At the beginning of 2019, I transferred from Tri-County Technical College (which is near Clemson University) to Toccoa Falls College (which is in Georgia). TFC is a four-year, Christian, liberal arts college in Toccoa, Georgia.

I transferred in as a second semester sophomore and am planning to double major in Mass-Media Communications and Biblical Studies. At TFC, every major offered is supplemented with a required minor in Biblical Studies (30 hours), so I’ll only need to add about two classes to get the double major – i.e. two degrees for the price of one.

TFC has an attendance of about 1500 students, so it’s a fairly small school. This creates a really unique atmosphere where everyone kind of knows each other. Campus is not overly fancy or glorious, but it is really nice – it feels friendly. A lot of the groundskeeing is done by students, the parking lot is small and never full, you can get hot tea in the coffee shop for $1, all my professors know me by name – I guess it feels welcoming in a way that my last college didn’t. I love how every Wednesday at 10 a.m. everyone migrates to chapel. No classes are scheduled over this hour, and the college stops to worship together.

My favorite thing about TFC is the people there. At my old school, unless you went to the cafe with someone, you were probably gonna eat alone. People walking past each other across campus didn’t really acknowledge one another. You could sit beside the same people in class for a whole semester and never really talk to them. It’s been really different here, and I’m really thankful for that. On one of my first days, before I knew anyone, some kids came up to me and invited me to eat lunch with them. Since then, I’ve made lots of great friends. Today, five of them drove to our house for Sunday lunch – it was a party. My family got to see who I hang out with, and my friends got my mom’s wonderful food instead of the campus cafe’s.

The smallness of the college also presents some challenges. The communications department has only two full-time professors and is located in the basement of the guys’ dorm building. The professor who will be teaching most of my classes is on sabbatical this semester, this means I had to take all Bible courses this semester and start major-focused classes in the fall.

I commute to school three days a week. A day for me usually looks like this:

—

8 a.m. – Arrive on campus and do homework in the coffee shop…or sleep in.

9 a.m. – Foundations of Spiritual Formation (with Professor Killian)

10 a.m. – Chapel on Wednesdays…discussion group otherwise

11 a.m. – Introduction to Old Testament (with Dr. Turner…my favorite class)

12 a.m. – Eat lunch in the cafeteria

1 p.m. – Introduction to New Testament (with Dr. Herringer)

2 p.m. – Introduction to Theology (with Dr. Vena)

3 p.m. – Come home…or do homework in the coffee shop

—

On Tuesdays, I usually go to a coffee shop called Brews on the Alley. This is my set time to catch up on class reading and homework. They play really good music and have a great tea selection. There’s a kid named Elijah who comes in with his mom on Tuesdays – he sometimes asks me to play chess with him. He’s five years old and incredibly bright.

And on Thursdays I work at Dienner’s Kitchen as a waiter. This is where I make money to buy gas and food and things like that.

And about a month ago, this girl agreed to go out with me. She lets me drive her places in my car and doesn’t get upset when I take wrong turns. She’s pretty cool.

And that is what’s up with me.

The other day my good friend Andrew Martin told me to check out Andrew Yang, a 2020 presidential candidate. Martin is someone with whom I love talking politics and all things abstract. He’s great at helping me understand ideas, and he’s currently attending Clemson University to become an structural engineer. Tonight we sat down and talked about what makes Yang such an interesting candidate – specifically his idea of the government giving every American $1000 per month.

In our conversation we hash out the pros and cons of the UBI, and Andrew tells me who he’ll be voting for in the next election.

I’m about half-way through Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” a novel from which I’ve gathered, if nothing else, that the French sure like their wine. They’ll stop twice for drinks on the way to dinner where they’ll drink again before heading to a drinking party. They speak a language of wine and liturgically share the communion of smashed grapes as a fundamental part of their lives. I was in Florida for the past week, and I’ve noticed how fundamental these shared communions are in holding us up –- binding us together.

Pinecraft, in Sarasota Florida, is a very unique place. You have hundreds, probably thousands, of very conservative Christians coming together in a very specific location every winter. One of my friends observed that it’s borderline cultish. Throughout the rest of the year, these people live within their communities as a very small minority in the country. You’ve got little pockets of people living, dressing, and existing in a way the nation as a whole finds very strange. Heck, I find it pretty strange. But then for a week or a month, they congregate into a new society, one where they’ve built the institutions and run them, where the world operates on their terms. They are no longer minorities but princes and citizens in a kingdom of about 10 sq. miles. An Amish boy walks down the street or sits in the bleachers wearing homemade clothes and rocking a bowl cut over crocks –- but now so is mostly everyone else. Temporary solidarity.

