My PhD Journey: Dr. Who?, Dr. What?, Dr. Why?

I have known my entire life that I wanted to work in education. Long before I understood what a doctorate degree was, before I knew the difference between undergraduate studies and graduate studies, before I could have explained what research even meant, I already knew that teaching, learning, and helping people understand the world around them was who I was called to be. I can’t explain it any other way.

Some of my earliest memories of school and the learning process involved coming home from school and immediately turning around to “teach invisible students” in the living room with my grandmother as my student. If you’ve ever played school growing up, then you understand exactly what I mean. I still get excited about a fresh new Expo marker and a white board.

I would model my lesson plan after what I was taught earlier in the day. I would simply reteach lessons from class, create assignments nobody asked for, explain concepts with far more confidence than accuracy, and genuinely love every second of it. Somewhere in those moments, the direction of my life became abundantly clear. I was made for this! It’s the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do.

As I got older, the calling only became clearer. I became passionate about teaching Education was more than just something I enjoyed, it was the thing I could not imagine myself walking away from. I loved the process of learning, the structure of academics, the challenge of ideas, the way good teachers could completely reshape the confidence and future of another person simply by seeing potential in them. Even from a young age, I understood that the level of teaching and scholarship I eventually hoped to pursue would require more than an undergraduate degree. The dream was never just to stand in a classroom, although it was part of the dream. Somehow, before I even understood how it all worked, I knew that I wanted to teach at the highest academic level, write in depth about it, research with intentionality, contribute meaningful ideas, and spend my life engaging the deeper questions surrounding education. The one thing that did change along the way was the subject matter. I have always had a love for history, politics, and social sciences. At one time I would have told you that I wanted to be a history professor. The textbook definition of exactly what you might be thinking of when you imagine what that looks like. I also found myself drawn to the world of education itself, and at one time believed that I wanted to teach future educators (something I am qualified for, and still may do from time to time). But I knew I found the place I belonged when I realized that my heart is to contribute through the understanding of people, discipleship, biblical principles, formation, psychology, and theology. Somewhere along the road, I knew that I was on the path that would eventually led toward my PhD.

Of course, the interesting thing about callings is that they rarely travel in straight lines. Or in my case… more like all around the world and back again.

If I am honest, there were seasons where I genuinely wondered whether the entire dream had died. If you know anything about my journey, that makes complete sense to you. If you don’t know, I walked through a season where I was completely removed from teaching and the world of education altogether. It was the darkest time of my life. What I expected my life to look like and what it actually became were, for a while, two very different stories. There was a period where the career I loved disappeared almost overnight, and with it came an avalanche of disappointment, uncertainty, grief, humiliation, exhaustion, financial strain, fractured confidence, and the strange emotional experience of watching parts of your identity unravel in real time. People love talking about resilience once the story has a clean ending. Living through it feels much less inspirational while it is happening.

For a long time, I carried the weight of trying to understand what it meant to lose something that felt deeply connected to purpose. If I wasn’t a teacher, who was I? What would I do? My entire life was dedicated to my passion. Teaching was never just a paycheck to me, in fact, it was hardly a paycheck at all. If you know you know. It was tied to what I knew was a higher calling on my life. When that was interrupted, it forced me into a season of wrestling with questions I never expected to ask. Questions about purpose. Questions about suffering. Questions about God, and why it would happen to me. Questions about whether a dream could ever survive this level of disappointment. Questions about whether a calling still exists when circumstances no longer resemble what you thought obedience would look like.

Oddly enough, those years are part of what eventually led me deeper into theology. It was a journey like I could never have imagined.

