Cultural Markers, Success, and a Father's Loving Heart: Life is a Relationship, Not a Strategy-October 2025

By the time that students and faculty have succeeded in reaching William & Mary, they’ve been embedded for years in an educational and cultural system that maintains that one’s self-worth is based on education, credentials, and knowledge. They’ve often followed a path of educational and career advancement that was laid out years in advance, one punctuated along the way by frequent tests, actual or metaphorical, that determine their “success”. Such a system can warp not only the way one views their academic life, but their spiritual life as well. Through his novels, the 19th century Scottish novelist George MacDonald presented a very different approach to life and faith -- one that saw life not as a strategy but as a relationship.

MacDonald encapsulates his understanding of life and growth in the following paragraph from his novel, Sir Gibbie. It is a dense, and at times, convoluted paragraph, but if we can get past the Victorian prose, we’ll discover truths about God and life that can revolutionize our faith.

MacDonald writes:

The one secret of life and development, is not to devise and plan, but to fall in with the forces at work—to do every moment's duty aright—that being the part in the process allotted to us; and let come—not what will, but what the eternal Thought wills for each of us, has intended in each of us from the first. If men would but believe that they are in process of creation, and consent to be made—let the maker handle them as the potter his clay, yielding themselves in submissive hopeful action with the turning of his wheel, they would ere long find themselves able to welcome every pressure of that hand upon them, even when it was felt in pain, and recognize the divine end in view, the bringing of a son into glory; whereas, behaving like children who struggle and scream while their mother washes and dresses them, they find they have to be washed and dressed, notwithstanding, and with the more discomfort: they may even have to find themselves set half naked and but half dried in a corner, to come to their right minds, and ask to be finished. 

Our culture is constantly, insistently, yammering that everything depends on our smarts, our knowledge, our ability to navigate the complexities of modern life. This can create tremendous stress because we feel that it all depends on us. MacDonald reminds us of the truth that we have a heavenly Father who actively cares for us and watches over us. Such a realization can help calm our anxious heart and remind us that, as MacDonald puts it, “Fatherhood [is]… at the core of the universe.”

This excerpt from MacDonald also reminds us that while God loved us enough to meet us where we were, He loves us too much to allow us to stay there. His desire for our life is that we grow in maturity-into the image of Christ. In helping us to grow, however, He will at times use loving discipline. We need to strive to be submissive and respondent to this discipline in order to grow. If we resist, God will ultimately win out, but we’ll delay our growth and limit our fruitfulness (and joy). If we fail to learn the lesson God is trying to teach us, it will prevent us from being given greater responsibility and moving on to the next stage in our growth.

We often have the tendency to come up with a game plan or roadmap for our life, and then set about following it: taking things into our own hands. When we feel we discern what God’s will is, instead of waiting on His timing, we can try through our own efforts to bring it about. Through his writing, MacDonald reminds us that while we want a road map for our life God wants us to come to His feet every day, take His hand, and allow Him to lead us to where He wants us to go. This doesn’t obviate the need for wisdom, or long-range planning; it merely puts things in their proper order. As Craig Barnes puts it: 

The primary symptom of a sick soul that has become sick is that it has become blind to the poetry of life. It can no longer see the beauty of the small miracles that make up a day. It has become so consumed by strategies that it can no longer enjoy the mystery of life’s unfolding drama.

At Cambridge House, our vision is to lay a table with the riches of the historic Christian tradition; this means reading old authors -- authors like George MacDonald. Not because they are necessarily better, but because they often provide a perspective on our culture and its pathologies that contemporary authors lack.

Another one of our goals is to create a space where both faculty, and students can step outside of the frantic, noisy rush of academic life, and be reminded that God loves them not because of their title, degree, or their grades, but because they’re His children; and that fruitfulness and success in life doesn’t come primarily from having the right skills, or strategy, but from knowing the right person… and trusting Him with each day.