A sequel to “A Father’s Journey: Following God’s Call to Nashville” and “24 Hours, 2 Celebrations, 1 Truth”
Five months ago, I held an acceptance letter and wept.
On November 20th, 2025, Belmont University opened its doors to my daughter, Jarah, the girl who had spent eleven years developing a gift she hadn’t asked for but had faithfully carried. I wrote about that moment. About surrender. About a dear friend who went home to Jesus the same week. About what it means to hold your dreams with open hands and trust God with the outcome.
Yesterday, April 11th, 2026, we walked through those doors.
Be Belmont Day. The invitation promised “a plunge headfirst into the very essence of Belmont University.” It delivered something more. For me, a father watching his daughter step into her calling, it delivered a mirror. And what I saw reflected wasn’t just Jarah’s future. It was a word for an entire generation aching for something they can’t quite name.
The Void Is Real. But You’ve Been Filling It with the Wrong Things.
Let me speak plainly to someone reading this who isn’t quite sure why they clicked.
You’re successful by most measures, or at least you’re working hard to get there. You have goals. A plan. Maybe a relationship, a career, a following. But underneath all of it, there’s a hum. A low, persistent emptiness that no achievement has ever fully quieted. You fill it with ambition, with entertainment, with relationships, with approval. And for a moment, sometimes a long moment, it works.
Then it doesn’t.
That void has a name. It’s a misaligned motive.
Here’s what I mean. As I sat in Belmont’s opening session for Be Belmont Day, President Dr. Greg Jones spoke about something called the SOUL Framework, a set of values woven into the very fabric of this university. Inspired by 3 John 1:2, “Beloved, I pray that you may prosper in all things and be in health, just as your soul prospers.”
SOUL stands for four things:
S — Seek Excellence (with humility)
O — Offer Gratitude (with joy)
U — Unleash Hospitality (with love)
L — Live the Dream Together (with hope)
The entire framework is surrounded by one word: Wisdom.
I sat there as a father, as a Chief Strategy Officer at a company, a school board member, a husband, a man who has chased enough things in life to know the difference between running toward something and running away from emptiness, and I thought: This is what’s missing.
Not just in my daughter’s generation. In every generation.
The Problem Isn’t Your Plan. It’s Your Motive.
Our culture has a motive crisis.
Everywhere you look, the message is the same: You are the center. Your brand. Your hustle. Your story. Your truth. Social media monetizes your insecurity. Algorithms reward your performance. The loudest voices in the room are the ones telling you to look inward for answers to questions that can only be answered from above.
It is exhausting.
The Apostle Paul said it plainly in 2 Corinthians 4:5: “For what we preach is not ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake.”
Twice in that verse, he says it’s all for Jesus. Not for us. Not for the brand. Not for the résumé. For Jesus.
Here’s the paradox that hit me when I first understood it: the moment you stop making life about yourself is the moment your life actually starts. God is far more interested in your why than your what. You could do everything right and still feel completely hollow. Because the motive was off. You were building your kingdom when He was asking you to build His Kingdom.
Colossians 3:17 doesn’t mince words: “ And whatever you do, whether in word or deed, do it all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father through him.”
All of it. The work emails. The parenting. The performance at the college audition. The scholarship application. The prayers over a dying friend. All of it, in His name, for His glory, as an act of worship.
That’s a motive that doesn’t burn out.
What a College in Nashville Is Getting Right
I’ll be honest with you. I was skeptical.
We live in an era when institutions, universities especially, often radicalize rather than educate. When character formation has been replaced by ideological conformity. When the beautiful, the true, and the good have been traded for the provocative, the relative, and the self-serving.
Belmont is not that place.
Is it perfect? No. It’s run by fallen human beings, same as every institution on this side of heaven. But when Dr. Jones stood before hundreds of incoming freshmen and their families yesterday and spoke about seeking excellence with humility, not for your own glory, but because you recognize there’s a greater purpose beyond yourself, I felt something rare.
Hope.
When he talked about unleashing hospitality, not tolerating people, not merely including them, but genuinely loving them in the way that 1 Corinthians 13 describes love, I thought about a generation that has more digital connections and fewer real friendships than any in history.
When he said live the dream together, I thought about a country that has forgotten how to.
In a moment when parents are rightly asking hard questions about where they send their children and who will shape them, Be Belmont Day offered me something concrete: a community that is deliberately, intentionally, unapologetically forming soul, not just skill.
For this father, that matters more than the rankings.
A Prayer for Another Great Awakening
If you’re a parent reading this, or soon to be one, and you’re quietly, desperately praying for something to shift in this country, I want to sit with you in that prayer for a moment.
I believe you. The anxiety is warranted. The direction is concerning. And the instinct to protect your children from a culture that often works against everything you’re trying to build at home, that instinct is right.
But here’s what Be Belmont Day reminded me: the answer to a culture of misaligned motives isn’t retreat. It’s formation. It’s raising children, and becoming adults ourselves, who know exactly why they’re here and whose they are.
Every Great Awakening in American history began not with a political movement but with ordinary people whose motives were right. People who stopped performing for an audience and started living for an Audience of One. People who discovered that the void they’d been desperately filling could only be filled by One who was already near.
That awakening begins at home. In families who feed their Good Wolf, who deliberately choose what they meditate on, what they celebrate, and what they build their foundation on. And then it spreads, one life at a time, one campus at a time, one community at a time.
Yesterday, I watched my daughter walk into her future surrounded by hundreds of other families doing the same hard, holy work. And I thought: maybe this is how it starts.
Jarah, This One’s for You
Five months ago, your acceptance letter arrived, and I saw God’s faithfulness written in ink on university stationery.
Yesterday, I saw it written on your face.
You walked those halls like someone who belongs there, not with arrogance, but with the quiet, settled confidence of someone who knows God opened that door. You are about to be formed. Challenged. Stretched. Maybe broken open in ways you can’t anticipate. Belmont will ask things of you that feel impossible.
Say yes anyway.
Seek excellence, not to impress anyone, but because you were made in the image of a God who does all things well.
Offer gratitude, especially on the days when the hard work doesn’t feel worth it.
Unleash hospitality, love the roommate who drives you crazy and the classmate who seems like they have it all together.
And live the dream together. You were never meant to do this alone.
You are living James 4:15 in real time: Instead, you ought to say, “If it is the Lord’s will, we will live and do this or that.” His will brought you here. His will will carry you through.
We are so proud of you. So grateful for you. And we are praying every single day that your soul thrives.
Marc is the founder of MindWolves® and co-partner of The Family Wins Devotional, a Christ-centered family devotional for building your foundation on God’s Word. If this post stirred something in you, Feed Your Good Wolf.
MindWolves 