Several years ago, after I knew the door had been opened for me again to step back into education. I did so with a different mindset. I walked through a season of spiritual formation that changed my life forever. I made the decision to pursue a Master of Arts in Theological Studies. Theology, at least to me, has never been merely about collecting information about God or learning how to sound intelligent in conversations. I learned that even though I thought I understood what it meant, my walk with God was shallow and limited to what my understanding of Him had become. I fell completely in love with embracing the world around me through a theological perspective. Theology shapes the way people understand reality itself, and many have very little if any understanding of what it means. The truth is that every person operates from some kind of theological framework whether they realize it or not. Every belief about identity, morality, suffering, purpose, hope, truth, justice, meaning, or human nature ultimately flows from deeper assumptions about God, humanity, and existence. I’m not referring to religious beliefs or church membership, I am talking about the way we live from day to day.

Theology asks questions that every human being eventually encounters whether they are sitting in a seminary classroom or not. Why are we here? What gives life meaning? What shapes people? Why do humans long for transcendence? What does redemption actually look like? Why are people simultaneously capable of extraordinary beauty and devastating brokenness? How should people understand suffering? How does belief shape behavior? What does transformation actually mean?

The deeper I moved into theological studies, the more fascinated I became by the psychological side of those same questions. It was almost as if my love for understanding people and the way we learn became even greater when I approached spiritual formation and discipleship.

This is where I will lose half of you on the journey because some have strong opinions on how psychology should be viewed. For those who care to stay a while, allow me to explain. By nature we are theological beings through the creation of our soul, but we are also psychological through the existence of our mind. Psychology, when understood properly, is attempting to understand human beings. If we don’t have understanding, what do we have?

The terminology for Psychology is probably not what you would hear in your Sunday morning sermon, although I believe there is certainly room for it. Psychology explores cognition, behavior, emotion, identity, development, motivation, trauma, relationships, habits, attention, personality, memory, resilience, and the countless internal processes shaping the way people experience themselves and the world around them. We are quick to dance all around it, but have little understanding of what it means.

My personal journey of mental health healing, spiritual formation, and discipleship revealed so much of what I unknowingly tolerated in my own life. Growing up in church, and serving in ministry, I have a genuine desire to see others grow in their relationship with Christ. However, that perspective didn’t change until I realized what I had experienced was shallow. Church was shallow. My understanding of God was what others told me. My spiritual life was shallow. My faith was consistent, but not developed. I started to pursue depth and discipleship outside of what I was used to. I walked away from indoctrination. That was almost dangerous in the best way. Somewhere along the way, I became increasingly frustrated with the way theology and psychology are often treated as competing enemies rather than disciplines asking many of the same human questions from different perspectives. In fact, somewhere along the way I became aware of just how much religious doctrine had influenced every single thing in my life, and left me spiritually depleted and theologically ignorant.

When I say this, I am not issuing a blanket statement. I want to be clear that I am not saying everyone. I am making a reference to what has been the majority for far too long. Psychology and spirituality are normally not found sitting on the same row at church. One side sometimes treats psychology as though understanding the mind somehow threatens faith. The other side often speaks about spirituality as though humans are nothing more than biological systems reacting to environmental stimuli. Personally, I think both sides deserve a much needed pause, as we reconsider how they might possibly become integrated. If we fail to use an integrated approach, we miss the depth and complexity of what it means to be human, and how we are to live as God’s created, in His image.

Human beings are not machines. We function as complex systems within an environment of systems. We are not disembodied spirits floating through existence either. Though I do believe some live this way.

We are deeply formed beings whose thoughts, habits, environments, relationships, beliefs, stories, wounds, experiences, attention, and spiritual lives are constantly shaping who we become. We are created on purpose, for a purpose. I realized as I studied deeper into God’s Word, if we lack understanding of theology (and we do), then we lack understanding of truth. Theology helps us understand truth, meaning, morality, redemption, and the nature of humanity. Attempting to understand those constructs without absolute truth and spiritual wisdom is detrimental to our existence. At the same time, adding in psychological understanding helps us better understand development, cognition, emotional processes, attention, identity formation, behavioral patterns, and the ways environments influence people over time. The more I studied both disciplines, the more convinced I became that they belong in conversation together. I started to realize, this is exactly what I am called to teach. This is what I am most passionate about when it comes to helping others.

