The college was established under the Morrill Act of July 2, 1862.
- Campusology #1
If you have never been to Texas A&M University or experienced all that is Aggieland then you need to know that it is an incredibly unique and special place. I have no doubts that alumni who have attended other fine universities would say the same thing about the institutions where they received their degrees. Therefore I understand there may be reservations about jumping into the hype of A&M by readers who are not familiar with the spirit surrounding the university and all the traditions that go with it. Yet because I obtained my undergraduate degree from another institution myself, I present my love and admiration for A&M from the perspective of a student who has seen both sides. Not reaching Aggieland until I was in my 40s, I spent my formative years and early career cynically moving through life depending on my critical inner mental dialogue to analyze what I perceived to be overly hyped romanticism so as to not allow my intelligent mind to be fooled. In short, I spent a great deal of my life being a selfish, negative jerk. I didn’t recognize it at the time but I figured out later that I had been doing it to subconsciously protect myself from incredibly positive experiences that I had always wanted but felt like I didn’t deserve.
I urge you not to go through life doing what I did my first forty years. My biggest hope is that while reading or listening to this story that you allow yourself to feel the transformative spirit and give yourself permission to be an Aggie, even if just for the time you spend following along on this journey. I recognize you may simply have to trust me and take my word for it, but I can tell you without reservation that Texas A&M University truly has a spirit that can ne’er be told. And that spirit changed my life. I don’t know if your life needs a transformation or if you desire a change yourself but I encourage you to open your heart to this story and to the spirit that is Aggieland. If you do so, I think you will find this tale that much more enjoyable.
I was an excited sophomore in high school back in 1992 when my father drove us from our
suburban home in Coppell, right next to Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, down to central Texas to spend the day in Aggieland. Mostly what I remember is simply walking around with our mouths gaping open from awe and admiration as a feeling of humble reverence prevented us from really saying much of anything. Kyle Field, Rudder Tower, the Memorial Student Center (MSC), the Quad, Evans Library, and numerous other buildings and locations steeped with Aggie lore mesmerized me as I silently walked beside my father, listening to our tour guide spew stories of legend and paint pictures of what could be. I was overwhelmed with wonder like a kid coming down the stairs on Christmas morning to find the room overflowing with sparkling lights and presents. I recognized that it would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience to attend such a place, rich with tradition and excellence. But both my father and I acknowledged without saying it that I would not be going to Texas A&M. At the time, our vision for my future was limited as we looked toward smaller colleges where I might secure the opportunity to play baseball. But more than that, I think we both knew that I really didn’t have the grades or test scores, and with my father being a pastor on a limited income while my mom stayed home with us kids, we certainly didn’t have the money. On this tour, we were simply sightseers experiencing a marquee location on a one-time trip much like tourists who understood that very soon it would be time to head back to real life.
After our tour and sampling The Dixie Chicken, a local eatery at the infamous Northgate entertainment district, we made the trek back up to the Dallas metroplex. It would be twenty-five years later before I returned. In those two and a half decades, I lived a full life saturated with adventure and excitement. I worked in local television for a short time. I was a professional firefighter and paramedic for seven years. I helped build one of the largest and most successful event companies in Dallas. I produced three award-winning films, two of which gained distribution. I had been on set as a background actor in Hollywood. And I taught high school for seven years. But something big was still missing.
In all those years and despite my accomplishments, I still felt like I never measured up. I recognized that people probably looked at me and saw a man who stepped out on faith, took risks, and had a really cool life. And I did. But somewhere inside of me, I knew I deeply wanted to prove myself academically at a top-level university. I never really had to try hard in that realm before and I wanted to push myself to grow. I wanted to prove that I was smart. In my last job previous to attending A&M, I was teaching AP Human Geography at the high school level. This might seem to suggest that I did have some form of intelligence, but I always felt like I was using more of my charisma and goofy humor to trick people into believing I knew what I was talking about rather than having real proven intelligence. I had something to prove to myself and over the years that yearning never went away.
Even more than that perhaps, I longed for the big university experience at a place rich with tradition. It seemed that everyone else around me, my friends and family, had gone to large universities with stories of cheering at the big games and walking around campus. I had received my bachelor’s degree and played four years of Division III college baseball at a small institution, an accomplishment for which I was extremely grateful. But in order to do so, I had chosen not to experience a place like Texas A&M. It was a trade-off I didn’t really regret at the time but the more advanced in years I got, the more I longed for the specific adventure that A&M could bring. Let’s face it. A&M is larger than life. A small liberal arts college is wonderful for other reasons but being known nationally as a major university was not one of them. Because of that, I always felt like I was missing a part of the journey. I would see the diplomas of others, hear their stories, and examine their network of connections in the real world and somewhere deep inside myself feel disappointed. I desperately wanted that myself. And I wanted to do it at a place like Texas A&M University.
