confidence, refined my voice, and deepened my sense that education was no longer merely about personal achievement. It was becoming part of my calling. God had used writing to help me tell my story, and now He was using education to help me tell it better, teach more effectively, and prepare for a wider field of service.

Chapter 10

Stepping Out Into the Unknown

From Dream to Doctorate and Beyond

Before I had fully finished celebrating the completion of my master’s degree, another door quietly began to open. On May 15, 2020, I took a step that once would have felt unimaginable—I applied to a Ph.D. program in Education with a focus in Instructional Design and Technology. I believed that my background in technology and my love for writing could serve me well, but more than that, I recognized something deeper unfolding. A man who had once been a high school dropout with a GED was now preparing to step into doctoral-level work. I could not explain that apart from the hand of God.

I began the doctoral journey on August 24, 2020. At the time, I did not yet fully understand how far-reaching that decision would become. What started as an academic pursuit would soon intersect with work, relocation, teaching, research, and a deeper sense of calling. The program itself demanded more than anything I had experienced before. It required discipline, endurance, humility, and steady trust. There were research methods to learn, statistics to face, literature reviews to construct, and expectations that stretched me beyond my comfort. Yet with each course, one truth kept rising to the surface: God had not brought me this far to leave me in the middle of the journey.

Even as I was taking those early steps in the Ph.D. program, another significant change was already unfolding. In 2020, I accepted a position at Liberty University as an Educational Technologist, with a start date of October 1. That decision meant more than starting a new job—it meant moving to Lynchburg, Virginia, while I was still in my first term of doctoral study. The timing itself was a testament to how quickly God was aligning different parts of my life.

Leaving Mississippi was not easy. It was home. It held memories, relationships, and a sense of familiarity that cannot easily be replaced. But obedience required more than comfort. It required trust. And this was not a step I took alone. Vicki walked through that decision with me, fully sharing in the sacrifice and the uncertainty. This would be her first time living outside Mississippi, yet she stepped forward with faith, just as she had encouraged me when the dream first began to reawaken. Her support was not distant; it was lived out in the packing, the transition, and the willingness to begin again.

When October 1 arrived, I stepped onto the campus of Liberty University for my first day of work. I carried a simple prayer with me that morning: that God would calm my nerves, help my life bring Him honor, and give me the courage to walk boldly in the place He had prepared. I also asked Him to help me believe that I belonged there. That prayer mattered, because old insecurities do not always disappear when new opportunities arrive. Sometimes you can step into a blessing and still need God to steady your heart enough to receive it.

There was something profoundly meaningful about that moment. I was not simply beginning a job. I was stepping into the visible result of years of growth, restoration, and perseverance. The former dropout was now working in a university setting while pursuing a doctoral degree within that same institution. It was not lost on me that this had everything to do with grace.

As work and study progressed, I quickly realized how closely they were connected. The alignment was undeniable. I was studying instructional design, learning theory, educational technology, and online learning, while simultaneously working in an environment where those concepts were applied daily. The two did not compete with each other—they strengthened each other. What I learned in my coursework sharpened my thinking at work, and what I experienced through my work deepened my understanding of my studies.

I became involved in instructional projects, faculty training, and digital learning tools such as Canvas and Articulate Storyline. The work was practical, but it carried meaning beyond tasks and responsibilities. It felt like the convergence of everything God had been building in my life—technology, writing, teaching, perseverance, and a desire to help others. For much of my life, those pieces had felt separate. Now they were being drawn together into a unified sense of purpose.

At the same time, the doctoral journey continued to stretch me. Balancing full-time work with rigorous academic expectations required discipline and constant dependence on God. There were long days, challenging assignments, and moments when the path felt demanding. Yet underneath it all, there was a steady awareness that I was walking in something God had prepared.

That season taught me something I had encountered before but now understood more deeply: God rarely reveals the entire path at once. He gives light for the next step. Looking back, I could see how one step had led to another—the link Vicki sent, the certificate, the master’s degree, the doctoral application, the job opportunity, and the move to Virginia. Each step had seemed manageable on its own, but together they formed a path I never could have planned.

By May 2023, after completing thirty-two graduate-level courses, I entered the dissertation phase. The topic I chose was not distant from my own experience: Exploring the Factors that Contribute to the Academic Success of Online Doctoral Students with Learning Disabilities. I wanted to focus not only on struggle, but on success—on what helps students persist, adapt, and reach the finish line. In many ways, I was studying a question I had lived: what enables someone who has struggled to learn to keep going?

