The Three Most Important Things

As a Pepperdine faculty member and former administrator, I often interview applicants for teaching and staff positions at the law school.  I start every single interview with the same simple, informal question: “What are the three most important things to you, and why?”

My hope is to casually catch the applicant in a moment of candor – before we get into pre-rehearsed canned responses about how much he or she wants the job.  I can think of no better way to cut through the smoke screen than to learn what the applicant truly values.  The applicant’s answer is unquestionably the most important aspect of the interview for me.

Because I ask this question so often, I have had the opportunity to reflect on this myself on numerous occasions.  My three:

My relationship with God

My relationship with Joline

My relationship with my kids

Last month, I interviewed applicants for summer internships with Pepperdine’ Global Justice Program in Uganda, Rwanda, and India.  Once again, I started by asking the students to tell me the three most important things to them.  The answers were interesting, varied, and insightful.  They included: Jesus/God/faith, family, friends, relationships, significance, intellectual curiosity/knowledge, education, culture, independence, community/connectedness, reading, purpose, growth, loyalty, ending human trafficking, wholeness/well-being, justice, service, love, and pizza.

Yes, pizza.

While most students provided a single word or short-phrase responses before I pressed them on why they chose those answers, one stood out to me.  I actually got misty, though this happens to me way too often.

Her answer is a prayer I now pray for my children.

I desperately yearn for her words to penetrate my kids to the marrow – for this to be the one thing that remains when all else is stripped away.  I won’t care what the second, third, or thirtieth most important thing is to them if the first is the same as this student’s:

“The most important thing to me is the assurance that I am known and deeply loved by God.”

Yet another reason that I have the best job in the world – I learn way more from my students than they learn from me.

I will be praying that whoever reads this will intensely experience that same love from the Creator who desperately wants you to know how much He loves you.