“The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord: & He delighteth in his way.” — Psalm 37:23
THE YEAR OF DISAPPEARING: 1991–92 AT CALVIN SEMINARY
A Dramatic Biographical Retelling of the Life of CK (Calvin Kid)
I. ARRIVAL WITH HOPE AND FIRE
When CK first stepped onto the campus of Calvin Seminary that late summer morning, he felt a surge of optimism that surprised even him. After months in the Corcovado rainforest, listening to the gentle whisper of God’s leading, the decision to attend seminary had felt like the culmination of years of slow spiritual pressure. This was the place where calling became preparation, where discipline met devotion, where people serious about the Gospel learned how to shape their voices for ministry. He imagined long discussions in hallways, deep Scripture study, and moments of spiritual clarity that would ignite his heart. The building itself—brick, traditional, sturdy—seemed to confirm that something meaningful was about to begin. And yet, beneath the optimism was a faint unease he chose to ignore. Obedience had brought him here, and obedience, he believed, would carry him through whatever came next. But sometimes calling is not a straight road; sometimes it is the first step toward discovering what calling is not.
II. THE PRAYER GROUP OF THREE
Seminary required students to join prayer groups—small gatherings meant for spiritual encouragement, Scripture reflection, and communal support. CK imagined a gentle circle of peers—new students, eager, humble, trying to build trust and learn together. Instead, he found himself assigned to a group of three. Just three. And the dynamic of those three changed everything. The first member was Professor Sid Greidanus, a man of towering intellect and intensity, respected widely but known to be overbearing in prayer settings. His very presence filled the room, leaving little air for quieter souls. The second member was the real surprise: Elliot VanderLugt.**** Elliot—a seminary upperclassman now—had once been CK’s suitemate in the Beets-Veenstra dorms six years earlier, back in 1985–86. Their lives had separated long ago; now here he was again, unchanged in voice, mannerisms, and spiritual demeanor. It felt almost orchestrated. Coincidence? Intention? CK could not decide. What he did know was this: he had never liked praying aloud. Public prayer felt like being asked to reveal a private conversation. And now he was expected to pray in front of a theologian and a familiar face from a former season of life. From the first meeting, CK felt out of place, as though he had stepped into a circle far more spiritually assertive than he could comfortably inhabit. Each prayer session left him anxious, not encouraged. He spoke too little, listened too much, and left each meeting feeling like he had failed at something unseen. The calling that had felt so strong in Costa Rica suddenly felt muffled, drowned out by expectations he had not anticipated.
III. THE CLASSES THAT DIDN’T STICK
CK had imagined seminary classes would electrify him. After all, he had come seeking deeper theological grounding, stronger biblical understanding, and a clearer sense of ministerial identity. But from the first week, something felt off. He couldn’t even remember the exact course schedule years later—a telling detail—because the classes left almost no impression on him. The lectures felt dry. The topics overwhelming. The pace relentless. Instead of being inspired, CK felt like he was falling behind before he even began. He sat in the back often, quietly observing students who seemed born for this place, their notebooks organized, their Greek textbooks already pre-highlighted, their confidence levels high. CK wondered if they sensed how out of place he felt, or if the insecurity was visible only to him. The disillusionment was not dramatic; it was slow, quiet, subtle. A steady leak in the soul. Each class drained him a little more. Each walk back to his apartment left him with heavier steps. Each glance at his unused Greek materials felt like a reminder of inadequacy. Within weeks, the fire he had brought from Costa Rica dimmed to embers.
IV. THE SHADOW OF DEPRESSION
Depression does not always arrive like a storm; sometimes it descends like morning fog. Soft, creeping, unnoticed at first. CK found himself sitting longer at his kitchen table each morning, staring at his books without opening them. He walked the hallways of the seminary with a sense of floating, disconnected from the community around him. The excitement that had filled him upon arrival had eroded. Something wasn’t working. Something wasn’t fitting. He prayed, but the prayers felt hollow. He read Scripture, but the words did not ignite. He listened in class but felt no spark of recognition. Was this truly the right path? Had he misheard God? Had he mistaken an emotional impulse for a calling? These questions haunted him, not with panic but with quiet heaviness. It was as though the joy and clarity he had received in Costa Rica had evaporated upon stepping into these academic halls. Calling, he realized, was not the same as fitting. And he was not fitting here—not yet.
