The College President Who Saw the Fifteen-Year-Old Preacher

When Martin Luther King Jr. arrived at Morehouse College in 1944, he was just fifteen years old — a skinny kid from Atlanta who had skipped two grades and wasn't even sure he wanted to be a minister. His father was a preacher. His grandfather was a preacher. But young Martin wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer, anything but another predictable King behind a pulpit.

Benjamin Mays, the college president, noticed him almost immediately. Not in the classroom, but in the chapel, where Mays delivered weekly addresses that wove theology with social justice. He watched the teenager lean forward in his seat, watched him linger after services, watched him wrestle privately with questions of faith and calling. Mays began inviting the young man to his office for conversations that would stretch into hours.

Years later, King would call Mays his "spiritual mentor and intellectual father" — the man who saw a world-changing pastor in a boy who didn't yet see it in himself.

When Jesus told Nathanael, "I saw you while you were still under the fig tree," He revealed something staggering: the Lord of all creation had been watching in the quiet, private moments before the invitation ever came. Before Philip said a word, before Nathanael walked a single step toward Jesus, he was already fully known and fully called. The God who finds us has always been watching — not from a distance, but with the tender attention of One who already knows exactly who we are becoming.