Keep on keepin on! Wesley Foundation E-Letter (Methodist Campus Ministry)

Dear Friends,

 

Hey! Hey! Hey!  It’s Sami Wilson, the crazy campus minister in your life.  J  Hope you have had a chance to enjoy the good weather.  It’s been beautiful. 

 

Tonight is our big Guitar Hero extravaganza.  We are having it at the Wesley instead of South Lawn, because of impending rain.  But there will still be lots of food, lots of fun, and since we are having it here, more board games, Mr. Bucket, as well as Ping Pong.  Oh Yeah!  We will fire up the grill at 5pm and go until at least 10pm.

 

IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENT!  Due to the One Campaign’s concert next Tuesday night, we will be having the Ladies Tea Party on Sunday, May 4^th, at 6:30pm at my house.  Ladies, you are all invited.  Please let me know if you plan on attending, and how many guests you want to bring so I can have enough food.

 

Guy’s Cookout is the Tuesday of Finals week at my house at 6:30pm.  Just so you don’t feel left out guys, I’m planning on making BBQ ribs as well as gourmet burgers.  Let me know if you are going to be there.

 

Now For Sami’s Ramblings About Jesus:

 

This morning the scripture my devotional book offered was this: 

 

Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.  And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.  Romans 5:1-5

 

As I read this and pondered it, several people dear and close to my heart came to mind.  One of them is a student who has faced many adversities through the years, both inner turmoil and outer obstacles.  So many times this young person was tempted to give up and quit.  Yet this student is still here.  Another person is a dear family member who is in an unfair and frustrating situation, yet continues to give excellence back, refusing to compromise character in retaliation.  Another I can name is a young person who has not always made the best choices, but now, even while living with the consequences of past mistakes, has been consistently seeking wise counsel and prayer help, calling out first to the Lord.  I believe that each of these individuals are God’s boast in Jesus Christ, because in a world that continually sets an example of bailing out of tough situations, these have instead decided to hang tough with God.  They are the living testaments to this scripture.  The suffering that they are enduring is producing character within them that will produce the hope that reveals God’s glory.

 

Two things.  First, God is looking for people through whom He can reveal His glory to our broken world.  What makes this kind of complicated is that we live in a culture that is all about stealing glory.  (Some examples that come to mind:  being on the job and taking credit for someone else’s work;  athletes who resort to unnatural resources to increase their athletic skill and prowess; students that feel enormous pressure to succeed and are daily tempted to plagiarize or use someone else’s ideas as their own.)  The other thing that makes this kind of complicated is that God chooses to reveal His glory through human beings, who, as we have seen, face great temptations to make themselves look better than they are.  Unless these vessels have deep character, the story of God’s glory gets misplaced, and the story of hope that a broken world needs to hear is lost.  Second, God wants to be absolutely sure that the glory He wants to reveal is recognized by our broken world as glorious, a real beacon of undeniable hope.  Again, our culture is powerfully incredulous.  We are taught to question everything and believe nothing.  When God moves, He wants His powerful imprint to be obvious, for onlookers to really be moved closer to a saving relationship with Him instead of standing back with arms folded, dubious of whether anything significant has really happened.

 

I guess the reason that God uses suffering (please note that I did not say causes!) as a tool in revealing His glory is because people of every persuasion can relate to it, and none of us can easily recover from it.  So when God takes someone’s suffering and turns it around, everybody takes notice!  And when an individual chooses to allow suffering to transform their character, they build credibility with a skeptical world.

 

So what’s the “So What?”  Many of you reading this have big needs right now:  You are preparing to take finals.  You are struggling with difficulties at home and at work.  The 9 percent tuition hike that Western’s Board of Regents is approving today is less than good news.  You are deeply concerned and affected by relationships that are in trouble and seem to have no easy answers.  You are feeling overwhelmed, stressed out, and completely at a loss for how to deal with the stuff going on in your lives.  What you need is hope.  Real hope that things will get better, that you are not alone in dealing with your problems, and that you will be okay at the end of the day.  The good news is that God is real, and the hope He offers you is real too.  You are not alone.  And if you let Him have everything and follow the guidance He provides, things will get better.  And at the end of the day, you will be okay.  What’s more is that God will take your turmoil and turn it into a testimony that reveals His glory.  Not just the kind we can expect when we get to Heaven, but the kind that we get to see here in this lifetime.  The kind that is so undeniably glorious that even the biggest scoffers will have nothing to scoff about.

