Emily Whearty: Student at University of Louisville

by Emily Pauw

So far I have interviewed members of our church that are in their thirties and above, and I wanted to acquire a perspective from someone close to my age. Therefore, I sought out one of the college-aged people at our church that hadn’t gone to a far away school. And although Emily Whearty doesn’t have an official job like most of my other interviewees, she does exhibit her faith in other aspects of her life. 

Emily is a sophomore at U of L majoring in Elementary Education and getting a minor in French. However, after college she wants to be a Young Adult Volunteer somewhere in Africa. She alleges that she has always wanted to live in Africa, but not for longer than a year. She just needs to get this desire to live in Africa “out of her system”. I think that one of the reasons that Emily wants to be a YAV may be that she watched her parents go on countless mission trips. A family’s background in faith truly does affect a person’s individual faith. I know that many of my friends do not attend church, just because their parents hated it growing up. And although, sometimes church can be time-consuming, in the long run I know that I will eventually be glad that my parents brought me to Sunday School at the ungodly hour of 9:45, no pun intended.

Many of you know that Emily and her family lived in the South Pacific island of Vanuatu because her parents were missionaries there. This made her family closer and also cleared up some of her questions about faith. She was in middle school at the time, and had the natural confusions about how to live as a Presbyterian or how to worship God the “right” way. However, talking to her parents frequently helped, as they were older and surer of their relationship with God. They did attend the unique church services in Vanuatu, but discussed the correlation to Presbyterianism afterwards.

Emily’s favorite parts of the Bible are the stories that we heard a thousand times when we were kids: Noah’s Ark, The Feeding of the Five Thousand, and of course the Christmas Story. She says that these stories take you back to the basics of God; how our uncomplicated admiration of our Lord seemed so simple, when all we had to worry about back then was guarding our lunch money from the class bully.