Remembering Share Prayer and Dare

Sunday was a blast from the past. Pastor Dave Mitchell's sermon series, "How Does Your Garden Grow?" has really brought to light many inspiring stories from the people of Westridge as we attempt to cultivate the corners of the garden where God has placed us. 

Last week I started a blog about the five-person panel Dave assembled to bring a "sermon" about how they are bringing Christ into their diverse workplaces. I didn't get very far on my blog last Sunday night, but I still plan to share those thoughts as well.

However, I want to talk about yesterday. The panel was made of four Westridge members who are in different stages of preparing for full-time ministry, one already has her degree, others just beginning.

The one at the first end of the panel was Brady Long, who is a sophomore at Tabor College. He has recently decided to pursue youth ministry. Onstage, Brady said he was forgoing his earlier notes to talk about a campus ministry he was involved with at Tabor. 

Brady grew up at Westridge (I remember teaching him in 1st grade Sunday School) and he attended youth group, but he said the ministry that brought him closest to God was Share Prayer and Dare at Tabor. Brady said the usual format was someone would share their testimony or a hard time that God had brought them through. Often the talks were deeply vulnerable and personal. After the sharing, the large group would break into smaller groups where they would discuss what they felt God wanted to teach them through the sharing that night, and what they would take away from the presentation. 

Brady said those nights were so powerful and life-changing that he wants to become a leader who will continue to create that experience for others. 

And around that point in the program, maybe because my husband, Dave, and I were sitting close to the front and nudging each other, Pastor Dave Mitchell pointed out that David Franklin had started that ministry years ago.

"Contributed to it," my husband clarified. "In the late '80s."

Which was news to Brady, so we gave him a brief history of the start of Share, Prayer, and Dare afterwards when we went to congratulate him and thank him for sharing during the service.

David Franklin and Brady Long

Last night, I did a deep dive into my chronological stack of The Tabor College View student newspapers (of course I saved them. I was a reporter and then editor for all of my time at Tabor).

According to the View, the group Share, Prayer, and Dare started at the beginning of the 1988-89 school year. It was a ministry of the Campus Ministries Council and run completely by a committee of students. It replaced Tabor Fellowship, a group that had been meeting in the Schlicting Center, an intimate venue that easily held the handful of students who regularly attended. 

Share, Prayer, and Dare started in the Schlicting Center as well, but soon outgrew the small space and was moved to the cafeteria.

What changed? The View articles don't give the back story, but I remember. We have to go back to 1983.

My husband, David Franklin, and some of his friends became Christians while attending Fellowship of Christian Athletes. As sophomores at Wichita North High, they were excited about their new faith, and they set out to invite others. They held weekly Bible studies crammed in one friend's basement. When they outgrew that, it became his parents' front lawn. When that was no longer feasible, the high school students rented an elementary school gym for the evening. They passed a Kentucky Fried Chicken bucket for contributions to pay the $50 rent for the gym. 

Eventually, the group found a home for their city-wide non-denominational Thursday night Bible study downtown in an old coffee bar called The Dandelion. Several adult mentors (in their twenties and thirties) came alongside, like Earnest Alexander, Terry Williams, and Robert Lang. By that time, the Bible studies were regularly attracting 100 to 200 kids. Friends were telling friends. High schoolers were preaching. Everyone was praying. Kids were getting saved.  

David Franklin, who by this time had graduated from high school, left this environment to go play football at Tabor College. He chose Tabor because on his campus visit people seemed to genuinely want to follow Christ. But he found the Tabor Fellowship group to be lacking. 

So, he started inviting Campus Ministry Council leaders and others to attend the Thursday Night Bible Study in Wichita. Carloads would leave campus and make the hour-long drive to the Dandelion where they would see students worshipping, praying, sharing, and learning to live out their faith.

As a freshman, I started attending. I loved the excitement, the energy, the openness, the love, and the unity. As the semester wore on, some became too busy to continue attending, but I managed to find time on Thursday nights to catch a ride to the Bible study. A few times it was just David Franklin and me in his Subaru hatchback. We talked a lot on that hour drive there and back. But that's another story.

The Tabor students who had attended the Thursday Night Bible Study had caught a vision. That spring, they re-imagined what Tabor Fellowship could be, and they started with a new name that would describe what they would do:  share their struggles, pray for each other, and dare each other to live it out.

Dave Barton, a football player who David Franklin had invited to the Thursday Night Bible Study, became the chairperson. Another on the committee was Brenda Wichert, who wrote in the yearbook that the move to meet in the cafeteria ushered in a new tradition they called the "Table Game," where first arrivers would grab a partner and move the tables out of the way so the group could sit in a circle. Brenda reported that the 10-20 students in the group grew to 100 as the year progressed (a fourth of Tabor's student population at the time). "Many students gave their testimonies and shared with the group the changes they were making in their lives and how they were growing," Brenda said.

So it was good to hear from Brady that lives are still being changed through Share, Prayer, and Dare. The group now meets in the historic Mennonite Brethren church, which was moved to Tabor's campus in 1989.

And the Thursday Night Bible Study? Terry Williams, one of the "older" leaders who got involved went to seminary, came back and started River Community Church in Wichita. One of the other Bible study leaders was Dave Mitchell, who served as an associate pastor at River until starting Westridge in 2012.

