These days I am far less certain of what I believe than when I was eighteen and was the smartest person on the planet. One thing I am sure about, though. I have gotten much more from life than I deserve. In fact, I am the luckiest person I know.

 

I was born to a sixteen-year-old mother and eighteen-year-old father, both high school dropouts, in a North Carolina mill town. The culture taught me that education was not especially important as long as one could walk away with the credential, and that cleanliness, humility, and the ability to take orders were the keys to a successful life. I came to view the pastorate as the highest career to which I could aspire, not for any religious reasons, but because it seemed like the closest thing to an entertainer I could ever actually be, and no other job outside the mills seemed possible for someone like me, even the ones my mother seemed to admire, like Fuller Brush salesman or disk jockey. I did admire the family physician, of course, but as soon as someone told me that the job required four years of medical school—after college, no less—I never again had even a passing thought about such a career.

 

Nevertheless, here I am—Professor of Honors at one of the south’s respected universities, holder of two Ph.D.s, published author, happy husband and father with a loving and successful family (that still includes its original members)—and I have no explanation for how I got here. Sometimes I feel as if I must be the subject of some secret experiment. I was never a very hard-working student, have never been the smartest guy in the room, brought far too much arrogance and too many rigid role expectations to my marriage, was too insecure to network effectively, was too slow to lose my blue-collar aesthetics and attitudes, and have never been in the first round of finalists for any job in my career. Yet, here I am.

 

I believe in luck.

 

Actually, I have never been especially “lucky,” as people generally use the term—winning the lottery, being discovered by a famous film director, finding an original copy of the Declaration of Independence in a yard sale. To say that I believed in luck like that would be simply an affirmation that I believe it exists, but that kind of luck has been so far from my experience that it is nothing upon which I would stake my future, expecting it to happen if I have enough faith. The kind of luck that has sustained me over the years comes in more reliable packages.

 

First, I have stumbled into the Luck of Preparation. Louis Pasteur once noted that accidental discoveries happen to the person best prepared to recognize them—“chance favors the prepared mind,” he said. So it was for my wife and me with the adoption of our middle child, a circumstance that would have seemed to anyone looking in like an incredible stroke of raw luck, like finding a baby beside the road on your morning jog. Our luck was nothing like that. Our pastor called us to ask if we would be interested in adopting a child soon to be delivered by an unwed girl in the community, but he hardly pulled us at random from the church directory. Only a month before, my wife, on the heels of several miscarriages, had told him that we would be interested in adopting a child. A couple of weeks later, the girl’s family came to him asking for help. I believe we were lucky, but all the pieces were in place when the opportunity came. 

 

Second, I somehow developed the Luck of Persistence. Whenever anyone learns I have two Ph.D.s, they assume I am some kind of genius. The truth is, I am lucky to have even one. I graduated with barely a B average from both high school and college, then repeated the performance in seminary. In a fog of delusion, I talked my way into grad school and earned yet a second masters degree, after which, in spite of being the worst student in my department, I stayed and began work on a Ph.D. Though I never realized it then, I had learned that those of us who would eventually earn graduate degrees were not especially the smartest, but were instead the ones who would simply stick it out until all the requirements were finished. I have met songwriters and novelists who have finally found success in their forties and fifties, or husbands and wives who, like my wife and me, have reached thirty-plus years in their marriage; for them, this kind of luck is no secret. They know how lucky they are, but it is luck they have earned through persistence, through simply showing up every day and getting the job done.

 

Finally, I learned to appreciate the Luck of Perspective. I have enormous admiration for men and women who seem to have the world on a string. They can afford to believe they control their world, that they have no need for help…and they may not. For the rest of us, good fortune is often gleaned from fields that have been sowed by others. Whenever I am tempted to gloat over my successful career, I am reminded of how lucky I was to get into the career at all. Getting a first teaching position fresh out of grad school is difficult, and the failure to do so drives many from the profession. My own search had been fruitless and the well nearly dry when I got a call from the school that eventually hired me, wanting to set up an interview. I later learned that my dissertation director had called the dean there, a friend of his, and been told that I was no longer a candidate. Then, however, the dean went to the committee and asked that my file get a second look. Two roads diverged at that point in my life, to paraphrase Robert Frost, and I had someone guiding me down the one…and that has made all the difference. I know to whom I owe my success in life, and they number something like the stars in the sky.

 

Good luck.