The ORU Alumni Board vice president on how God’s continued call to ORU students and alumni
April 1983. My local church was hosting four ORU students on a Lay Witness mission. They were so different—in a way that was undeniably captivating. Each was so full of life and seemed to clearly understand their calling. They were the coolest Christian people I had ever met, proclaiming their faith with boldness and love. I wanted to be like that.
Two years and a season later, I was sitting in my parents’ living room in Hickory Ridge, Arkansas, a town of 400 people nestled securely amidst rice and soybean farms. My sole connection to Oral Roberts University was through a TV broadcast. I was so drawn to every aspect of the world-renowned school—its ideals, its magnetic student life and the power of God that was perpetually evident there. It was larger than me, and I needed to go there. I was undeniably certain that this small-town kid was, like Peter, being called to get out of the boat. I didn’t know how to make it happen, but God did.
My story is not a unique one. There are so many of us—more than 40,000 ORU alumni—who didn’t find ORU; ORU found us. Many of us stepped onto campus, as I did at 18, and felt the presence of God so strongly, we couldn’t resist the call to come, to leave our families and to chase what we knew was His plan for our lives.
Throughout our journeys, we found lifelong relationships with people from all over the world, professors who believed we could, even when we were unsure ourselves, and the ability to hear the voice of God through the power of the Holy Spirit.
Today, God has not stopped calling those ready and eager to follow. Our locations may have changed. Our appearance has surely changed. Our responsibilities look much different. But the same God who led us to ORU is the same God who told Peter to “Come,” not because Peter was ever really able, but because we needed to see his dependence on the One who called him (Matt. 14:22-32). And with our eyes fixed on Him, the impossible becomes possible.
It’s been 23 years since I graduated from ORU with my business degree, and there’s never been a day I regretted leaving that rice farm to follow God’s leading. He has never disappointed me. Not once. That simple decision was the first in a series that has led me to the place I am now.
I invite you to step back on campus. The place we once called our “home away from home” is still permeated by the spirit of God. Thanks to the great leadership of Dr. Wilson, enrollment is at an all-time high, the campus is immaculate, and technology is cutting-edge. The Armand Hammer Student and Alumni Center is alive with student and alumni life. And the spiritual life on campus is like nothing I have ever experienced before!
I invite you to step back on campus. The place we once called our “home away from home” is still permeated by the spirit of God.
After all these years, I can still hear Oral Roberts in chapel proclaiming with distinguishable passion and conviction: “Raise up your students to hear My voice, to go where My light is dim, where My voice is heard small, and My healing power is not known, even to the uttermost bounds of the earth. Their work will exceed yours, and in this I am well pleased.”
And today my prayer is this: Lord, help me hear Your voice, to go when You say go. To spread Your light in my day-to-day business. To be Your voice when the world screams its obscenities so loudly. And that somehow I would be able to live a life worthy of Your calling.
It started at ORU, and it’s still up to me to walk it out.
I encourage you, my fellow alumni, whether you’ve kept your eyes on Jesus and are walking on water, or you looked into the vast bleakness of the world and are sinking, rise up! As alumni, we are part of an incredible legacy, and one that this world is in desperate need of. Our work will exceed Oral Roberts’, and in that God is greatly pleased.