But more than all that, before I attended A&M as a middle-aged adult, I recognized that I had reached a certain level and lacked the skills to grow further on my own. I knew that I had plateaued and it would take a significant life-altering experience to get me to the place I wanted to go. I was ready to be a top-level contributor to the game of life but looked at myself in the mirror to see the reflection of an ordinary man. Deep inside I was not ordinary. But I couldn’t help considering the movie Batman Begins when the character Rachel explains to Bruce Wayne that, “It’s not who you are underneath. It’s what you do that defines you.” For my own standards, I recognized that I was not yet doing the things I had always wanted to do.
I think people looking at my life and the cool things I had accomplished would say that nothing about me was ordinary. But when I stopped to ponder the larger picture of my life, I knew I wasn’t done pushing myself yet. I had to have something larger than myself to force me to be the best version of the man I wanted to be. I had reached the peak of who I was going to become on my own. It was time to get real about getting to the next level. I had to do it. I was dying inside and I desperately needed to go on a journey to discover who I really was meant to be. The quest to find my true self was of utmost importance because deep down in the depth of my spirit, I believed God created me for a larger purpose. I just hadn’t found it yet.
The truth of the matter is that over the course of my forty years, I had discovered that while I didn’t yet know my larger purpose, God had trained me to accept and cherish my smaller purpose. It had taken me years, but I did understand that my smaller purpose was to glorify the Lord in everything I did, no matter how mundane the task seemed. Figuring that out took a while but it did help me tremendously. Growing up, I wanted to serve the Lord by being an incredibly famous and rich Major League baseball player. My idea was to use the fame and fortune to point the way to Jesus through a national platform of success. That was my plan. It definitely did not happen. So when I found myself living the life of an average guy, it was frustrating, disheartening, and discouraging. I was not in the spotlight and therefore felt like I was forgotten and left alone in the darkness. Because of that, I found it extremely difficult to be thankful for anything. I found little joy in my day-to-day activities because nothing measured up to my dream of glorifying the Lord as a superstar. But slowly, God taught me to be grateful and find joy in all the little blessings he had provided me with.
For example, this might sound extremely trite, but I discovered that I really enjoyed doing laundry. No, I wasn’t a star professional baseball player, but I learned how to say thank you to God for having a nice home where I could peacefully accomplish the task of putting our clothes into the machines and then folding them neatly. Every time I did the laundry, I began to say thank you for the legs, arms, and hands that I had and the clothes God had given us. I even started to feel like I had accomplished something when the laundry was done and organized piles of clothes were ready to be put away. I honestly began to love it. I found joy in something small. Over time, that understanding became something big. I began to apply it to many other areas of my life. I started to be thankful for mowing the lawn, washing our cars, and having a nice thick head of dark brown hair. Yes, I was disappointed and frustrated that I never realized my dreams in life and I couldn’t seem to find my true larger purpose, but I did learn to say thank you and enjoy the little things. And that became my smaller purpose.
This is not to say that finding joy and giving thanks for all the little blessings in life should be considered a smaller purpose. We should never take those things for granted. The lesson I learned over all those years is that those small blessings were actually the key to a much happier and joyous life. Finding joy and saying thank you to God for all the little things became a manner in which I glorified the Lord. So the first purpose I had figured out. It was to glorify the Lord in everything I did, no matter how small or big the task. This purpose I discovered on all my other previous adventures and had put it to good use, pointing the way to God with gratitude for what the Lord had given me in the hope to be found in the salvation of Jesus Christ. My smaller purpose was already clear and consistently being accomplished, despite the fact that I was not very strong spiritually, physically, mentally, or emotionally.
Yet the larger purpose for my life had been elusive. Since my youth, I had an idea that the Lord was calling me for something specific, but I could never find it. Despite continually inquiring of the Lord and seeking his plan for my life, I just never understood what God ultimately created me to do. I felt like I had a unique mission that God had called me to but he never told me what it was. However, during my time at A&M, through both my academic studies and time in the Corps of Cadets, I stumbled onto a term that I deeply connected with – resilience. Because I felt like my entire life was an exercise in overcoming adversity and always getting back up after being knocked down, I immediately identified with the idea of being resilient. And so, I decided to make the term an official theme in my life. I also began to believe that God called me to help others be resilient too. I still wasn’t quite sure of why I would need to help people be resilient but I figured just the general idea of helping people be resilient would be a great start. Because, let’s face it, life is hard for all of us. Who doesn’t need resilience?
