small.

A couple weeks ago, maybe longer than that now, I was asked if I'd be interested in being AIM's representative at JMU, promoting Adventures in Missions and their trips. [For those of you who don't know, I worked with AIM all summer in Philadelphia.]  Life has been crazy and I've been a little bit of a procrastinator with it.  Basically, AIM has a program called Real Life which are mission trips geared specifically for college aged students.

The promotion campaign has three parts and today I started one of them which is the t-shirt portion.  I was given a t-shirt by AIM which looks like this,

[385 million people live on less than $1 a day]

and was told to wear it for five consecutive days in hopes that people will ask questions and I have the opportunity to talk to them about poverty and what we can do to help.

Part of our role as college reps for AIM is to also keep a blog on what we're doing and how the activities are going.  So I wrote a blog today and for some reason the AIM server was down.  And that got me thinking about how little I've been writing lately and that it would be good to share what's going on.  So here are my thoughts on the t-shirt challenge for today:

James Madison University is nestled in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.  It attracts mostly applicants from Northern VA as well as students from PA, NJ, and NY.  This year we have close to 19,000 students enrolled, spread throughout 108 degree programs.

Needless to say that I was little unsure of how today, my first day wearing my AIM poverty shirt, would go.  Walking to school I was listening to worship music and thinking about how to most affectively impact my student body.  Our school is known for being a huge party school and yet we have one of the largest, if not the largest active InterVarsity chapter in the U.S.  While the need is obviously great, I see that God is moving mightily at JMU.

I had this expectation of how today would go.  That I'd be like a magnetic for people asking about my shirt and that when I put up the posters, AIM would have an influx of messages asking about trips.  Not surprising my "plan" didn't work out quite like I expected it.  No one asked about my shirt and because JMU has an intense policy about hanging fliers and whatnot up around campus I wasn't able to put up the posters.

Today make me ridiculously aware of how small I am.  Today I was so mindful of the world around me, of the hundreds of students I passed during my walks on campus, and all I could think of is "Lord, how can I possibly make a difference here?  I'm just one person!"

I'm currently a co-leader of a high school girls small group and we're reading "Ruthless Trust" by Brennan Manning which, as you can tell by the title, digs into the core of what it means to truly trust God.  Today all I could think about is what I could do to affect our campus better, what I could do to would promote AIM better, what I could do that would allow my fellow students to see and hear God more clearly when I had just talked to my girls about surrendering everything to the Lord.

As I walked back home today, slightly disappointed and feeling terribly insignificant, I heard the Lord reminding me that this wasn't about me.  It was about Him.  All that He was calling me to do was be a willing and ready vessel and that He would use my insignificance to make His glory more known.  I'm not to make plans because God already has one.

My prayer for this week is that the Lord would move in UNEXPECTED ways.  I pray that my preconceived notions would be thrown out the window and that I would be amazed and awed with His majesty as He makes Himself known at JMU.  I pray that my campus would be on fire for Christ, that His love would overwhelm my school and we would see revival in my community.  I know that Christ will continue to change lives at my school and I'm so excited to see it happen.

To read more about poverty and about Esther's story, who is shown in the picture below, check out this portion of AIM's Real Life website.