The Road to BYU
I know that God is calling me to Provo, and that He’s going to provide a way. Even now He’s carving a path for me to take. I don’t know why He wants me there. He didn’t say why He wanted me there, He just said to “go.” I don’t know if asking questions will do any good.
That was part of my journal entry for Tuesday, September 21, 1999. I was 17 and my senior year of high school had started a few weeks earlier. Students were beginning their applications to the universities they hoped to attend, and here I had it in my head that God wanted me to apply to Brigham Young University. This idea was idiotic for so many reasons:
* My addiction to Internet discussion boards had taken a terrible toll on my grades during my junior year, and that is not the year you want to do poorly academically; it is the year colleges put the most weight on when they consider you for admission. I had failed three of my four classes the second semester, one of which I had to re-take in summer school or face not graduating with my generation. You don’t get into BYU with grades like that.
* As I’ve explained elsewhere, I was a recovering anti-Mormon, still trying to sort out my own original approach to Mormonism free from the hurtful and often dishonest tactics employed by some counter-cult ministries. Would the people at BYU really want a former anti-Mormon going there?
* I had not spent any time going to LDS Seminary in high school. A seminary recommend technically isn’t required for non-LDS applicants, but it helps. So I was applying without a seminary recommend.
* My beloved youth pastor, the same one I spoke of in my testimony, was completely against it. He knew that over the summer, I had struggled with and nearly converted to Mormonism, and he did not believe I was strong enough to spend so much time in the heart of Mormonism and not convert. I told him that I believed it was what God wanted, and that I believed God would bring it to pass in spite of my poor grades from the previous year. He sighed, shook his head, and told me, “You can’t make God dance, Jack.”
* Although I’d had a rocky relationship with my parents throughout my teenage years, they still wanted me to go to college somewhere closer. “Why do you have to go to that Mormon college when there’s a religious school right down the street?” my father asked me, referring to Pacific Lutheran University. He never understood my religious zealotry, and still doesn’t.
I was absolutely terrified to try what I was about to try, and terrified of what I would have to live with for years if I succeeded. However, the state of Mormon-evangelical relations weighed so heavily on me, the ineffectiveness of most counter-cult ministries and the fake-PhD scandals which plagued them.1 I had read Carl Mosser and Paul Owen’s paper on the lack of scholarly evangelical interaction with LDS apologetics and the need for evangelicals to step up, had almost converted to Mormonism myself because so few evangelicals were stepping up and offering intellectual responses to the LDS church’s claims. What if I could become an evangelical who had received her first degree from an LDS college as an evangelical, yet was not an ex-Mormon? Wasn’t that a voice that both camps would welcome?2
I could not change what had happened my junior year, so I began to concentrate on the parts of the application that I could change. I studied hard for the ACT, determined to beat the average score of entering BYU freshmen.3 I worked hard in my classes, hoping that a set of good first semester senior grades would help the admissions people see that I had turned a new leaf. I also wrote good application essays, going through many re-writes, knowing that I was a talented writer who could easily best most other freshmen applicants if I put my mind to it.
My other teachers and the high school college admissions counselor (who was LDS) all told me that while they admired my confidence, I really should be applying to other colleges in case I did not get in to BYU. On Monday, November 1, I reluctantly took home some applications to PLU, the University of Washington and some local community colleges to fill out. As I was walking up the steps to my house, this horrible feeling overcame me that I was doing the wrong thing. I looked down at the applications in guilt. It was as if God was asking, “Don’t you trust Me?” I had to admit that I didn’t, but I wanted to.
I wrote in my journal that day:
I’ve been working on my application for BYU. God is with me. I was going to apply to PLU as a back-up plan, but now I’m not going to. God told me not to. He said that if I applied to PLU, I was showing that I didn’t have enough faith in HimI feel like I’m burning all my other ships. My life is there, in BYU; there is nothing for me here. I can think of a million reasons why I could fail at this, but here is the reason I’m going to succeed: God is with me.
I was partially quoting a song by Steven Curtis Chapman, “Burn the Ships.”4 That night, I literally burned the other applications in my driveway. It would be BYU or nothing.
My classes that semester were AP English Literature and Composition, AP Calculus AB, World History and whatever the highest concert band was called. One of the classes I had failed during my junior year had been Pre-Calculus. I should not have been allowed into the calculus class, but I had heard that pre-calculus actually has little to do with calculus, even if the school requires it before taking calculus. So I had signed up for calculus on registration day, fully expecting the school to reprimand me and send me back to pre-calculus. It never happened; I was allowed to remain in the class.
However, calculus was a struggle. Good grades in English, history and band all came naturally to me (and always had), but with calculus I learned that I really had to apply myself to do well. The first test I took for the class, I got a D. The teacher’s name was Wylie Beatty, and as he handed my D test back to me, he complimented me. “Glimpses of brilliance,” he said.
I gave him my best scowl. “I got a D.”
“Yes, but the stuff you knew you did like a pro. It was the stuff you did not study for that hurt your grade.”
Huh. I decided maybe I could try a little harder.
By the end of that first semester of my senior year, I had only pulled my calculus grade up to a C+, but I had emerged as one of the most capable students in the class. I eeked out As in all my other classes. Would that be enough to show the admissions board at BYU that I had changed?
By mid-January I began rushing home from school and checking my mail religiously, looking for a letter from BYU. I was out for the day on Saturday, January 29, 2000, and when I came home my parents ushered me up to their room and pulled out a large envelope from BYU, smiling. They thought we should all read the letter together. My father opened the letter and began to read:
January 25, 2000Dear Bridget:We recently completed our review of your request for admission to Brigham Young University. I am sorry to report that, after careful consideration, we are unable to offer you admission as a degree seeking student.We realize that this news will come as a disappointment to you. Our decision is not in any way a reflection of your ability to be a successful college student. We simply do not have enough space for all who are wishing to pursue a degree at BYU. For future admissions consideration, you are welcome to reapply after you have completed at least 30 semester (45 quarter) hours of college credit at another college or university.5
I couldn’t believe it. Either I had not really been listening to God, or he had let me down. And now I had no college to go to.
I fled from my parents’s bedroom sobbing.
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1 Back in the late 1970s/early 1980s there was a well-known counter-cult author and speaker by the name of Dee Jay Nelson who claimed to be an Egyptologist with a PhD from “Pacific Northwestern University.” Numerous other evangelical Christians who have been involved with the counter-cult ministries obtained doctoral degrees from unaccredited degree-granting seminaries and schools.
2 As it turns out, not everyone is. Certain LDS apologists have been more than happy to insist that I don’t understand Mormonism when they can’t offer engaging responses to my arguments, and the more vitriolic factions in the counter-cult ministry will dismiss me as “tainted” by my time spent at BYU and my marriage to a Mormon. Guess there’s no pleasing everyone.
3 At the time, BYU reported its average ACT score of incoming freshmen as 27. Some of the college guides I read claimed it was actually 24. I’ll just be modest and say my score was higher than both reported averages.
4 From his 1994 album Heaven in the Real World. There’s no full version on YouTube, but there’s a pretty good partial cover here and the lyrics are here.
5 The letter goes on, but quoting the entire thing would be dull. My parents had assumed it was an acceptance letter because it was a large packet. The material in the large packet was information about the spring/summer visiting student program, which was nothing. BYU would let anyone attend during spring and summer terms.
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