Resilience by definition is the ability to bounce back from adversity (Hart & Blincow, 2007). A person is resilient if they can take a punch and keep going, despite the setback and pain. Resilient people are strong and have the flexibility to make adjustments so that they don’t stop their forward progress. Or at least, the crisis doesn’t prevent them from getting back up and carrying on their mission. Resilience is “the process of reintegrating from disruptions in life” (Richardson, 2002, p. 309). Through this understanding, you might think that resilience is just the inner fortitude and resolve of one single person. But through my studies at A&M and my time in the Corps of Cadets, I discovered that it takes more than just individual toughness to be resilient.
To be resilient means a number of different things in various disciplines. At the heart of the term as it applies to people, resilience is definitely the ability to bounce back from adversity through aspects like strength of mind. But resilience also incorporates aspects beyond one individual person. As professor Patrice Buzzanel (2010) currently at the University of South Florida explains it, resilience is a communicative exercise that we enact through the creation of stories we produce ourselves as we attempt to make sense of the world around us. Resilience is co-produced with the people in our lives and the interactions we have with them as we attempt to negotiate our place in the world. It is the story we tell ourselves about the situations we are in and how we will rise to the challenges. The power and influence of resilience is that we decide to be resilient based on how we choose to see our role in the world and our relationship to everyone else around us.
I had found an aspect of resilience in my life prior to coming to A&M but I was starting to understand that what the Lord was preparing me for would require more than the faltering courage I currently had. It didn’t take much to look around at the world to understand that things weren’t getting any easier. And from the calling I felt deep within the quiet of my spirit, I could easily discern that there were more challenges ahead, not just for me but also for us as people in a world that seemed to be getting crazier. My smaller purpose to be joyful and glorify the Lord in all the little things each day seemed to be pretty solid. But my larger purpose apparently had something to do with resilience and I needed to figure out exactly what that meant so I could apply it to my life and help others around me to do the same. As I discovered A&M was the right place to do just that.
Attending Texas A&M University in the Corps of Cadets was only one part of the larger story of the adventure of the years I spent in Aggieland. There were so many aspects of the university and surrounding organizations that influenced my life for the better and grew me as a human being and follower of Christ. But perhaps no other aspect of being an Aggie changed me like being in the world-famous Corps. If I was ever going to discover what it means to be resilient, by God, that was the place where it was going to happen.
I have four goals for you as you read through this book. The first goal is for you to simply enjoy the story. Each chapter will follow my journey through the Corps chronologically to tell the tale of my path toward greater resilience as the Lord prepared me to be a disciplined man of faith. If you get nothing else out of this book, enjoyment would be a great result. The second goal is for you to be inspired by the story and find the courage to partake in your own journey and take a larger step out on faith wherever you discern that God might be calling you. Sometimes a good story can motivate us to do such things. My hope is that this adventure pushes you to just go for it. The third goal is to learn tools of resilience that can help you on your journey. As we progress through my story in this text, I’ll highlight aspects of resilience as I learned them so that you may, in turn, apply them yourself. Inspiring others to step out on faith and be resilient is absolutely the purpose of this book. I am writing this so that you might find inspiration to be more resilient, if you so choose. The fourth goal is to find the Lord, maybe where you never expected to see him at work.
To recap, these are my goals for you with this book:
Enjoy the story
Be inspired to step out on faith
Learn tools of resilience and begin to use them
Find God in places you may not have looked for him before
Each chapter begins by stating one of the campusologies or “campos” that must be perfectly memorized by each cadet during their freshman year in the Corps. Memorizing these campos is not simply getting most of the words and coming close to the general meaning. No. Each cadet is charged with perfectly memorizing every single word. Perhaps the more challenging aspect of remembering all these campos is that they must be stated together with the entire group of freshmen in your outfit. This is a key aspect of resilience. It’s not just about you. To be resilient is to link arms with those around you. Only by working together in a continual process can one truly become resilient because the strength and ability to bounce back from adversity is produced along with the other people in your life.
Like the first campo and the establishment of the university itself, I too would embark on a new journey that would reforge me into the man I always wanted to be. The college was established in 1862. The new me began to be established by the same university one hundred and sixty years later. This book is dedicated to the thousands of cadets who came before me and will follow after.
Together as Aggies, we are resilient.
-- This blog post is one chapter in a book titled I Bleed Maroon by Andrew Christjoy that is being finalized and seeks publication.
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