V. A ROOMMATE’S EXAMPLE
His roommate, Jim Zoetewey, was pursuing his teaching certification in English education. Jim seemed focused, settled, purposeful—everything CK no longer felt. Jim talked about lesson plans, student teaching, literary analysis, and the strange, chaotic beauty of middle school classrooms. The more CK listened, the more something stirred in him. Teaching. Young people. Influence. Calling didn’t have to be limited to pulpits. Maybe it never had been. CK considered the possibility that ministry could take place in schools, not just sanctuaries. Maybe God had shaped his heart for teaching long before he recognized it. But by the time he realized this, it was already late in the semester. Calvin College’s academic calendar was set. Registration had closed. He felt trapped—too far into seminary to switch, too far out of alignment to stay.
VI. THE SLOW DISAPPEARING
CK did not drop out suddenly. He faded. He skipped a class here. Missed a prayer group there. Told himself he would catch up later. Then later never came. He walked the campus in long loops rather than attend lectures. On some days he sat in his car during scheduled class times, staring out the windshield and wondering how the path had gone crooked so quickly. The problem wasn’t laziness; it was direction. He had lost his reason for being there. And without reason, seminary felt like a burden too heavy to carry. The calling that had once felt so clear had blurred. CK wasn’t running from God; he was simply struggling to recognize where God was leading. And sometimes disappearing is the first step toward discovering where you truly belong.
VII. RETURN TO PINE REST
It was during this season of drifting that CK remembered Pine Rest Hospital—the Christian psychiatric hospital where he had worked previously, and where his father had served for fourteen years as chaplain and CPE supervisor. Pine Rest was familiar ground. Hard ground, yes, but meaningful. It dealt with people in crisis, people in need, people whose suffering required presence more than perfection. He wondered if they would take him back temporarily. They did. Quickly. Almost eagerly. CK became a mental health worker again, assisting patients who struggled with depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, trauma, and crises of identity. It was not glamorous work. The units were locked; the nights were long. But he felt useful again. Needed. Grounded. And in a strange way, it felt more like ministry than anything he had experienced at the seminary that semester. Working at Pine Rest became the anchor while everything else drifted. He attended fewer seminary classes. Then fewer still. Seminary slipped quietly from primary to secondary to background noise. By December, CK was working more than studying. And strangely, he found himself breathing easier.
VIII. THE REVELATION OF A TEACHER’S CALLING
Somewhere between late December and early January, clarity arrived—not as a flash, but as a settling of the soul. Teaching. That was it. Not as a fallback. Not as a compromise. But as a calling. He remembered the joy of teaching the Merchant boys in Costa Rica. The creativity. The mentoring. The spark in young minds. He remembered how alive he felt guiding tourists, explaining ecology, interpreting creation. He remembered the small moments of influence he’d had on younger students during his Calvin College years. And suddenly it made sense. He could teach. He should teach. He could reach young people with truth, encouragement, and the Gospel in ways that didn’t require a pulpit or a collar. Maybe seminary had been the necessary stop to discover what ministry path was actually meant for him. With that clarity, he went “down the hill,” as the phrase went—down to Calvin College, physically lower on the campus slope—and inquired about switching programs. The English/Education track welcomed him easily. Requirements were clear. The time frame was reasonable. He could complete it in two to two-and-a-half years. After months of confusion, CK felt something he hadn’t felt in a long time: direction.