In September 2023, my study received Institutional Review Board approval, and the final stage of the journey came into view. Then, in December 2023, after three years, three months, and twenty-six days, I completed the process and became Dr. Jerry Pitts. That moment carried more than personal achievement. It represented God’s faithfulness, the encouragement I had received from Janice, the support and belief Vicki had continued to pour into me, the sacrifices of my parents, the patience of my children, and countless prayers along the way.

When I look across the entire journey—from the GED to early struggles, from returning to school to completing a doctorate—I do not see a simple progression of degrees. I see transformation. I see a life that once felt limited being reshaped by grace. I see God refusing to allow my past to define my future.

And even then, it was clear that the degree itself was not the destination. It became part of something larger—a preparation for service, for leadership, and for continuing to walk in the purpose God had been unfolding step by step.

Chapter 11

Helping Others See Their Own Finish Line

Watching Others Become Doctor

One of the deepest joys of this season came through serving as a Dissertation Chair, watching doctoral students reach their own finish lines. Because I knew what the doctoral journey required, I did not see their completions as simple academic events. I knew how much prayer, perseverance, revision, sacrifice, and unseen endurance stood behind the title Doctor. I knew the moments of doubt, the weight of feedback, and the courage required to keep returning to the work. So, when a student reached the finish line, I understood that I was witnessing more than a completed degree. I was witnessing a testimony.

Walking beside dissertation students gave me a front-row seat to courage. Each student carried a story into the process. They had families, jobs, responsibilities, fears, and reasons the journey mattered. My role was to guide the academic work, but it was also to help them remember that the finish line was still possible. Sometimes that meant explaining a process. Sometimes it meant helping them think through a research decision. Sometimes it meant reminding them that revisions were not rejection. Sometimes it meant simply being steady when they felt uncertain.

When I watched students defend successfully and step into the title they had worked so hard to earn, I felt a kind of joy that was different from the joy of my own completion. My doctorate had been personal, a culmination of God’s faithfulness in my life. Their completions showed me that the grace God had given me was multiplying outward. The finish line I had crossed was now helping others cross theirs. That realization moved me deeply because it showed me that God’s work in a life never has to end with the individual. In His hands, testimony becomes seed.

The opportunity to participate in those moments—through mentoring, guiding, encouraging, and eventually celebrating—felt sacred. To see someone become Doctor is to see years of effort made visible. It is to watch a long, hidden process step into the light. It is to stand close enough to understand that the ceremony is only the surface of something much deeper. Behind the title is a journey. Behind the journey is a person. Behind the person is a story only God fully knows.

Left to Right: Kathy Vaughan, Taylor Moreau, and Jennifer Knowlton on graduation day 5/14/2026. I am standing in the background like a proud papa.

Those experiences changed how I understood success. I had once prayed and worked to complete my own degree. Now I found myself rejoicing because others were completing theirs. That was a different kind of fulfillment. It was not about my title anymore. It was about seeing God use my story to strengthen someone else’s endurance. The mentor’s joy is not smaller than the student’s joy. In some ways, it is wider, because it carries gratitude for what God has done in more than one life.

Teaching in Higher Education

While dissertation chairing opened one door of service, teaching opened another. It felt as though the Lord was widening the calling in a way that connected directly to everything He had already been building in me. I had spent years as a learner, years as a writer, years working with technology, years helping others grow, and now those threads were coming together. Teaching was not separate from the journey. It was one of the fruits of it.

One of the opportunities that stirred me deeply was teaching for the University of Lynchburg in its graduate program in Instructional Design and Technology. The course, Technology and Adult Learners, felt like a natural fit because I had lived so much of that subject. I knew what it meant to be an adult learner balancing work, family, calling, and academic demands. I knew what it meant to rely on technology not as a luxury, but as a lifeline for learning. I knew what it meant to discover that the right tool, the right strategy, and the right encouragement could help a student persist when the road became difficult.

Designing and teaching that course gave me a chance to pour my own experience into a learning environment for others. I was no longer only consuming education. I was helping shape it. Building assignments, thinking through readings, creating instructional materials, and considering how adult learners would experience the course all reminded me that teaching is an act of care. A course is never merely a container for content. It is a path someone else must walk. If I could make that path clearer, more meaningful, and more supportive, then I was serving students in a way that reflected what God had done for me.

