The Call That Changes Everything

The call came before the clarity. It always does.

Student Grace Wanjiku had held other plans before attending the Ashland Theological Seminary: horses, accounting, a quieter life in Kenya. What broke through was a sense, shaped through hardship and confirmed through prayer, that she was supposed to be here. She left her young son behind during COVID, crossed the Atlantic, and arrived on the Seminary campus on a July 4th weekend to find it nearly silent, stood in the quiet and asked God a version of the same question: is this why you called me here?

Dr. Yvonne Glass could have told her yes. She walks the seminary grounds on purpose, past the prayer garden, past the fountain, into the kind of stillness she calls a spiritual discipline. The role she holds as executive dean arrived nearly a decade ahead of when she had imagined it, and she said yes before she felt ready. That, she says, is the lesson she keeps returning to: don't limit God.

What holds their conversation together is the same thing that carried both of them through: people who walked beside them and believed before they could believe it themselves. Dr. Glass names four. Grace names three, including a biology professor still teaching in her seventies whose words she has never stopped carrying. With God, expect the unexpected. He will never waste anything you receive. At Ashland, the mentors are not incidental to the formation. They are how it happens.