Service, Missions, Leadership

Scene:  

It's August 15, a Sunday morning. All the 2010-2011 RAs have finished their exhausting week of training. In less than two hours bright-eyed freshmen will move in to their freshly cleaned dorms. Now, the RAs are sitting together with their coordinated shirts listening to Brother John's sermon at Siloam Baptist Church.

A sound breaks the silence down the pew from Ryan-Beep, beep, beepity, beep.

As Ryan looks around to see where this strange noise is coming from, she notices Sau Nam, a new student from Myanmar, playing with some electronic device. Ryan leans over to Sau Nam and jestly whispers, "Are you playing on your cell phone?"

Sau Nam's response, "No, it's my translator."

Ryan chuckles to herself after realizing the ignorance of the moment and nods her head to accept that Sau Nam, who is completely new to America, might need a translator to understand the sermon.

End scene.

When I first met Sau Nam she was recovering from motion sickness. She arrived three days earlier than the freshmen and her flight into Birmingham wasn't a pleasant one. I was given instructions from my boss to check on her regularly, seeing that she is on my hall. I didn't mind. The only problem was I didn't know how often was too often. So, every time I knocked on her door I woke her up, we had an awkward conversation, and we said our goodbyes. No significant encounter. No glimpse of a life-long friendship. No lessons learned would come from our year together at Judson.

So I thought.

My first lesson came the morning of the "translator incident". After Sau told me about her translator, all of the observations I made about her from the past few days made sense. Why was she sitting in the window sill at the end of our hall a couple of mornings ago? Why did I see her Bible near her every time I came in her room? Why did she bow her head to pray immediately after she sat down in the pew?

REVERENCE: A feeling or attitude of deep respect.

That's why.

Sau Nam's reverence toward worship is completely different from anything that I am accustomed to. She doesn't worry about the Sunday afternoon football game or the roast that might be burning in the oven for Sunday dinner. She doesn't worry about the Sunday afternoon nap that is needed after a week of filling life with pettiness. She didn't care if the service went past 12pm. On Sundays she is devoted to the uninterrupted worship of God. And, the awesome part is, her reverence doesn't stop on Sundays.

What a concept. What a lessoned learned.

As a Christian, God is constantly showing me ways to improve my walk with Him. I am so blessed to have someone like Sau Nam on our hall. Her culture, her life, her ambitions-there is so much to be learned. All because God called her to Judson. All because God told Adoniram Judson to mission in Burma almost 200 years ago. All because God is a God of reverence.

God is spirit and Sau Nam is a walking, breathing testament to John 4:24,

"God is Spirit and His worshipers must worship in Spirit and in Truth."

Reverence: A lesson learned.

In Him,

As my summer working for Student.Go in Perry County was coming to an end, I realized that I had one more thing to do before school started. That was debriefing.

At first I thought, oh great, I am tired beyond belief and I want to sleep. I want to see my family. I want to do anything, but postpone my few solitary hours of alone time before my junior year of school starts. Please, God, let this mandatory assignment be as painless as possible.

Selah Vie was the theme for Student.Go's debriefing this year. At first I thought it would be one of those corny get together times where everyone does get-to-know-you games, team building exercises, and midnight pranks. Ya, well, some of it was, but the majority of our debriefing was spent on the translation of Selah Vie, which is, Pause Life.

What?

I get a chance to press the PAUSE button on LIFE?

Is this allowed in God's ministry?

Are we allowed to have a time of reflection and rejuvenation?

YES!

When we first arrived, Bethany and I had to run to the Chapel for our first session. We listened to a man preach about what the next few days would be like-relaxing and reflecting. Was I pumped or what?

Then it happened. Small group time. Yep, I was about to be placed in a group of strangers and we were going to tell about one of the most memorable experiences that we had all summer. Being the extrovert that I am, I usually would jump at this situation. Unfortunately I didn't know what the summer felt like to me. I hadn't had time to sort through the emotions, the lessons learned, or what the end of something amazing would feel like.

Boom!