That realization eventually led me toward this journey I am on now, pursuing a PhD in Psychology: Theology. A program that I didn’t even know existed when I first started teaching, much less be offered at the university where I attend.

This is the part of the journey, for those who are interested, that I want to share with you. My PhD journey.

Now let me pause here because the moment people hear “PhD,” they tend to think one of three things: either you are secretly a genius, you enjoy educational suffering recreationally, or you plan on becoming the kind of person who casually ruins dinner conversations by overanalyzing everyone’s attachment styles, using big words, and knows everything. At this point, I can confidently confirm that doctoral work does, in fact, increase the likelihood of turning ordinary conversations into research questions, and I do analyze everyone and everything. (I am thankful for my friends who still enjoy dinner with me)

I will start with the basics. At its foundational level, a PhD, which stands for Doctor of Philosophy, is fundamentally about the pursuit of wisdom and scholarly contribution. It’s becoming an expert in the field of study that you are most passionate about. Philosophy, everyone’s favorite subject, simply means “love of wisdom,” – okay, it’s probably not everyone’s favorite subject, and I don’t think I should have said “simply means” because nothing in philosophy is simple.

If you want my opinion, I think society desperately needs more people willing to slow down and pursue wisdom instead of merely consuming information. Pause right here and read that again because I meant every word of it. In a world consumed with readily available information, we could stand a bit more wisdom.

I will probably ask you to pause from time to time because we often times read over something without ever stopping to think about it. We live in a culture drowning in content while starving for depth. Go ahead and read that last sentence again, because it was profound, if I do say so myself.

Consider this for a moment. As a culture, we are drawn into algorithms and consumed by newsfeed. Constantly scrolling and seeking. People scroll endlessly through opinions without ever stopping long enough to ask what is actually shaping their minds, habits, identities, emotions, relationships, and spiritual lives in the process. I started to realize this when I was forced in my own life to unplug, sit down, stop talking, and embrace solitude. It was ROUGH. But it was necessary.

What have we allowed ourselves to become without even realizing it? How has the globally connected age of technology impacted the way we view God, ourselves, and others? How can we be raised in church our whole life and remain shallow in our spiritual understanding? Those questions along with many others started to become what I thought about most days.

I would sit and think about why I had more bibles than a Sunday School classroom on my bookshelf but could not tell you anything about it. Yet I could spend hours scrolling on my phone, just to fill you in later on what everyone else was doing. I became interested in why I felt unsafe to share my mental state with those who I called “brothers and sisters” in Christ for the fear of being categorized as broken, or weak, or even better, crazy. I began to wonder why I felt unsafe to be authentically myself, outside of the only thing I knew, which was education. When I didn’t have that to fall back on, I wondered how many others dealt with the same feelings – lost. Yet claimed to be “found”.

I spent my time diving deep into God’s Word. I studied discipleship and why it seemed to be an overused word for an underused commandment. I studied mental health because I felt my own begin to come apart. I wanted to understand why all of a sudden I dealt with crippling anxiety and thoughts of suicide when I never had before. I didn’t just want to be told that it would get better. I wanted to know what was happening. I wanted to know why depression and anxiety ran rampant in churches, but never talked about out loud. I couldn’t help but wonder since my environment had changed the way I approached everything, how was our cultural environment shaping who we were becoming?

My interests in spiritual formation and discipleship started to increasingly become centered around digital distraction, attentional control, spiritual formation, narrative identity, and the ways environments shape people psychologically and spiritually over time.

Before we go any further, I want you to ask yourself, do you have a hard time paying attention? How many times do you say the phrase “chasing squirrels”? Or, how often do you hear others say it?

Attention and the way our minds gravitate towards things is extremely interesting. I am fascinated by how attention functions almost like a form of discipleship all on their own, without us even realizing it. I only became aware of this sort of thing when I found myself sitting at home with minimal interaction with the world around me.

The truth is, research reveals that whatever consistently captures a person’s attention eventually begins shaping their desires, perceptions, emotions, thought patterns, and identity whether they realize it or not. Remember, my entire identity was shaped by what had my attention as an educator.

