September 9, 2002 - Chapel Address

Are you Ready to Travel?

May the words of my mouth and meditations and thoughts of our hearts here today be acceptable in your sight oh Lord our strength and our Redeemer.  Amen.  

He was an athlete and very competitive.  He played basketball and baseball in high school; he was a diehard Cubs fan.  His friends said that he wasn’t aggressive, but he was very determined and he stood up for his own rights and for the rights of other people.  He attended Wheaton College, our sister school in the Chicago area, where he met his wife in a senior seminar class.  He graduated in 1991 and now at the age of 32 lived with 2 children, 2 boys, David - 3, and Drew - 1, and his wife, Lisa, in Newark, NJ, where he was a sales manager for Oracle Software.  

Yesterday was the 2nd Sunday of September.  Last year on the 2nd Sunday of September, he returned from a family vacation, with his whole family in Italy.  He was supposed to fly on the next day….that would be the 2nd Monday, today is the 2nd Monday in September…..from his home in Newark, to a sales meeting of Oracle Software in San Francisco, CA.  But he decided to delay his flight and to spend an extra night with his wife and kids.  And so instead of flying on Monday, at 6.15 in the morning, on the 2nd Tuesday of September last year, he drove 45 minutes to the airport, parked his car, left a voice message on the machine of one of his buddies in a support group, an encouraging message, just telling him how much he loved him.  Then he boarded United flight 93 bound for San Francisco at 8 a.m.  

A hundred minutes later, at 9.45, a GTE air phone operator in Chicago, another Lisa, named Lisa Jefferson, got a call from him.  He reported that flight 93 had been hijacked by 3 men carrying knives and one of them had a device of some kind strapped around his waist with a red band.  The passengers had been forced to the back of the plane, but because of cell phone calls they were all well aware of what had happened in NY City only an hour before.  Lisa the operator talked with him for 15 minutes.  Here are some of the things that he said.  “I don’t think we are going to get out of this.  Please call my wife and kids, tell them I love them.  I think we are going to rush the hijackers”.  To which Lisa responded and said, “Are you sure that is a good idea”?  And he replied, “It’s what we have to do”.  He said “I am afraid Lisa, and I asked Jesus to help me, would you pray the Lord’s Prayer with me”?  And Lisa did.  The last Lisa heard him say were those now famous words, spoken to people near by, “Are you guys ready?  Let’s roll.”  Two minutes later at 9:58 a.m., flight number 93 buried itself in the Stony Creek strip mine near Shanksville, in Somerset County, 80 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.  Todd Beamer was dead.  We may never know for sure, but his courage, and that of Jeremy Glick, Tom Burrett, Mark Bingham, and others, probably saved the Capitol Building, the White House, or something else.  

We learned a great deal about him, both from what he DID and what that call revealed to us about who he WAS.  We learned a great deal about Todd Beamer.  Both by what he did, and who he was.  Cleaning out his office a few weeks later, Lisa Beamer found a piece of paper in the bottom of his inbox which had remained there for all the years that he worked at Oracle.  He had kept a quotation from Teddy Roosevelt.  “The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, who strives valiantly who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotions, and spends himself in a worthy cause. Who at best knows the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with cold and timid souls who know neither nor defeat.”  His simple tombstone in Cranberry, NJ, bears the words of Micah 6:8.  “What doth the Lord require of thee?  But to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with your God.”

The life and death of Todd Beamer illustrates the mission of Greenville College.  He was a young man of great personal courage, who in face of a serious problem responded self sacrificially.  At Greenville, we call that a life of character and service.  Out mission is to transform students for such a life, through a Christ centered education, through the liberating arts and sciences.  As students here at Greenville College, you have the best possible reasons to know, to hear and understand, exactly what that mission means.  And so as we begin a new year, I urge you stop, and to reflect with me on how you are being changed and transformed in this community.  

First, this education is all about equipping you with practical skills.  Skills to work; learning to do things.  This is a very American outcome, and perhaps the main thing that you considered when you chose to come to Greenville College; and that’s not wrong.  But we try to make that training different at Greenville College.  Because we aren’t just training you, giving you skills for a job.  We want to equip you to use your skills for other people, not just yourself, in the work of service.  Todd’s tombstone reminds us that the Lord requires us to DO things; to DO justly.  And we believe that this can be done best here at Greenville by helping you to learn first to see and then to solve the problems of the real people around you.  And so I would ask you this morning, what problems are you seeing?  What problems are you learning to address?  What serving are you doing?  

But, second, a GC education is also about character.  It is to BECOME a certain kind of person inside.  It is attitude, it is motivation, it is spirit; and frankly most American colleges and universities don’t care about these at all.  Here at Greenville, we want you to think about who you are inside, not just about the skills you are learning.  Todd’s tombstone also reminds us that the Lord requires us to be….“inside”…. people of humility and mercy.  Recently, I watched again the movie Saving Private Ryan, and I wondered as I did the first and second time I saw it, if I could ever possibly do the things that they did.  Could I ever do those heroic things?  Perhaps we’ve all asked this kind of question.  Perhaps we’ve asked if we can ever do the heroic deeds of Todd Beamer and his partners.  I don’t mean to suggest that heroic acts are always acts of violence.  Refraining from violence, confessing to a failure, or even just persisting in the drudgery of day-to-day work can be heroic.  But the answer to the question of whether or not we can do such deeds comes back to who we are inside.  It  comes back to our character.  Behavior flows out of character.  Whether it’s Todd’s behavior on Flight 93, or Kenneth Lay’s behavior at Enron, behavior flows out of character.  Courageous self-sacrificing behavior does not come from a vacuum, but from a character of courage and unselfishness.  