I think it’s something of an escape, but I don’t think that it’s wrong…I go down there every year. I think it’s a quaint little vision of heaven on earth. Still, whenever you have hundreds and thousands of people sharing time and space, there are necessarily differences and uniqueness. So then emerges these shared languages that I’ve seen.

*Wine

After arriving in this pseudo promised land, I realize the air-chuck fittings on my bike’s flat tires were missing. So on Thursday I rolled it over to the driveway where a sign proclaimed “Bike rentals and repairs.” Inside the garage, which had been converted into a workshop,  I found Sam and three other Amish people watching him work on a three-wheeler. Sam aired up my tires and then said my wheel bearing was loose and tightened it up too. I had figured on being there about two minutes instead of twelve, so I hadn’t even brought my wallet. (I also hadn’t asked him to tighten the bearing.) I shook his hand and peddled happily away. That night about 12:30 a.m., inspired by Hemmingway’s characters in the book, I left a thank-you note taped to a bottle of sparkling apple-cider on his front step. I chose Martinelli’s sparkling over money because that stuff is amazing regardless of what you believe about righteousness – and because I was humored by the idea of an Amish man opening his door to find a bottle that looked like wine. Money is perhaps the commonest of languages, and I could have left that. But it’s so tasteless. Gifting rich people with money is like paying a mechanic with a wrench – the only thing in the world he obviously doesn’t need from you. But a bottle of bubbly…

*Ball.

Sam fixed my bike in the afternoon. That night I peddled down to the park where the locals congregate until precisely 9:38 p.m. when someone turns off the lights and kills the party. I stopped by the basketball court and saw something wonderful and hilarious. It was a game of half-court, three on three. They were kids about 12 – 15 years old. But there, as one of the six, was an Amish man. He was probably 60 years old with a full beard, homemade pants, suspenders, and a green shirt –- ballin’ out. They weren’t talking much, only battling for position, raising their arms to call for the ball, driving to the basket, squaring their hips to defend, rebounding, laying it back up off the glass. And this old guy was holding his own. Sports are sets rules and objectives where very little verbal language is required, and it doesn’t matter what anyone looks like if they can pull their weight, do their job, play their position. You don’t need to hold much in common to share something. And if three on three is that something, then you ought to play.

*Rock n Roll.

The reason my friends and I go to Florida is mainly for the outdoor volleyball tournament that happens every year. It is the mother of all Mennonite/Amish gatherings with about fifty teams and literally thousands of people – playing, watching, milling around. I played on a team called the volley-llamas and had never met four out of five of them. But everyone there has mutual friends. The night after the tournament, I found myself crammed in a tiny living room with about ten friends, new and old, from South Carolina, Indiana, and Missouri. And we rocked and rolled to every childhood song we could think of. I’m not talking about singing along; I mean raise the neighbors from their handcrafted furniture jamming. It was pretty much the best night I’ve had in a while.

It’s crazy how much music we share in common in spite of growing up thousands of miles apart. It’s transcendent. When someone played TobyMac’s “Lose My Soul” in that cracker-box living room, it wasn’t like singing along to a vaguely remembered tune. If you were born when we were born, that song is something that made you who you are. And somehow you know every phrase, MR. FRANKLIN STEP UP TO THE MIC SIR, even though you probably haven’t actually heard it in years. Music is powerful in that I already share something with the millions I’ve never met but who’ve heard and loved Coldplay or Maroon 5 or U2 or Springsteen or Fountains of Wayne or whatever.

It can be tempting to disassociate with people because they look or speak differently than you do. But as long as Walmart sells Martinelli’s sparkling cider, you can still leave it on doorsteps. Where two or more are gathered, you can play half-court basketball. And as long as “Lose My Soul” is available on Spotify, you can pretend to be Kirk Franklin alongside anyone born within ten years of you. These are simple, deep languages binding us together. In 2019, I hope to remember that we don’t have to hold much in common to share something. And if we can, we really ought to.

