Wait… You’re an English Major? What do you do with that?

This week I received my diploma in the mail, which means that I have officially graduated from college! And that’s why I’ve decided to take a look at how my major in English all started. 

 

 

One of the most frequently asked questions since my senior year of high school has been: What’s your major?

An innocent question, but one that I’ve grown to dislike. Not because it has been asked so frequently, but because of most people’s responses to my answer.

The typical conversation goes as follows:

“What’s your major?” says the curious person.

“English,” I respond, watching my interviewers face as they look at me skeptically, for to many there can only be one real reason as to why I would possibly wish major in English.

“Oh, so you’re going to teach!”

Inwardly, I groan a little bit. It’s not a bad thing to ask, but when you didn’t sign up to teach English, it starts to get a little bit frustrating when most people assume that’s what you’re going to be doing. Now don’t get me wrong, teaching is great, but it’s not something I feel I have been called to do.

What’s also hard is when you tell your interviewer that, “No, I’m not teaching” and they have that rather perplexed look, and I receive a small laugh. 

And almost every time I say no, I get, in a very doubtful tone, “So what are you going to do with that major?”

There, right there. That’s the worst part of the conversation. Why? Because there’s almost always an implication that I can’t do anything but teach as an English major. It leads to me seriously doubt my choice in major. The question implies that my major has no worth. That I choose it poorly. But I didn’t choose poorly. I chose it (or rather, I was supposed to choose it) for a very good reason. Which leads me into the question that I wish people would ask me:
Why did I choose to be an English major?

While I love to read and write, that was not ultimately why I chose to be an English major.

The short answer? God. 

The long answer? 

From a young age, I have loved to both read and write. I’ve always done well in those areas at school. I especially loved to write. I was told by others that I was actually pretty good at it (give or take, even now, some grammatical errors). So during senior year, when it came time to decide what to do, I naturally wanted to do something with my gift of writing. What better choice than an English major? But weighing my options, I was doubtful that this was a good major. Like my interviewers above, I was doubtful that it was something that I could succeed in in the real world. I mean writing? C’mon. I might be considered a good writer by some friends a family, but I sure wasn’t going to delude myself about making a living off of it.

That’s when God got ahold of me. I was in a college level writing class (while a senior in high school), still wishing I could be an English major, but doubting that my writing could measure up. That writing was even something I was good at. There was one particular week that I was really bashing my talent. And that I got back a paper I had written for my college writing class.

I got an A, 100%, a perfect score. 

In order to really understand the significance of a perfect paper, you first have to understand that the average grade for a paper was a C. If you got a C on a paper, you were feeling good. Getting papers back in that class was both a looked forward to and dreaded day. Looked forward to because you would finally know if you passed. Dreaded because, in high school, a C felt like you had done horribly. And for many people in the class, getting a C was pretty hard. For me, I had done well on my other papers, mostly B’s, but no A’s. I really didn’t believe that A’s existed in that class. They were some mythical being that somehow showed up on the syllabus, but never in real life. And I was okay with that. 

So when I saw that I had gotten an A AND 100% on my paper, that’s when I knew that God was getting my attention. Because there was no way that I had achieved that impossible grade on my own. I knew then that I could be an English major, that God was calling me to use the talents that He had given me, even if the rest of the world might not see that. Even if, after college, I might not succeed (by worldly standards) with my writing. Even if almost everyone would doubt the use of my major. Even if I would doubt my own abilities. But like that mythical A in my college writing class, I could do anything with God.

A lesson I would have to relearn over and over again. 

Because even though I knew God was with me on my choice, it was still hard to hear the scrutiny from those around me. For a long while I placed a lot of value in how people reacted to my major. I allowed it to make me doubt my major and myself again. God, ever relentless, got ahold of me again. 

This time I was in Haiti. God taught me a lot while I was in Haiti. One of those things was to trust that God had everything in hand, that He really did have a plan for me, my English major, and my life. And He taught me that through two card games.

The first was a game of War. It doesn’t take much thinking, you just flip over cards and whoever has the highest card wins. The winner takes the cards and puts them into their deck. At the end of the game, whoever has all the cards, wins. I played with my friend, Emily. An easy game where we could chat with each other and not have to think too much about what we were doing. We played with Aces as the highest card. After playing several rounds, we both flipped over Aces. In order to break the tie we laid three cards down without flipping them, then flipped the fourth card. We tied again, this time with 10s. Again, we laid three cards down and I flipped over my fourth card. I flipped a 3. Immediately I thought I had lost the round. You can’t get much lower than a 3, and the likelihood of Emily flipping a 2 wasn’t very great. I sighed and resigned to my defeat, which meant I would lose my Ace to Emily, giving her a big advantage over me. I voiced my thoughts to Emily, who had yet to flip over her card. To my luck, Emily flipped over a 2! Against pretty unlikely odds, I had beaten her and won the Ace! 

(The War win impacted me so much, that I felt the need to document it.)

Okay, okay, I know… it was just a card game. Not really a big deal one way or the other. But my doubts about my major weren’t far from my mind while I was playing the game, and I had been praying hard about what course my life should take. Should I pursue writing? The results of this game showed me a lot about my own predicament. It showed me that my own attitude was my own worst enemy. I was ready to give up before I had even seen where my life could take me if I followed God. I was ready to give up my Ace (aka my writing talent), rather than believe that God had my back in what I considered a hopeless situation. That took some time to process. But I was still doubting that I was exceptional enough that God had some kind of perfect plan for my life. 

That’s where the second card game came in. Emily and I abandoned our game of War, which had grown boring (imagine that ). Instead we took up Kings in the Corner. A game that Emily hadn’t played for a long time, so I dealt out the cards, intending to reteach her the game. I tried to demonstrate how the game worked taking my turn first. Instead of teaching Emily, however, I won the game with my first hand. I couldn’t believe it, I had gotten a perfect hand! Emily looked from me to the cards sitting in front of us, and her expression was hilarious. Needless to say, I didn’t teach her much about how the game actually worked. But I saw God’s hand in it once again, teaching me. 

I had still been questioning God’s plan for my life and He had responded, reassuring me that He had the right cards in hand and could play them out perfectly. Like Emily in the game, I may not understand how God would do it, but I didn’t need to in order for God to use me. 

 

 

Even now I still tend to doubt that God will do extraordinary things through me and the talents that he has given me. But God’s patient with me. Thank goodness, or I don’t know where I would be now. 

And, as usual, I’ll sign off with a song (which kinda works with the post):

I hope you know that someone out there loves you 
So don’t give yourself away, 
and don’t listen to them when they say 

“This is the way that you are,” 
don’t let them say, 
“This is the way that you are.” 

 

Thanks for reading! It ended up being a pretty long post!

 

I found this status on facebook the same day that I posted this blog. It comes from the lead singer of The Classic Crime. It really goes with the theme of this blog post and my sentiments about my writing. He says:

“I want to encourage all of you out there who create and display art (“art” being a very loose definition, but I’m mostly talking to people who are creating things that aren’t helping to pay the bills, currently).