Teaching at Liberty University carried its own unique significance, but my classroom was not defined by a physical space. I taught educational technology courses online, meeting students in digital environments rather than residential classrooms. Even so, the sense of calling remained just as strong. To engage with learners through course shells, discussion boards, assignments, and virtual interaction—at the same university where I had studied, worked, struggled, grown, and completed my doctorate—felt deeply full-circle. The man who once questioned whether he belonged in academic spaces was now helping others navigate them in a different, but equally meaningful, format.

Courses in instructional technology, online learning, and design gave me the opportunity to connect content with calling in a real and practical way. I was not simply delivering information. I was helping students understand how these tools and ideas could shape their own work, their teaching, and even their ministries. The online environment became a place where learning could still be personal, purposeful, and transformative.

What I valued most about teaching was not limited to the subject matter itself, though I cared deeply about it. What mattered most was witnessing growth. I saw uncertainty begin to give way to confidence. I saw students take risks, develop new skills, and begin to believe in their ability to succeed. Even through screens and written interaction, those moments were real.

In that sense, teaching became another form of testimony. Each course, each interaction, each assignment became an opportunity for what God had done in my life to quietly serve someone else’s journey. I was not just teaching content—I was walking alongside learners as they took their next steps forward.

The Finish Line as a Place to Turn Around

By this point, I could see a pattern in what God was doing. He had brought me through grief, awakened a dream through Vicki’s encouragement, restored my educational path, moved us to Lynchburg, helped me complete the doctorate, and then placed me in roles where I could help others learn, persist, and finish. None of those chapters stood alone. They were connected. What once looked like private struggle had become preparation for public service.

That realization reshaped the way I thought about every earlier difficulty. My learning struggles mattered because they helped me understand students who doubt themselves. My writing journey mattered because it helped me communicate and teach. My technology background mattered because it gave me tools to support learning. My grief mattered because it deepened my compassion. My doctoral journey mattered because it gave me credibility with students still climbing that mountain. God had wasted none of it.

The more I helped students, the more I understood that I no longer needed to prove I belonged. That old question had lost much of its power. God had answered it not only by helping me finish, but by allowing me to help others finish. Somewhere along the way, I moved from trying to find my place to helping others believe they had one. That shift was one of the most beautiful transformations of this season. It changed the way I saw myself, my work, and my calling.

In the end, the greatest gift was not merely crossing the finish line myself. It was discovering that, by God’s grace, I had become the kind of person who could help someone else see theirs. That is what this season has really been about. Not titles. Not achievement for achievement’s sake. Not even teaching or dissertation chairing as professional accomplishments. It has been about multiplication—God taking one restored dream and using it to breathe courage into others.

The more I helped students reach their finish lines, the more I understood that my own story was becoming useful in ways I had not expected. God was not only allowing me to mentor students. He was teaching me how to turn the very places where I had once struggled into a handrail for others. That handrail began with the part of my story I once might have preferred to hide: I had struggled to learn.

Chapter 12

Calling Greater Than the Dream

The Leap into Leadership

What began as a personal dream had grown into a responsibility larger than I had imagined. It became the doorway into a wider calling, where my story was no longer only helping one student at a time but beginning to shape broader conversations about learning, persistence, and support. That is where leadership entered the story—not as a pursuit of visibility, but as an enlarged form of stewardship. The same God who had taken my struggle and turned it into a handrail for others was now asking me to carry that handrail into wider spaces.

For much of my life, I would never have imagined myself in a leadership role in higher education. I had spent too many years believing the old labels spoken over my academic life. Dropout. GED. Not college material. Those words had once felt like limits. Yet God had patiently rewritten every one of them. He had led me back to college, restored my confidence through graduate study, carried me through a doctorate, and opened doors to teaching and dissertation mentoring. With each step, the dream became less about what I could accomplish and more about how I could serve.

That is why being promoted to Assistant Director for the Center for Teaching Excellence felt so significant. It was not merely a new title. It was a visible reminder that God does not measure a future by the weakness of a beginning. He does not call the qualified in the way the world often defines qualification. He qualifies the called. I knew too much about my own story to see that role as ordinary advancement. It felt like grace taking another form—a reminder that God had been preparing me through every unlikely chapter.