So you might ask yourself today, who am I inside today?  Who am I becoming at Greenville College?  Of course DOING and BECOMING are not disconnected.  They are mutually dependent.  They each shape each other.  You can’t merely hope, for example, that you will somehow just suddenly become a person of courage. Because part of becoming a person of courage means behaving daily in little things courageously.  Likewise you can’t just hope that you will behave honestly when the time arises and the need presents itself.  You must first become an honest person.  But of course becoming an honest person requires that in the little daily things each day you behave honestly.  And so, of course, we pray that at Greenville College you learn to not only DO the work of service, but to BECOME men and women of character.  

This morning, you begin another leg in your journey of transformation.  What will it look like?  I would like to close this morning by illustrating this journey of character and service in the personal and public life of Moses.  First, was his personal life, and you remember the story, of Moses.  Raised in the home of pharaoh in Egypt, he grew to adulthood and was extremely well educated.  He was powerful and very well connected.  And he looked around himself and he saw the problem of his people.  In order to see that, he had to get out and about, and he did.  He saw that they were oppressed and were captives.  And because of his power and education, he tried to do something about it.  But of course you remember that he utterly and miserably failed.  He sought to DO before he BECAME.  And so, in his failure, he journeyed into a painful personal character building experience.  An experience of self-doubt.  And in that experience, in the wilderness, he met the Lord.  He nearly missed him.  He nearly didn’t see that the bush was burning and not consumed.  But thanks be to God, he did see it.  And he responded to God’s call with a sense of complete inadequacy, “Lord I can’t do this.”  But Moses did say that he was willing, he was available.  And so his journey continued out of the wilderness, back into Egypt, and with God’s help he now truly served his people.  His journey, personal journey, transformed him in character and for service.  

But then the story of Moses’ public life shows us again a journey of transformation. As you recall, the people of God were in Goshen in the land of Egypt.  They were prisoners.  But it wasn’t wrong for them to be there.  Neither is it bad for you to be where you are now; at whatever stage of faith, personal, moral, or intellectual development you happen to be.  The people of God were there, but they were captive.  But then God called them out for a journey of transformation, a journey of liberation.  He called them out of what had become their comfort zone.  And so the journey of transformation for the people of God began in Egypt.  They were called out of their comfort zone.  As Moses himself was called into the wilderness, so the people of God were called into the wilderness.  It was painful.  

The call of God often is painful in our lives. For you athletes, for good coaches, for parents, you know that growth requires that painful stretching.  And so the people of God started in Goshen, left their comfort zone, and followed their leader, Moses. 
And at Greenville we pray that everyone of our faculty is committed to leading and guiding you in your journey of transformation; even as they themselves undergo and continue their own personal journeys of transformation.  

But be warned, that the journey is risky.  The wilderness is not a safe place.  And Greenville College is not a safe place.  If you came here because you thought it would be safe, you are in the wrong place, friend.  It’s dangerous because there is education going on.  We want it to be an opportunity to grow and stretch.  But as we see in the people of God, it is dangerous.  And people can be hurt in the wilderness. We pray God’s protection on you even as He sought to protect His people in the wilderness.  

It’s risky, but God provides direction.  He provided His people a pillar of fire by night and a cloud by day.  And he provided nourishment as they needed it.  He never provided enough for tomorrow, but always enough for today.  God will provide for you, not only in giving you the direction but also the nourishment in your life.  He will do so on a day-to-day basis if you will only trust Him.  

In the process He works through one another in a community.  We need each other. You remember the story of how the Israelites were battling the Amalekites and Moses was called upon to stand up on the mountain because Joshua and his soldiers couldn’t do it all.  He just had to stand and hold his arms up, and Moses was an old man.  So Aaron and Hur, came alongside and they held his arms up.  Who won the battle that day?  Was it Joshua, was it the soldiers, was it Aaron, was it Hur?  No, it was the community of God.  We need each other.  Of course as we recall, in the end, God’s people reached the Promised Land.  Persistence produces results, and they became the people God wanted them to BECOME and went on to DO the work that He called them to do.  Their journey like that personal journey of Moses transformed them in character and service.  

Consider the journey of Todd Beamer that day a year ago, the journey of Moses alone, the journey of the people of God 3000 years ago, or even the journey of God himself from heaven to earth and back.  Are you ready to travel?  Lisa Beamer said this.  “On September 11, Todd’s mission on earth was completed and he ended daring greatly, not with the cold and timid souls that know neither victory nor defeat.”  Our challenge in the time remaining for each of us, is each day to dare greatly for God, leaving luke-warm faith behind.  In a passage from My Utmost for his Highest, Oswald Chamber says this:  “We are apt to forget that a man is not only committed to Jesus Christ for salvation; he is committed to Jesus Christ’s view of God, of the world, and of sin and this will mean that he must recognize the responsibility of being transformed by the renewing of his mind.”  

We don’t know what our journey of transformation holds for us.  We know that it will hold opportunities to grow and to stretch in character. And opportunities to serve other people as we see real problems and learn to tackle them.  

This Thursday at 11.30 Ellen and I will take our son, Jim, who is with us this morning. We will take him to the airport in St. Louis where he will get on a plane to go to Croatia where he will serve for a year as a consultant for the U.S. government in helping them to develop small business infrastructures.  Naturally Ellen and I are very proud of him.  Yesterday I asked him, are you ready to travel?  My question to you, my question to my son, my question to myself, is “Are you ready to travel?”

Dr. Jim Mannoia

Additional Mannoia Texts

Last updated: October 1, 2002