 

So be encouraged my friends, my dear ones.  Hang tough with God.  He will not leave you nor forsake you.  And when you give your everything to Him, He turns it into incredible sources of joy and celebration.  Just don’t give up.  Endure.  And let His good work in your difficulties transform you into a reflection of His goodness for all the world to see.  I’m still—

 

Hoping,

 

Sami

 

 

 

 

 

Sami Wilson

Campus Minister/Director

WKU Wesley Foundation

United Methodist Campus Ministry

270-842-2880

sami.wilson@wku.edu

 

Chin up! Wesley Foundation E-Letter (Methodist Campus Ministry)

Hey there!

 

It’s gorgeous outside—Yay!!!!!!!!!  Tomorrow night we meet for free food at 6:30 and then we will have a mystery night!  It will be cool!  God is good!  Hope everyone got the message about Friday.  Free lunch at noon at the Wesley Foundation.  Come and share the way you see God moving in this ministry.  It will be fun!

 

Now For Sami’s Ramblings About Jesus:

 

Every now and then I discover buried treasure.  God seems to surprise me with words spoken for “just a time as this.”  This morning in my quiet time, such a thing happened.  I was in my office in that quiet, holy space, sensing the presence of the Lord, when I noticed a book on my shelf.  It is one that I have not even looked at in years, certainly not in the time since I have been campus minister here.  I opened it up and read a piece, certainly not impressed, but then by chance turned to the cover.  Inside its front page was a hand-written note to the previous owner:

 

8-30-75

 

Dear Lou Ann—

 

Paul said “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness . . .  For the sake of Christ, then, I am content with weaknesses . . . for when I am weak then I am strong.” (II Cor. 12:9,10)  That’s a Mystery that each of us discovers in his own way.  God grant you faith to experience the real meaning of strength during this time when you must feel overwhelmed with weakness.  Chin up!  God loves you!

 

Barbara

 

Now I have no idea what the context of the message to Lou Ann was.  In 1975 I was three years old.  But I love the message.  I love the chipper quality in which it is given:  “Chin up! God loves you!”  I can only guess at the weakness that the recipient was struggling to overcome, the circumstances that caused it.  But I love the response to that circumstance that God delivers.  It is full of hope.  Instead of crawling into the pit too and somberly wondering how it will all get better, this comforter brings a bit of joy and humor to her words of encouragement.  That indeed whatever lies within, and certainly what lies ahead, is nothing that is able to steal the joy that is our birthright in the Lord.  In fact, the message is that in the place of our most poignant weakness God is getting ready to do His biggest work.  Well that’ll preach.

 

I want to encourage you today, my dear ones.  God is getting ready to do His biggest work in your life.  Just watch and see.  Chin up!  So that your eyes may be facing Him, ready to see His hand revealed.  Not focused on the pit you are in, downward cast so as to miss His hand of might and mercy at work.  Chin up!  God loves you!  And I do too—

 

Hoping,

 

Sami

 

Sami Wilson

Campus Minister/Director

WKU Wesley Foundation

United Methodist Campus Ministry

270-842-2880

sami.wilson@wku.edu

 

Be the Hope that you are!--Wesley Foundation E-Letter (Methodist Campus Ministry)

 

Dear Friends,

 

Hope all is well with everyone.  It wasn’t until this morning that I realized last week’s e-letter did not go out.  My computer has been doing crazy stuff.  Sorry about that; you were supposed to get this last Thursday.

 

IMPORTANT!!!!  The deadline for turning in scholarship applications is tomorrow.  Remember to turn in the University Form to Potter, room 317, labeled Wesley Foundation Leadership Scholarship.  The essay and reference letter can be turned in to the Wesley Foundation. 

 

Now For Sami’s Ramblings About Jesus:

 

I am so proud to be a Hilltopper!  It thrills me that WKU won the ONE campaign!  It is a movement to raise awareness and fight poverty world wide.  Of all of those Universities in the country that participated, we won!!!!!  Oh Wow!!!!!  Can you tell I’m excited?  I remember talking to my friend Azurdee one day early in the semester and her telling me that she just jokingly made the comment to the ONE campaign students that they could make signs out of cardboard they found in the trash.  Well, they did it.  And with creativity and passion they began to spread the word that fighting poverty is really something everyone can take part in.  It’s not rocket science.  It’s doable.  It just takes some effort.  I have never been so proud to be a Hilltopper.  Those college students--who never backed down, never gave up, and never let their own lack of resources get to them—inspire me.

