Inspire, Spring 2008

In September of 1983, around 3 o’clock in the afternoon, I sat on the side of Interstate 70 in Columbus, plucking single strands of grass from the ground like petals from a daisy. I love Ohio. I hate Ohio. Cedarville is the place for me. I should go back to New Jersey. I know what I’m doing. I don’t know what I’m doing. As I watched my dad change the tire on our Buick Electra, I wondered whether God was sending me a sign: Flat tire = Go back. Or whether Satan was just toying with me: Flat tire = Trick to make you think you should go back. But once my dad tightened the last lug nut and we hopped into the car, only the last hour of our trip stood between me and the start of my college education. Deciding to attend school 10 hours away wasn’t easy. My public high school counselor thought I was crazy to go to a small Baptist college she’d never heard of. “Go to Wake Forest if you want a religious school,” she’d insisted. But I had my mind made up. In hindsight, of course, I can honestly say now that following my best friend to college wasn’t exactly the best reason on which to base a college decision. I didn’t really know what I was doing. And I certainly never dreamed Cedarville would be the place I’d eventually call home. Gathering for my 20th reunion in the Dixon Ministry Center (DMC) last fall, my husband John ’87 and I explained how long we’ve lived here to many friends who hadn’t returned to campus since we’d all graduated in 1987. “What? You never left?” “You live here ? In the cornfields?” I had to admit the truth: The rural landscape has grown on me. I no longer think of Les Nessman on WKRP in Cincinnati when I hear hog reports in the news; I think instead of my friend Doug whose swine each year yield the pearls his family must live on. And dry spells in July yield prayers for him and others whose pockets will empty if the seeds of corn and soybean can’t sprout the green they need to pay their bills. I even write poetry about this idiosyncratic, Ohio life. So I have to admit the other truth, too: I love this place. Most days, anyway. I can remember working with Andy Wilson ’87, then- president of the Student Government Association (SGA), in the SGA office near the end of our senior year. We were reminiscing, as seniors tend to do, when Andy said to me, “I’ve loved every minute of my time here. Every minute.” And I agreed. We loved basketball games, Cedar What? , and Young’s. We loved our friends and classes and the ways both challenged our thinking. We loved Dr. Dixon and Mrs. Dixon, Dean (Don) Rickard ’58 and Mrs. Knauff, Jim Phipps ’68 and Deb (Bush) Haffey ’68, Mr. Spencer and Chuck McKinney. I must admit, we loved DeGarmo and Key, Petra, and Keith Green, too. And we loved chapel. To this day, we can still recite Dr. Dixon’s oft-repeated nuggets of advice: “Take ‘quit’ out of your vocabulary.” “Life is 10 percent what happens to you, 90 percent how you respond to what happens to you.” “Don’t trade a moment of pleasure for a lifetime of regret.” We viewed graduation as a truly bittersweet venture, one that would allow us to pursue our dreams yet one that would close a chapter of our lives that had been everything, and nothing, we’d ever expected. As a resident of Cedarville and eventual professor in the Department of Language and Literature, I’ve seen the school’s changes up close, even as I spent the decade of the ’90s teaching at nearby Wilberforce University. Yet, my fellow alumni couldn’t believe their eyes. Some of what they saw was quite dramatic — a different president in the soft-spoken yet witty person of Dr. Bill Brown; a greater number of women in positions of leadership, like Dr. Pam Diehl Johnson, Cedarville’s first female dean; and the huge brick buildings housing the new chapel, dining hall, theatre, fitness center, and field house, not to mention the Center for Biblical and Theological Studies currently under construction. And some of what they noticed was quite humorous — students in shorts in buildings around campus, music with Cedarville University 11 Then and Now Cedarville by Julie L. (Stackhouse) Moore ’87