“I have set the Lord always before me.
Because he is at my right hand, I will not be shaken.”
– Psalm 16:8
Dear praying friends,
These last weeks at Gordon College have been full and will continue to be very full — full of activity and full of emotion. But how good it is that I can rest in God's care, knowing His great love for me!
On April 11, I celebrated my 22nd birthday and was overwhelmed by love. I appreciated the many emails and words of encouragement that I received from friends and family. What a blessing to be affirmed in my calling and celebrated as one of God's children.
This month of May holds many big events for me. Please pray for:
May 3-5: I travel to Wilmore, KY with my parents for a time of commissioning at the bi-annual Word Made Flesh board meeting.
~ Pray for this time to be full of grace and truth and blessing for all who attend. May 17-18: This is graduation weekend! Lots of packing, and family reunions and tough goodbyes with friends.
~ Pray for emotional stamina and sustaining joy through this time of transition. May 19-29: I'm traveling to PA and Washington DC with Erika Day to visit her family and see the Holocaust museum in DC. We will then travel to the wedding of two good friends, Margaret Taylor and Josh Feit, in Wheaton, IL, and finally back East, with Jenny Pinkus along for the last leg of the trip.
~ Pray for safety and sweet memories with the best of friends. June 3: On Sunday morning I will be commissioned at my home church, Byfield Parish in Georgetown, MA, followed by a reception. July 1: After spending the month of June with my family in New Hampshire, I will fly to Romania to join the WMF Romania community ministering among children at risk and spending most days at the newly renovated drop-in center.
Please consider if God would have you commit to praying for me regularly and let me know through email, or through the response card enclosed. Faithful prayer sustains me in times like these when I cannot begin to grasp the implications of the changes and challenges that lie ahead.
And praise God for providing generously for my financial needs as I begin this journey. Through friends, family, church and monthly pledges, my financial goal has been met.
If you feel led to give financially to the ministry of Word Made Flesh, please consider giving to the General Fund or to another staff member. Thank you for your generosity.
On the following pages is an article I wrote for my campus newspaper, directed toward college students, but appropriate for a wider audience as well. Names have been changed to respect the characters mentioned.
Grace and peace to you all,
Rachel
Journey to the Poor
If you're a college student, you've heard the grumbling about the tuition increase. What?!? Not again! I can't afford it! This year I was relieved to realize that the increase doesn't apply to me because I graduate in May. But every year, you and I can be heard exclaiming about the costs of tuition, now almost twenty-five grand per year. The price is high indeed, but how is it that we college students come to consider ourselves poor? If we accept the “poor student” label we believe a lie.
Freshman year I began to believe in my poor student status and self-proclaimed poverty. I would cry poor from having outrageously expensive books to buy and no quarters to do my laundry. It's tough for us students, using every last dollar just to fill up with gasoline, yet again.
In addition, endless credit card offers found jammed into my mailbox led me to believe I was on the low end of society, forced to borrow because I had no capital for spending. We're poor students, right? So we must borrow to buy the things we need and want like new clothes, CD's, and computer software.
Junior year, I decided to go for a semester abroad, as all well-rounded students should do. But I wanted an experience that would challenge my worldview, especially related to mission work. I was hesitant when I first read the brochure about Word Made Flesh Servant Teams, but a persistent conviction led me to sign up. I soon found myself on a trans-Atlantic flight to Eastern Europe for a semester of first-hand exposure to poverty and outreach among street children.
I arrive in Romania to discover that my host mom is a widowed mother of twelve. Living in a five story apartment building with six rooms to share, Elena treats me like royalty from the day I cross the threshold, insisting that I let her wash my clothes. Her twelve kids tend to generate enormous amounts of dirty laundry and she's the expert washing machine that scrubs clothes by hand in the bathtub for several hours every day. Two chairs, three stools and a wooden table crammed into the kitchen require us to eat in shifts, the youngest children going first. Since her husband's death to cancer, Elena has learned to trust in charity to keep her children fed, healthy and in school.
So now I have seen the truly poor, right? Yes, and no. For if I place my host family in the category of poor, I have to find another category for the adolescent street boys who sleep in the cold. Each day as we meet for a game of soccer, these boys show me other signs of poverty. Torn clothing, tattered shoes, matted hair and blackened fingernails tell me I have come face to face with the truly poor, the unloved and unwanted.
Statistics reveal that as college students you and I are among the 1% of people on earth who have the privilege of earning a degree. That's 99% of people in the world that will never make it past grade school. Surely, I am not poor.
One cool September afternoon with the street boys in Romania, I wonder why twelve-year old Jon is wearing nothing but a pair of black shorts. He sits next to me, silently watching the others chase the soccer ball across the concrete. Then I spot a flea on my jeans, flick it off, and realize he is braving the cold to find relief from his infested clothing.
Later I learn that Jon is one of more than 120 million street children worldwide. Children that live like Jon exceed the populations of France and Britain combined, and are found in almost every major city worldwide.
Stepping back onto campus, I see a familiar picture but can hardly recognize anything at all. It's a cloudy winter day in January, but the ascetic beauty of each carefully sculpted building and smooth pathway are too much for me to absorb. My senses are clouded by my experiences with Elena and the street children, coloring everything I now see. The paved sidewalks bordered with neatly trimmed bushes speak of order and beauty and safety – everything that poverty is not.
By senior year I've gotten over my bad case of reverse culture shock, but some things I see and hear no less surprise me. Sitting at a table in Starbucks, I notice two girls who I recognize from my school. Debating whether to get a drink now or later, the taller girl shyly admits with down-turned lip,
“I don't have any money. Do you think they take credit?”
“Don't worry, I've got some extra cash,” comes the reply.
The desperate student is relieved by her friend's generosity. Who can blame her? Gong to Starbucks without getting a drink is very disappointing. Still, I have trouble feeling compassion for this girl as she solicits sympathy from her friend. There is no poverty here in this well-lighted, colorfully painted Starbucks consumer cafe. None.
Somehow we have skewed the scale to make pretend that we students are poor. A constant IV drip of advertisements generate materialistic lies that blind us to the reality of our wealth. You and I are led to believe that there is so much we need but don't yet have.
The truth is, we students receive so many credit card offers not because we'
;re poor, but because we're privileged. We own stereos, cars, and computers and many of us plan to enter careers that will enable us to buy houses, engagement rings, new cars and newer computers. We're targeted because we're rich, even now, while we are students. Our education is one of our greatest assets. We possess privilege and status that most only dream about.
So what do I do with this new knowledge of my wealth? To start, I've stopped crying poor. Anyone who has completed twelve years of grade school (thirteen in Canada) and studies at an institution for higher education can hardly be counted among the poor. There are those who are truly poor, but you and I are not among them. And it's our responsibility to expose the lies that try to convince us otherwise.
Rachel Simons ~ PO Box 152 ~ Wolfeboro, NH 03894 rachel.simons@wordmadeflesh.com