 

This past week I have been looking at my journals, walking back through time to those early days in our ministry when I felt so overwhelmed by the needs and so underwhelmed by my own ability to meet those needs.  I couldn’t see then how I could possibly be enough to take this ministry to the place it needed to go.  I kept begging God to give me a leader to follow.  And He kept answering my imploring with silence, as if to say, “You can beg Me all You want, but You won’t change my mind about the leader I want in this place.”  And so I had to suck it up and become the leader He wanted here.  I’m more confident now.  Not so much in my own abilities, but in the One who called me to this place and set a thunderous passion in my heart to reach college students with the love of Jesus.  Somehow, He made it happen.  I have never been more excited to be a part of this ministry.  Oh we are going to some exciting places.

 

And so I want to encourage each of you with the Hope of Jesus Christ.  Hear this:  He has set His hope on you!  You may be called to, invited to, set your hope on Him, but He has already set His hope on you.  You are the one He has called to perform those “good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life” (Ephesians 2:10).  You may be like I was, so down on yourself that you can’t see up, but that does not change His mind about who you are and what He has in mind for you to accomplish.  It is for you specifically, personally.  No one else can bring it to pass.  He has set His hope on you!  While you may be waiting on Him do something awesome, He in fact has already been waiting on you to step up and be the Hope He made you to be!  Wow!  We think we wait on Him, when in fact He really has been waiting on us!  It blows me away.  Especially when I see each of you up close and personal.  When I get to be a witness to your lives.  It’s like I can see the Hope of who you are super-imposed upon the life you are living now.  And it is the coolest thing when the two become one.  When you get it.  And you begin to live the hope you were always meant to be.  It just blows me away.

 

Let me leave you with a word from Scripture:  “So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up.  So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith” (Galatians 6:9).  Thank you ONE kids, for being the inspiration that reminds me of how BIG my God is.  Thank you for showing me that all it takes is our willingness.  And thank you Wesley kids, for being the Hope of Christ to me, His Hope made flesh.  You inspire me to gratitude.  God is so good.  So this is me . . .

 

Hoping,

 

Sami

 

 

Sami Wilson

Campus Minister/Director

WKU Wesley Foundation

United Methodist Campus Ministry

270-842-2880

sami.wilson@wku.edu

 

Vote for WKU students in ONE campaign

Dear Friends,

 

The WKU ONE chapter has done some amazing things to help stop world poverty.  It is quite a testament to what ordinary people can do when they have passion and vision, determination and commitment.  Because of their example, I am so proud to be a Western Alumni and a campus minister here.  It is awesome to see young people stepping up in such a powerful way.  Currently WKU is ranked fourth in the nation for their efforts.  Check out what these regular students have been doing to fight extreme poverty and then vote for them as a way to encourage their efforts.  You can help them to reach first place.  Simply go to the web-site http://www.one.org/projects/ to help these WKU students make an even bigger difference.  And be encouraged by their story.  Every single person has an important contribution to make.  See theirs and be inspired to make yours.

 

Blessings,

 

Sami

 

Sami Wilson

Campus Minister/Director

WKU Wesley Foundation

United Methodist Campus Ministry

270-842-2880

sami.wilson@wku.edu

 

Daffadils--WKU Wesley Foundation E-Letter (Methodist Campus Ministry)

Dear Friends,

 

This week is so full of good things!  Namely, tomorrow we have free lunch at the Wesley Foundation.  I’m cooking 5 way Cincinnati Chilli.  Yay!!!!  You can look the event up on Facebook (Wednesday @ Wesley) and let me know if you plan to come or not.  Also this week on Thursday night we will introduce officer elections for the Wesley Foundation.  If you are interested in being a part of our leadership, you should definitely be there.  I also want to remind you that the deadline for applying for the Wesley Foundation Leadership Scholarship is coming up on April 15^th.  Remember, on Thursday we eat at 6:30, always free and really good.  And then we have our program at 7:30pm.  This week we will look at Paul’s strongest words of encouragement to young adults.  Yes, Paul was a campus minister.  Who knew?