—

This video depicts a Wednesday at Tri-County.

As of Tuesday a week a ago, I have given my last presentation at Tri-County Technical. I have climbed and descended those great flights of steps for the last time.

Tri-County is something of a city on a hill. I’ve told friends that if disaster strikes, that’s where I’m headed. Whether it’s an invasion or a flood, Tech is something of a fortress – easily defended and about two hundred feet above parking level. And I was just a little sad to leave her for the last time.

After I graduated from high-school, I spent the next two years entertaining thoughts about higher education. Deep down, in about three places, I was always afraid of it. I was afraid that even though I got good grades at my old school, I would be inadequate as a college student. I was worried that it would cost a fortune. And finally, I wasn’t easily able to see its practical purpose.

Inadequacy

I was afraid that maybe I’d go to college, try as hard as I could, and just not be able to succeed. Basically, I was afraid that I wasn’t smart enough to be educated – which is really silly if you think about it. I don’t know if other people feel like that – I tend to feel that way a lot. But it didn’t last long. It became apparent pretty quickly that, as a general rule, the kids who did well were the ones who were willing to try. I think anyone with self-discipline and the ability to read can do quite well at Tri-County. It’s really a lot like high-school, except that no one calls your parents if you don’t read the material, do homework, or show up to class. As it turns out that’s actually more than most kids are willing to do. My classes were not all easy, but I think that as a you can succeed here if you want to.

Money

When I first started applying and getting things in order to start at Tri-County, the whole financial thing was kind of indefinite. As it turned out, I never ended up paying any tuition. The first two semesters I spent a couple hundred bucks on books. But I learned that the South Carolina Life Scholarship is available to anyone who graduates high-school in S.C., becomes a full-time student, and can maintain a 3.0 GPA (or an 80). Since I was really unsure about what degree I was going to get, I was afraid I’d be sinking money into wasted time. After three semesters, I’ve probably spent about $600 on books, parking decals, and transcript fees. I got the Life Scholarship and applied to the general list of available scholarships and got one of those each year. College thus far has cost me about as much as having a gym membership and a Netflix account for 15 months.

Pragmatism.

My experience in my community and culture has taught me to be very pragmatic. This means that everything serves a definite purpose, is undertaken to produce a result. We often read the Bible looking for life lessons: how does this apply to my life…what is the moral of the story…where’s the important principle? Going to school has helped me unlearn some of this mindset.

There are different views about education and its purpose. Some see it as a pragmatic means to a monetary ends. Go to school, get that piece of paper, then can get out in the real world and make good money. I think that’s a pretty lousy ideology. It’s also why there were so many lazy, pathetic students sitting beside me. Education was their means to monetary ends, nothing more.

There is another view of education, the one held by Socrates and the one I prefer, which says education is a turning of the mind, a re-direction. Socrates calls it a turn from becoming and towards being.

“The power to learn is present in everyone’s soul and the instrument with which each learns is like an eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light without turning the whole body…until it is able to study (the brightest of things), namely, the good. Education is not the craft of putting sight into the soul. It takes for granted that sight is already there but that it isn’t turned the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries to redirect it appropriately” – Socrates (The Republic).

Some Christians get squeamish because they think going to college will fill your head with false information – you’ll get brainwashed by atheists. I was surprised to find that most professors were intent not on teaching me what to think, but instead, how to think. Most of my professors were quite reserved in giving their beliefs out. They were teaching to equip students to think well about important things, not indoctrinating them. Except of course for math classes – they’re pretty dogmatic.

So then my fears and hesitations, about insufficiency, money, and purpose, have proved to be mostly unfounded. It’s been worth it.

This spring, I’ll be going to Toccoa Falls College over in Georgia. There are many things about Tri-County I shall miss – the dried out burgers and flights of stairs are not among them.

—

If you ever have to choose between classes, I’d be happy to give advice. Here’s what I’ve taken, from most to least favorite:

(1.) Sociology (2.) Philosophy. (3.) English 202 (4.) English 101 (5.) English 102 (6.) Spanish (7.) Psychology (8.) Early American History (9.) Music Appreciation (10.) Speech (11.) Western Civ. (12.) Psychics/Chemistry (13.) Technology in Society (14.) Probability and Statistics (15.) Astronomy.

—