President's Message
6,000 and counting

Ollie Petruzel was living outside of Washington, D.C., in a wealthy suburb where teenagers had credit cards, and some drove BMWs to class. Friday nights, he and his friends would gather at the nearby McDonald’s, looking for a party.

He was one of the lucky ones of the world. He had more than enough of money and cars, and what’s more, he had time to hang out with his friends. But when a Washington Post reporter asked him how he felt about where he was, he said, “This is the most boring place I ever lived.”

Perhaps Ollie’s comment was, in part, a teenager’s pose. But Ollie Petruzel did understand that having everything doesn’t mean you’re OK. Without a purpose that goes beyond consumption and carousing, you’re trapped inside your own ego. Nothing is vivid except what you lack — the sense of significance and passion and adventure.

This issue of Pacesetter features, among others, a graduate of Kettering’s physician assistant studies program named Echo VanderWal. With her physician husband and four sons, she spends 10 months a year in a mobile clinic ministry called The Luke Commission. The ministry takes place in southern Africa, where the couple meets and attempts to alleviate “a lot of pain and heartache.”

The Luke Commission takes its bearings from the Jesus story, and the husband-wife team that embraces the commission has found significance, passion, and adventure. All this reminds me of another bit of wisdom — from Kathleen Norris, someone whose point is completely intentional. In her book Amazing Grace, she imagines herself conversing with an elderly man whose face, in her reverie, becomes “impossibly beautiful.” And she “can’t escape the feeling,” she says, “that at this moment, in this unlikely setting...I am looking into the face of Christ (and Christ is looking back at me).”

Her words trace back to a parable Jesus told. It’s the one quoted in Kettering College commencement programs, where Jesus declares that what you do for “the least of these,” you
do for him.

Soon, 6,000 Kettering College students will have taken the Gospel legacy with them into the health care workplace. Few have been bored. Most have found significance, passion, and adventure.

That’s what you get when you escape the ego trap and set out to do something about human need.