IX. A NEW ROUTINE, A NEW BEGINNING
The next semester found CK sitting in undergraduate classrooms again, surrounded by younger students who talked about novels, grammar, composition, and child development. At first he felt out of place. Then he felt at home. The joy returned. The energy returned. The calling returned—but reshaped. Teaching in the mornings and early afternoons, Pine Rest shifts in the evenings, sleep squeezed somewhere in between. Hard, yes. But purposeful. And purpose, CK learned, can sustain a man far better than perfect circumstances. Seminary wasn’t a failure; it was a season. A necessary season. A season that revealed not where he was meant to be, but where he wasn’t meant to be—yet. God’s timing is seldom linear. Sometimes the shortest path is the one that detours through confusion, so that clarity becomes unmistakably divine. CK had disappeared from seminary, but he had reappeared in his calling.
***⭐ Your 1,000-word “Footnote of Dissonance” is now ready. ⭐
FOOTNOTE1: THE DIVERGING PATHS OF E.V. — ALIAS "VANDER LUCK"
(A 1,000-word reflective commentary)
CK would look back on that semester and realize that one of the most unsettling parts had nothing to do with courses, calling, languages, or even his slow disappearance from seminary life. It had to do with E.V. — also known in CK’s private reflections as “Alias Vander Luck,” a name he coined years later when the story no longer made sense as mere biography, but only as parable. Because in a strange way, E.V. became less of a person in CK’s memory and more of a symbol — a living question mark that trailed behind him for decades.
E.V. had entered CK’s life twice, bookending two very different versions of himself. The first encounter was in the Beets-Veenstra dorms in 1985–86, a time when their personalities were still forming, when everyone was pretending to be more confident than they truly were, when spiritual identities were more costume than calling. E.V. had been earnest, intense, and strangely opaque. Friendly, yes. Predictable, no. CK had never felt he fully understood him. Something always hovered just beyond the edges — a kind of spiritual tension, or psychological tightness, that made CK uneasy even when he didn’t know why.
The second encounter came six years later, inside that tiny prayer group of three. CK had expected to be surrounded by fellow beginners — but instead he found himself pressed between two figures who each represented something larger than himself: Professor Greidanus, with his weighty theological presence, and E.V., the ghost of a former life, now older, deeper into seminary, farther down a ministerial path CK wasn’t sure he could walk. Seeing E.V. again didn’t feel like coincidence. It felt orchestrated — and not necessarily in the comforting way. CK couldn’t shake the sense that the past had been summoned for reasons beyond his understanding.
In those awkward prayer sessions, E.V. prayed assertively, fluently, confidently — but something in the cadence felt strained, as though he were performing a role more than inhabiting it. CK didn’t judge him for it; seminary was full of men trying to speak the language of faith even when their souls hadn’t yet caught up. But CK sensed the dissonance. He could not name it then, but his spirit registered it the way a tuning fork vibrates even when struck from across the room.
After CK drifted out of seminary, that prayer group dissolved from his life like mist. He didn’t see E.V. again. At least not in person. But he watched his trajectory from a distance the way one occasionally checks the weather in a city once lived in — out of curiosity, not attachment.
At first it all made sense. E.V. became a CRC pastor — of course he did. The confidence, the fluency, the demeanor, it all pointed that direction. CK wasn’t surprised to learn he ministered first in Texas, then in Ripon, California. From afar CK imagined him preaching, leading meetings, counseling congregants, living out the life that seminary had intended to shape. And CK wished him well. Whatever unease he had once felt seemed irrelevant now. Their paths had diverged. Their stories had become separate pages in different chapters.
But over the years, CK noticed small details — a church directory that no longer listed E.V., an obituary-like gap in an online congregation history, a clergy roster that bore no mention of him where he once had been. CK wasn’t searching obsessively, just occasionally curious. But each glimpse revealed more discontinuity. A ministry vacancy that lingered too long. A missing biography. A silence where there once had been sermons.
Then the dissolution of E.V.’s marriage. CK learned this only indirectly, through patterns rather than statements. And this began to trouble him, not because divorce was rare, but because E.V. had seemed so determined, so structured, so outwardly rooted. The dissonance grew. Something had come undone, not quickly, but gradually, the way a rope frays one thread at a time.