Formation is part of who we are. Humans are being formed constantly. We are able to be influenced by what we are surrounded with. Or who we are surrounded by. Check your friend group, do you want to be like them? Or are they trying to be like you?

Since we are formed by our environment, it should be no surprise for you to learn that technology is formational. We are formed by our habits we develop. Communities form us. Stories form us. Worship forms us. Trauma forms us. Repetition forms us. The environments people live within every day are shaping them in profound ways, often times without our awareness.

And honestly, that is part of why this journey matters so much to me personally.

The reason I want to share this journey with you is because I believe that we could all benefit from becoming aware of how we have been formed into the life we are living, and how that life lines up with what God has in store for us. I do not simply want to earn a degree for the sake of accomplishment or status. I’ve been down that road, and it left me empty.

I am pursuing a PhD because I want to teach. I am called to teach. I am passionate about it. I want to write. I want to research questions that matter. I want to help bridge conversations between theology and psychology in ways that are intellectually honest, spiritually grounded, and practically meaningful for real people living real lives. I want to have the conversations that many believers won’t acknowledge, and many churches choose to address.

I want to become part of this field because I care deeply about discipleship, identity, education, spiritual formation, attention, purpose, and the ways human beings interpret themselves and the world around them. I care about the ones who are wondering the same things I did, while continuing to try and hold it all together Sunday after Sunday. I want to shape those who are pursuing their lifelong dreams and careers in a way that is academically honest and spiritually meaningful.

In fact, the entire journey of pursuing a PhD itself is profoundly formational. I am not the same person intellectually today that I was a few years ago. This journey will change you. If you are considering earning your PhD, please understand that it will change you.

It changes the way you think.
The way you read.
The way you process ideas.
The way you handle pressure.
The way you manage time.
The way you understand discipline.
The way you approach suffering.
The way you engage uncertainty.
The way you confront your own limitations.

Some days this journey feels deeply fulfilling and intellectually energizing. There are some days I am excited to learn more and dig deeper. Other days it feels like being psychologically humbled by peer-reviewed journal articles written by researchers who apparently have personal vendettas against clarity and concise writing. There are some days when I stare at the page and wonder what language I needed to learn in order to understand what is being said. Doctoral work has an incredible ability to make you feel both highly educated and completely incompetent within the same afternoon. That is the truth.

And honestly, I think that is part of what I want this series to capture. I don’t want to share academic material with you to make sure you get a good night sleep before you are done reading. I want to share the moments that I feel completely unqualified and incompetent. I want to share the moments I’ve thought about quitting but didn’t. I want to share with you what it feels like to feel like I am the only one in the entire world who cares about my subject matter, but something in me keeps showing up.

I am probably not going to share with you all of the polished milestones. I want you to become part of the process that most don’t see. I also might just be writing this for myself. I realize that only a few may read through it, and even fewer actually reading every word.

I want to share this journey because I believe every journey is worth sharing, if it’s made in truth and transparency.

I want to invite you to the other side for a moment.

The mental side.
The emotional side.
The spiritual side.
The practical side.
The exhausting side.
The meaningful side.
The deeply human side.

I want to write about the courses I take, the research process, the frustrations, the late nights, the breakthroughs, the faith journey, the pressure, the resilience, the theological reflections, the psychological insights, the moments of doubt, the moments of clarity, and the strange realization that education often forms the person as much as it informs the mind.

Somewhere between all the papers, deadlines, journal articles, theological discussions, statistics assignments, and existential crises triggered by APA formatting guidelines, I know that this process is becoming about far more than earning letters behind my name. It is becoming part of who I am becoming.

So this is the beginning. This is the first. My hope is that you will decide you want to follow along for the next however long it takes. My hope is that you learn something along the way about yourself, about God, and maybe a little psychology or theology along the way. Who knows? Maybe you will realize at some point that you too can pursue that dream you’ve had your whole life.

Let the journey begin.

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