The new role represented trust. It trusted me to teach, to support faculty, to help strengthen learning environments, and to contribute to the development of others. It also asked me to lead in ways that remained rooted in the lessons God had already taught me. I could not lead as someone detached from struggle. I had to lead as someone who remembered what it felt like to need encouragement, structure, patience, and belief. The leadership God was growing in me had to remain close to the ground, close to people, and close to the testimony that had shaped it.

I also knew I was not stepping into that enlarged calling alone. Vicki’s support remained one of God’s clearest gifts in this season. She had been there when the dream woke back up. She had walked with me through the move to Lynchburg, the doctoral journey, the long workdays, the teaching opportunities, and the growing responsibilities. Her encouragement had helped me take one step after another. Every new door carried the quiet evidence of her faithfulness beside me.

New Courses, New Doors, New Trust

As the calling widened, new doors continued to open in teaching and faculty development. Those doors did not feel random. They felt connected to the entire road God had been building. The courses I taught, the faculty I supported, the instructional projects I helped shape, and the training opportunities I helped develop all grew from the same soil: a life changed by learning, restored through grace, and called to help others grow.

Teaching had already shown me how deeply aligned I felt when I could help students connect ideas to practice. Whether I was teaching instructional technology, adult learning, online learning, or design, the work gave me a place to bring together experience and calling. I had been an adult learner. I had depended on technology to support my own persistence. I had lived the tension of work, family, faith, and study. Those experiences gave me more than content knowledge. They gave me empathy, and empathy shaped the way I taught.

Faculty development widened that same calling. Supporting faculty meant thinking beyond my own classes and asking how I could help others create better learning experiences for their students. It meant helping instructors use tools well, design courses thoughtfully, communicate clearly, and support learners with wisdom and care. That work mattered because every faculty member strengthened could, in turn, strengthen many students. Leadership began to look like multiplication.

The work also required trust. Each new course, project, training effort, and responsibility asked me to depend on God again. It would have been easy to look at open doors and assume that confidence should now come naturally. But the truth is that every enlarged assignment still required prayer. I still needed the Lord to steady me. I still needed wisdom. I still needed humility. I still needed to remember that the doors were not mine to boast about; they were His to steward.

That posture helped me receive the new opportunities without losing sight of their purpose. The goal was never simply to become busier, more visible, or more professionally established. The goal was faithfulness. If God opened a course, I wanted to teach it well. If He opened a leadership responsibility, I wanted to carry it with care. If He placed faculty, students, or colleagues in front of me, I wanted to serve them in a way that reflected His grace.

Leadership and the Enlarged Calling

The more responsibility God placed in my hands, the more I understood that leadership is not first about authority. It is about service. It is about helping others flourish. It is about creating conditions where people can learn, grow, persist, and become more confident in the work God has placed before them. In that sense, leadership was not a departure from advocacy. It was advocacy widened. The same heart that wanted struggling students to know they could keep going now wanted faculty and learners alike to have the support they needed to do their work well.

This enlarged calling also taught me that leadership must be shaped by memory. I needed to remember the student I had once been—the one who struggled, doubted, quit, returned, and slowly learned to believe again. I needed to remember the grieving husband who was not sure what life would look like after loss. I needed to remember the adult learner balancing responsibilities and deadlines. Those memories kept leadership from becoming performance. They kept it human. They reminded me that behind every role, course, project, or initiative are people carrying stories I may not fully know.

As Assistant Director, I began to see how the different strands of my life were converging into a broader ministry of teaching and leadership. Writing helped me tell the truth. Technology helped me build and support learning. Research helped me understand persistence. Teaching helped me guide students. Faculty development helped me strengthen those who strengthen others. Advocacy helped me remember who might be struggling quietly in the room. Leadership gathered those strands and asked me to steward them faithfully.

That realization humbled me. I had once prayed for a chance to use my gifts, to write, to teach, to make a difference, and to become the man God intended me to be. God answered those prayers, but then He expanded them beyond what I had first imagined. The dream had once been about finding my place. Then it became about helping students find theirs. Now it was becoming about helping shape spaces where many people could grow. That was larger than the dream I started with, and it required a deeper dependence on God than ever before.

I do not see this season as arrival. I see it as stewardship in motion. The calling keeps growing because God keeps placing people, needs, and opportunities in front of me. Every title, course, workshop, mentoring conversation, and leadership responsibility is another reminder that the story is still being written. And the only way I know to walk forward is the same way I have walked every other chapter: with open hands, a surrendered heart, and trust in the God who has never wasted a single step.

