Launching a Career in Peacebuilding

I attended Hesston College in the school year of 1973-75. In those days, we referred to it as a “junior college,” but I don’t think there was anything junior about it. At the time, it would not have occurred to me that going to Hesston was anything less or more than heading off to the next level of school. Mostly it was independence. Well, sort of – I grew up in Hesston, Kansas, a town that has mostly maintained a population of about three thousand people and whose primary industries focus on agriculture and farming in this part of the American central plains. I did not have far to go from home to my dorm room. My parents taught at Hesston College, and we lived at the edge of campus. But the journey in those first years of college-level studies opened a world of possibility I would never have imagined or expected when I first started.

Hesston College’s theme, displayed prominently in brochures and banners across the campus, states, “Start here, go everywhere.” This was certainly my experience…