 

Now For Sami’s Ramblings About Jesus:

 

The daffodils are blooming outside the Wesley Foundation.  These are the first flowers I ever noticed as a child.  I remember being in grade school and seeing other students bringing fistfuls of daffodils to the teacher.  The stems were always wrapped in wet paper towels and aluminum foil.  And yet they were still so pretty.  Later on in my life I recall the long line of daffodils making a pretty trail in our back yard all the way down to the water’s edge of the lake behind our house.  I marveled at how year after year those pretty little flowers would return without any kind of keeping.  They would just always show up heralding the onset of spring. 

 

It tickles me to see them growing at the Wesley Foundation.  A couple of years ago we had a work day and did some landscaping.  Because I wanted a clean look to the front yard, I told the guys who were weeding to go ahead and pull them out too.  My Board chair at the time looked at me like I was crazy (love you Woody!), but pulled them out anyway.  God really has a sense of humor, because here they are again, fully in bloom, and beautiful as ever. This to me is Easter.   

 

How powerfully the resurrection speaks to my own life, but how difficult it is to write about sometimes.  Last week I tried, and couldn’t.  I think it is because I received news that a child I had been praying for had died from Leukemia, just three years old.  I had been and continue to pray for this sweet boy’s mama.  And somehow I couldn’t find the words to articulate the hope of Easter while staring such heartache in the face.  I guess it’s because it touches so keenly my own heartache of seeing my little boy in a hospital room.  He is fine and healthy now, but the pain of that moment lingers.  And I cannot speak glibly of Easter when a mother has experienced the kind of loss that I shudder to consider.

 

But last week there were no daffodils.  Today there are.  And they remind me of the resiliency of hope, and the tenderness of God who brings it.  The ground of our lives may be bare, stripped of everything we associate with life, but that is no sign that our lives are barren.  Even when the unthinkable strips our hearts clean of joy and beauty, God is ever waiting to bring us back to life, back to joy, back to our own souls that are well watered and loved and tended with grace.  The ground of our lives is Him, and as we are rooted and grounded in Him, though everything on the surface can be taken from us, that which holds us fast cannot be touched.

 

I love the scripture that says, “I pray that, according to the riches of his glory, he may grant that you may be strengthened in your inner being with power through his Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love” (Ephesians 3:16-17).  Yes, as we are rooted and grounded in love, in the One who is Love, then we are safe from the storms that assail our hearts.  I know that so many of you face all kinds of storms, the kind that rob you of peace and joy.  I know there are struggles that demand your all, and on some days demand more than your all.  I know that there are situations you face that seem impervious to any solution.  But the message of Easter I would speak into your storm, your struggle, your hopeless situation is that God is holding you fast, and God is bigger than your storm, bigger than your struggle, and bigger than your situations.  Just the moment you think all hope is lost, God begins to do a new thing and a small sprout of new life pokes up its head.  In the miracle that is God something so tender is still so tenacious and cannot be denied, ever, at all.  This is the power of the cross and resurrection.  This is the promise of the empty grave and an ascended Savior.  Death has no hold on our King. 

 

For this young mother who has lost her precious child to death I would say that God’s love is watering the tender places of her heart with hope.  And with the gentleness of time, she will see the tender shoots of life spring up within her.  It will not deny or degrade her pain, but it will transform it into the fertile soil of God’s tender consolation and a place of sweet beauty.  Of course she will see her son again.  But in the meantime she will have the heart of Christ beating within her when her own heart is too battered to feel anything.  And she will have the tears of strangers watering her life as well:  those who are holding her in a place of love, beyond words, beyond cures, beyond easy answers, joining with the One Love that knows her by name and never lets her go.

 

I want to close with the words of William Wordsworth, a poem written in 1804:

 

"Daffodils"

I WANDER'D lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the Milky Way,

They stretch'd in never-ending line

Along the margin of a bay:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they

Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:

A poet could not but be gay,

In such a jocund company:

I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude;

And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

 

Happy Easter,

 

Sami

 

 

Sami Wilson

Campus Minister/Director

WKU Wesley Foundation

United Methodist Campus Ministry

270-842-2880

sami.wilson@wku.edu