Friends: It’s a reflective time of year as school begins, I count my blessings, and track an important anniversary. Have a great week! Blessings, Bob

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September 2, 2025

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

My Favorite Years

By Bob Walters

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding.” – Proverbs 3:5

The school year has started back up at Mission Christian Academy here in Fishers where my wife Pam is in her fifth year teaching high school English and I began my third year teaching high school history and civics.

Three weeks in it remains pretty much a dream job for both of us: Pam the career teacher, preacher’s kid, and multi-talented crafter and homemaker, me the late-to-the-faith ex-sportswriter, media relations executive, and – how did that happen? – 11 years in retirement as a school bus driver. Hybrid school MCA meets just three days a week.

Pam and I are cruising into our 70s, we as children of the 1960s and 70s, now greeted daily by nearly a hundred fresh-faced teen-agers in a caring, Christian atmosphere and serious K-12 educational setting. Students are happy to be there, staff is happy to be there, and families express regular thanks for their kids being there.

MCA, in its sixth year, has grown from 38 students and eight teachers in 2020-21 (Covid factored into its creation) to now more than 500 K-12 students and 50 faculty.

Labor Day weekend, for me, annually marks my coming-to-faith “awake date” – Sunday, September 2, 2001 – when a random, middle-aged trip to church at my young son Eric’s urging yielded an irrefutable encounter with the Holy Spirit that led shortly to my baptism in Christ. This column’s publication date, you may notice, is September 2.

Pam has never had a day in her life when she didn’t know Jesus, while I had 47 years not really knowing Him.  I was a dedicated, youthful Episcopal altar boy but then an entirely unserious, in-name-only Christian until that Labor Day Sunday 24 years ago at East 91^st Street Christian Church in Indianapolis.

I bring all this up because, like I said, I am highly reflective about this anniversary of the beginning of my faith life.  But a couple of my wonderful current students in two different periods recently asked, in class, what had been the “favorite time of my life.”

Pam and I by far are the oldest teachers in the building, so we get good-natured pot-shots from the kids all the time about our lack of “current” cultural and technical proficiencies. The students are, however, no match (yet) for our combined language, literary, and historical “chops” as well as our deep Christian experience. It’s great duty.

So, students asked earnestly about my “favorite time of life.” And if you read my bio you know I’ve had a good life, a fun and interesting career, and raised two great sons – Eric and John, both baptized – who now have their own families and careers.

Including all the stumbles, sins, and hardships that don’t appear in my bio, parts of my life are less attractive than others. But the students’ questions dug into something Pam and I have often discussed, that this is the favorite time of my life, and our lives. 

That is not a complaint about anything that has come before.  What’s great is that we can track back through lives that have had plentiful “best” times – with more than a few rough patches – and are yet so deeply thankful to have this latter time of purpose, commitment, freedom, love, family, learning, and joy while still avoiding life’s off-ramp.

I lived most of my life not knowing the Lord, not knowing what I had and didn’t have, and not trusting the truth, joy, and purpose present in the magnitude God offers.

I learned to trust God’s character and lean not on my own understanding. Whew.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) is thankful for every moment that led to now.