 It happened; every memorable experience came to me at once! Sitting in that circle with all the other Believers, knowing that our compassion matched, I wanted to tell every story of anger, relief, love, and compassion I had. I wanted to make every person in that circle feel the same way I do about Perry County and how much it needs our attention. I was a ball of mixed emotions-not knowing whether to cry or laugh, shout or be silent. All I knew was, I had too much to say and I didn't know how to say it.

I spoke.

That's all that happened. The first experience that came to mind is what came out of my mouth. I couldn't weigh out which experience was worthy of telling. They are all worth their own time. So, I went for the first one that came to mind.

I told them about a girl that I tutored all through June. To the people she has known all of her life-her family, her friends, her counselor; her teachers-she was hopeless. She wasn't worth the extra time and effort in school. She was going to be like the rest of her family. Pop out kids, collect a check, drop out and be another statistic for scholars to mark on their reports on rural poverty.

That wasn't happening on my watch. God gave me a desire to give her hope. To tell her that God's plan is different.

Her turn-around was amazing. God calls us to be encouragers. This student taught me why. All she needed was someone to tell her she could finish school, she could defy her odds, and she was better than what she was giving herself.

By the middle of June, she was almost completely finished with both of her summer school courses. Think about it. She had two courses that were supposed to take a semester, each, to finish. She was passing them in a fourth of the time. Amongst all of her adversity, she finished. She received her passing grades and now she is one more year closer to achieving her goal of graduating. All because of the compassion God gave me.

At the end of the small group, I realized that sometimes jumping out of the boat might be scary, might be time consuming, and it might backfire, but the jump is completely divine. It's God who will keep me afloat and give me strength to do His will so that people like this student may see the way, the truth, and the life shine through me.

In all, the debriefing experience proved to be worth it. I rested, rejuvenated, and truly paused life to listen to God. By reading this blog you can obviously see why. :)  I have had more time since debriefing to reflect. With regret, not all of those reflections can be posted. I know you would be bored. Haha.

It's now the second week of school and I gotta tell ya, Judson sure looks different. Living in Perry County really opened my eyes this summer. Well, that's another story for another blog.

See you soon,

Ryan Dowling

If you know me at all, then you know that eating is one of my favorite past times. So, when Brother John Nicholson of Siloam Baptist Church announced that there would be a fish fry at the Donovan's Sunday afternoon, you best believe that I was there to enjoy the food and fellowship.

I didn't know what to expect from this time of fellowship. I haven't been to Siloam Baptist in a long time because I have been visiting other churches in the community. Needless to say, I felt a little disconnected from everyone else. However, the business of the event kept me communicating with the members and guests of the church.

HOW? Well...

What would a fish fry be without some fishing of our own?

Yes, there was fishing at this fish fry. No worries. We weren't catching dinner (trust me I would starve if I had to).  To give us some activities while we were waiting on the food, our hosts let us fish in their lake. Yes, their lake.  It was fantastic, besides having to put crickets on my hook...GROSS! Before last Sunday I never caught a fish before. Thanks to Jonathan Goode, the college minister at Siloam, I caught one. I didn't use those fancy rods and reels. No sir, I went Woman vs. Wild on that lake and only used fishing line with a hook and cricket. And, not to brag or anything, but I caught my first fish on the first try. Look out wilderness, HERE I COME! Not really. It wasn't too hard. I mean a four year old caught one before I did. Ugh. Kudos to the kid, though. :)                                                                                  

After the slime of fish and the smell of lake water dried on our hands we decided to make our way over to the eating area. (Yes, we eventually washed our hands.) The food wasn't quite ready, but I, Molly Beasley, and Hardy Ernest didn't mind waiting in line. Well, the line started when we got there. :D.

The food looked delicious! We could tell that a lot of time and energy went into the feast. As we waited in line for the fish to finish frying, we made friends with the other people waiting. By this time all my disconnected feelings were non-existent. The people where friendly and funny. Especially, the twin MMI wrestling coaches who never heard of moon pies before. Needless to say, they are from the North. You could imagine the jokes that were made.