I wanted to be a doctor always. When I was a child, I guess I started out wanting to be a nurse because my aunt was a nurse.

And then I upped the ante to being a doctor. And then I was quite sure that God wanted me to be a surgeon.

And I still think I might have been a good one.

But I've matriculated at Wheaton College as a pre-med student.

But it was during my four years there that I realized that God had given me a gift in linguistics.

And it was then that I learned that there were 2,000 languages in linguistics, and it was then that I learned that

there were 2,000 languages in the world that had never been reduced to writing, so it seemed to me to make

sense to volunteer to work on at least one of those languages, and so that's the way things

worked out. I never imagined being a writer or a public speaker. But God has all

kinds of amazing things up his sleeve, doesn't he? So I'm very grateful for the privilege of

being here today. You have certainly given me a tough topic to talk about, a character of steel

in a world of plastic.

There are three of us in this room who went to a certain high school in Florida.

It was a little boarding school called Hampton-Dubose Academy, and Jack Schuller and David Stevens and I all had the great blessing of learning character in that place.

We heard that word probably every day more than once.

And long before Jack and David's time there, way back the dark ages, the school was actually

in Orlando, Florida, in a very crummy little hotel.

And the headmistress, a very redoubtable woman, taller than I, weighed probably

100 pounds more than I do.

She was like a galleon in full sail when she walked

into any room and we trembled in our boots. But she had a chair in the lobby and she could look

straight down the whole hall and in that hall she had small throw rugs, oriental rugs in the hall.

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