When Leadership Became Service

The work was no longer limited to my own classes or my own students. It was widening into course design, faculty support, teaching excellence, mentoring, and institutional service. That kind of leadership does not replace personal ministry; it multiplies it.

The more I served, the more I understood that leadership born from grace must remain generous. It must remember that people need more than direction. They need encouragement, clarity, patience, and sometimes someone who believes in them before they can fully believe in themselves. That had been true in my life again and again. My mother, Janice, Vicki, mentors, colleagues, and leaders had all helped me keep going at different points along the way. Now God was giving me opportunities to offer that same kind of steady encouragement to others.

That is why this season matters in the larger movement of the memoir. The story began with God deepening my life after the first book. It moved through illness, grief, healing, new love, education, relocation, scholarship, teaching, and advocacy. Now the work was widening again. Leadership became another expression of the same testimony: God takes what has been redeemed in us and asks us to use it for the good of others.

Even so, leadership was not the only place where God was teaching me about belonging, identity, and restoration. While my professional calling was widening through teaching and faculty development, another part of my life was opening in a very different but deeply connected way. Outside the classroom, God had also given me a passion for family history, DNA research, and helping people recover missing pieces of their stories. Whether I was helping students find confidence or helping families find names, the theme was becoming clear: God kept placing me in the work of helping people find where they belonged.

That is where the next chapter turns. The enlarged calling did not stop at classrooms, courses, or leadership roles. It also reached into family memory, hidden stories, and the sacred work of finding people. Long before I fully understood it as ministry, genealogy became another way God allowed me to help people find where they belonged.

Chapter 13

Finding People, Finding Purpose

Discovering Family History

Long before I fully understood genealogy as ministry, it became another way God allowed me to help people find where they belonged. In my professional life, that often meant helping students and faculty grow with confidence. But outside the classroom, the same theme began appearing in a very different form. I found myself drawn into family history, DNA research, and the sacred work of recovering names, stories, and connections that had been hidden or forgotten.

At first, it did not seem like a calling. It seemed like curiosity. In 2014, I began helping my sister, Debbie, trace our family tree, and what started as a simple effort to learn more about where we came from quickly became something deeper. One record led to another. One question opened another question. A name on a page became more than a name. A census record, a birth date, a marriage license, a cemetery listing, or an old photograph could suddenly feel like a doorway into a life that had been waiting to be remembered. I began to understand that family history is not merely a hobby. It is a way of restoring continuity.

The more I searched, the more I realized that people are shaped not only by the lives they have lived, but also by the stories they have inherited—or the stories they have been denied. Some families carry names and memories clearly from one generation to the next. Others carry silence. An unknown parent, a missing branch, an adoption, an unexplained relationship, or a story no one was willing or able to tell can leave a person with questions that reach far deeper than curiosity. Those questions touch identity. They touch belonging. They touch the need to know where one fits in the larger story.

That was what drew me in. I loved the discovery process, but I also loved what discovery could make possible. Genealogy gave me a way to help restore pieces of a story. It allowed me to take scattered fragments and begin arranging them into something meaningful. In that sense, it felt strangely familiar. God had done that in my own life. He had taken broken pieces, confusing chapters, grief, failure, and unexpected grace and turned them into testimony. Family history allowed me to watch a similar kind of restoration unfold in the lives of others.

After I took a DNA test, the work widened even more. It was as though a door opened and the room behind it was much larger than I expected. DNA did not replace traditional research, but it gave new clues and new possibilities. It connected people who might never have found one another through documents alone. It revealed patterns, relationships, and shared ancestry that could help answer questions families had carried for years. The deeper I went, the more I came to see that this work was not only about the past. It was about healing something in the present.

DNA, Mystery, and Missing Names

DNA research taught me that a mystery in a family tree is rarely just a puzzle. It is often a silence with a person attached to it. Sometimes the missing name belongs to a birth parent. Sometimes it belongs to a grandparent no one could verify. Sometimes it belongs to an ancestor whose story was distorted by time, secrecy, shame, or incomplete records. Whatever the case, the absence can shape people more than they realize. A missing name can become a gap in identity, and filling that gap can bring both clarity and emotion.

