Claire Bailey

This isn’t about me or my degree

In 1999, my grandpa, John Fozard, left a thriving church in Illinois to become the president of Mid-America Christian University. What he didn’t know until after moving and accepting the job was that MACU was $14.5 million in debt. The school was on the brink of shutting down.

But instead of giving up, he chose obedience that didn’t make sense. He took a step of blind faith, trusting that God had a bigger plan. And as crazy as it sounds, Yahweh provided.

However, there is blind faith—faith and knowledge that GOD always has something far greater than anything we have in mind. And we must TRUST Him in that & not try to take it upon ourselves to create the story. The Lord’s mission throughout all of time is to partner with His creation. However, we try to take it upon ourselves to make it “work” when we don’t even have the ability to do it. You look at Adam and Eve, and from the beginning, they wanted control. You examine more & find out that if Abraham and Sarah would have just trusted the Lord, there wouldn’t have been a conflict between sons. Then you look at the nation of Israel trying to have kings of their own—and how broken, literally in two, the nation became because of the unwillingness to give God control over His own people.

Then Jesus enters the scene—from a tiny town no one cared about. He gave up everything, made Himself fully vulnerable, LITERALLY, and loved us before we ever chose Him. That kind of trust? That kind of obedience? It changes things.

26 years ago, my grandpa had two options: close the school, or trust God to do something only He could.

All of this to say—I’m pretty sure 26 years ago, my grandpa never had the intent that he would hand his granddaughter her bachelor’s degree. I’m almost certain his mind could only think of keeping the school afloat until it HAD to shut down—giving all the employees one last check, telling the students that there would be no university to return to & then hopefully selling the school and land so the debt could be paid off

But John Fozard decided to partner with the Creator.

This isn’t Legacy.
This isn’t my story, it’s Yahweh’s.
That’s the story behind this degree.