And then — the final rupture.
Years later CK came across a clipping or digital notice that stunned him into stillness. E.V. — Alias Vander Luck — had not only left the ministry, not only uprooted himself from the conservative CRC world they once inhabited, but had stepped into a life that was its near-opposite. Rumor or not, the implication was that he was now partnered in a way fundamentally at odds with the world he had once represented. Married, even — to a man. CK stared at the notice for a long time, unable to process the magnitude of the contrast.
Not because he judged E.V. — that wasn’t it. It was the sheer distance between who E.V. had seemed to be in 1991 and who he appeared to be decades later. It was as if the man who had prayed so intensely in that little room had become a different story altogether, rewritten from the inside out.
And CK felt something he hadn’t expected: grief. Not for morality. Not for theology. But for the fracturing of a life that had once been pointed so sharply in another direction. A sadness that a fellow pilgrim, someone who had once walked the same early path, had experienced such a violent redirection of identity. And beneath that grief lay a darker, more haunting question: Had anyone ever truly known E.V. at all?
This became the heart of the dissonance.
Because CK realized he had sensed something hidden even in their earliest days — a tension beneath the confidence, a shadow beneath the certainty, a complexity beneath the surface that no one had fully named. He wondered if E.V. had carried battles no one saw, burdens no one understood, desires no one could articulate safely in their conservative circles. Perhaps the intensity in prayer had been struggle. Perhaps the confidence had been armor. Perhaps the ministry itself had been an attempt to outrun a truth too heavy to face.
And in that reflection, CK learned something important about calling:
Not every path that begins in sanctuaries ends in pulpits.
Sometimes the soul takes detours.
Sometimes the heart breaks open in ways that look like betrayal but feel like liberation.
Sometimes God allows a life to unravel so that something truer can emerge.
CK had trouble with CK's radical departure from the faith. But kept it to himself — quietly, soberly, prayerfully — as a reminder that calling is fragile, identity is complex, and grace must make room for mysteries that logic cannot untangle.
In the great tapestry of CK’s life, E.V. became not a villain, nor a cautionary tale, but a living footnote about the secret battles people wage behind well-pressed shirts and polished prayers. And in the end, CK realized this truth: Something was off -the-mark about EV
“Stand fast in the faith, quit you like men, be strong.” — 1 Corinthians 16:13
Excellent — here is Option D:
A separate, clear, respectful “CK’s Belief Statement Footnote” that affirms your convictions, without attacking anyone, and without altering the emotional depth of the story.
About 250–300 words.
Tight, honest, and fully aligned with traditional Christian teaching.
FOOTNOTE2: CK’S BELIEF STATEMENT ON MARRIAGE & IDENTITY
CK’s reflections on E.V.’s later life were never an endorsement of the path he took. They were a mixture of sorrow, compassion, and theological tension. CK held firmly—quietly but unwaveringly—to the conviction he had been raised with and later confirmed through Scripture and the historic Christian tradition: that marriage, as he understood it, belonged to the covenant union of one man and one woman, and that human sexuality was meant to reflect both divine design and spiritual mystery.
To CK, this conviction was not rooted in animosity, nor in cultural reaction, but in obedience. Obedience to Scripture. Obedience to the teachings he had studied since childhood. Obedience to what he believed God had revealed about creation and covenant. He did not gloat over E.V.’s transformation, nor condemn him personally. Instead, he grieved the departure from a path he believed had once held promise, stability, and spiritual integrity.
But CK also learned something vital: moral conviction does not eliminate compassion. Holding to a biblical view of marriage did not free him from the responsibility to treat all people—including E.V.—with dignity, sorrowing prayer, and humility.
He processed it not as a political statement, nor a culture war, but as a pastoral ache—the ache one feels when a fellow traveler takes a road that diverges radically from the faith they once shared. His convictions remained firm; his compassion remained real. Both could coexist without compromise.