The process required patience. DNA matches rarely hand over complete answers by themselves. They offer clues. Those clues have to be compared with traditional records, family trees, obituaries, census entries, newspapers, cemetery information, and sometimes oral histories that must be handled carefully. One match may point toward a surname. Another may confirm a geographic pattern. Another may connect two branches that appear unrelated at first. Slowly, through careful comparison, the story begins to take shape. That slow unfolding became part of what I loved about the work. It required discipline, humility, and respect for the people behind the data.

The more cases I encountered, the more I understood that every missing name represented real people, real choices, real pain, and real hope. Genealogy, especially when DNA is involved, is never only about proving a connection. It is about honoring the lives behind the connection. It is about remembering that behind every chart and match list there are human beings longing to understand where they came from and how they belong.

Helping Adoptees and Families Reconnect

The part of this work that moved me most deeply was helping adoptees and families reconnect. I began noticing how many adults were searching for birth parents, siblings, or missing family lines. Many of them were not looking to disturb anyone’s life or rewrite anyone’s history. They simply wanted to know. They wanted a name, a face, a medical history, a story, or the chance to understand a piece of themselves that had always felt hidden. That longing deserves to be treated with tenderness.

Helping in those searches felt like sacred work. When someone invites you into that kind of question, they are not merely asking for research help. They are opening a deeply personal part of their life. There can be hope in the search, but there can also be fear. What if the answer cannot be found? What if the answer is painful? What if the person they find does not want connection? What if the truth changes the way they understand their story? Those questions make the work delicate. It requires compassion as much as skill.

Over time, I was privileged to help with cases involving adoptees and family mysteries, including stories connected to people such as Hal, Amy, Larry, Lisa, Alison, Camille, Gilda, Betty, Ross, Kristi, and Olivia. Each story was different, and each had to be handled on its own terms. Some searches led to birth parents. Some verified fathers. Some revealed family connections people had never known. Some brought joy, while others carried complexity. But all of them reminded me that family history is never abstract. It lives inside real people who have carried real questions.

I was also grateful for partners in this work, including Quinna Cooper and my sister, Debbie McCain, whose dedication helped bring long-awaited answers to people seeking connection and truth. Their involvement reminded me again that meaningful restoration often happens through community. Just as no one reaches an academic finish line alone, no one uncovers some of these family mysteries alone either. It takes patience, collaboration, careful research, and a willingness to walk gently with people through whatever the truth reveals.

Truth, Belonging, and Restoration

The deeper I went into genealogy, the more I realized that truth and belonging are closely connected. People can live with unanswered questions, but unanswered questions often leave emotional rooms unfinished. To find a name, confirm a relationship, or understand a missing branch does not solve every wound, but it can give a person ground beneath their feet. It can restore narrative. It can help someone say, this is part of where I came from, and because I know it, I understand myself a little more clearly.

That is why this work belongs in the larger story of my life. On the surface, genealogy may seem far removed from teaching, dissertation chairing, pastoral counseling, or leadership. But to me, the connection is clear. In every one of those spaces, God has placed me near people who are trying to find something: confidence, direction, healing, identity, persistence, or belonging. Whether I am helping a doctoral student believe the finish line is still possible or helping someone identify a missing family connection, the heartbeat is similar. I am helping people take hold of a story they can stand on.

Genealogy also taught me reverence for complexity. Not every discovery is simple. Not every truth arrives without pain. Families are human, and human stories include love, loss, secrecy, mistakes, courage, and grace. That is why truth must be handled carefully. The goal is not to expose for the sake of exposure. The goal is restoration where restoration is possible, clarity where clarity has been absent, and dignity for every person whose life becomes part of the story.

In many ways, family history became one more expression of the same truth God had been teaching me all along: He wastes nothing. He can use old records, DNA matches, family stories, unanswered questions, and even painful silences to bring understanding and connection. He can take what feels scattered and begin to gather it. He can take mystery and slowly bring it into the light. And when that happens, people often receive more than information. They receive a piece of themselves.

Finding people became another way of finding purpose. It widened my understanding of ministry, service, and legacy. I had already learned that a life story can become a handrail for others. Through genealogy, I learned that family stories can do the same. But names and connections are only part of what we leave behind. The deeper work is preserving the stories themselves—the memories, testimonies, writings, art, and words that continue speaking after we are gone. That realization brings me back to one of the oldest callings God placed in my life: writing.