Hebrews 10:24-25 "And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another--and all the more as you see the Day approaching."

God gave me you

"I would have been happy with a regular girl, but God gave me you!" I often told my daughter, Laurel, through the years as she would wow me with a skillful painting, a beautiful ceramic piece, a funny comment, or any number of amazing things. Her many artistic talents were a bonus, an extra that I loved and enjoyed. I often thought she was above and beyond the answer to my prayers.

Those prayers had come with increasing urgency as the year 1999 progressed. I certainly hoped we would have a third child and prayed it would be a girl. I was happy with our two boys, Caleb and Harrison, and I loved being a mom of boys, but I wanted a girl as well.

However, the calendar pages kept turning and I still wasn't pregnant. I counted ahead nine months to a possible birthdate, and my "deadline" was only a month away. I wanted to have our third child two years behind Harrison in school, so we had been trying for eight months already. Now, if it didn't happen this cycle the baby would most likely be three years behind him in school. 

Worse yet, my hoped-for daughter would a be a September or Fall baby like me. I had developed super early and always disliked being the biggest and tallest in the class. Being one of the oldest only made my early maturing more pronounced. 

My boys were at the top (or off of) the growth charts in both height and weight. Baby and kids' clothes sizes never matched their ages. At two years, they were already in 4T, and at four years size 6X was fitting pretty well. My husband, Dave, had been big too, and his mom loved to relay that "little David's" pediatrician had declared he was a "Green Bay Packer in diapers." So, any baby we produced seemed destined to be big.

That Thanksgiving, I was thrilled and thankful when I realized a cozy fireplace evening had resulted in pregnancy and the baby would be due in August, right before the September 1st school cutoff. This kid would be one of the youngest in the class, and I sincerely hoped it would be a girl.  

My pregnancy was healthy and uneventful, so my general practice doctor saw no reason to order a sonogram. This was the one pregnancy when I really did want to know the sex of our baby ahead of time, but it looked like that wouldn't be the case.

Then my church women's small group did a service project at the Pregnancy Crisis Center. We sorted and folded baby clothes and toured the center. The gal from our group who had organized the event had just started working there as a nurse who would be performing sonograms. As luck would have it, she needed experience on their equipment. Why not practice on my baby bump? I was all in!

My baby wasn't super cooperative that night. I was already far enough along that positioning became difficult, so my friend wasn't ready to give me a definitive answer, but as far as she could tell, I was carrying a girl. I was thrilled!

Because my family practice doctor who had delivered Caleb and Harrison no longer delivered babies, I would need to switch to another doctor in the group when I reached seven months pregnant. When I met the new doctor who would deliver my baby he went over my charts to get up-to-speed on my pregnancy.

"Do you know if you're having a boy or a girl?" he asked me.

"I had a sonogram at the Pregnancy Crisis Center, and she thought it was a girl." I told him.

He looked confusedly back at the chart and was silent for a long while. Finally, he tentatively asked, "Was there some reason you weren't excited about this pregnancy?"

Now it was my turn to be confused. This visit had taken a weird turn. I replayed "Pregnancy CRISIS Center" in my brain and suddenly understood. Whoops! I quickly explained I hadn't been a client seeking counseling or financial help at the center, but a volunteer of sorts. The sonogram had just been for practice. And I assured him that I certainly was excited about this pregnancy!

My girl Laurel came into this world sans drugs in two pushes at straight up 3:00 p.m. on August 17 as the doctor was walking into the room (he was delayed by a train). She weighed 8.9 lbs., just like her brothers. 

To leave the hospital, I put her in a little cotton print dress with matching bloomers that my mom had sewed for her. I had received cute outfits for my boys, but dressing my little baby doll girl was another level entirely. This was fun! I was smitten.

Laurel in the little cotton dress that she wore to leave the hospital. My mom made it for her.

My parents took the boys to the farm for the weekend, so Dave and I were at home with just our little baby girl. All I had to do was breastfeed Laurel (she hadn't been latching on correctly at first, but a lactation consultant at the hospital got us going great before we left) and then answer the door periodically as my women's small group delivered meals to us and peeked at our new pink bundle. I remember lounging on our mauve carpet, leaning against the flowered couch thinking, "Wow, this is so easy!"

I felt profoundly loved. God had honored my "deadline" and sent me a girl. He certainly didn't have to. But He had. I knew there were couples who agonized over infertility. Women who desperately wanted to be mothers. I had no answers for them. Deep in my heart I knew--this was personal. This was how God had showed his love to me. And I was grateful. 

Grandmother (Dave's mom) loved tea sets and tea parties, so this photo op was perfect. The doll's name is Janet (Grandmother's name). Grandmother gave the doll to Laurel, but it always stayed at Grandmother's for Laurel to play with there. Laurel has the doll at her house now.
Trey Allen (the photographer) used this photo in his sample album. I was not surprised.

When Laurel was a baby, her brothers didn't pay her a lot of attention, but by the time she turned one, she started to become more interesting to them. She liked to make them laugh and giggle at her antics. At Christmas, I told her we were going to see Dr. Hett and she touched her head (sounds similar). That became a game for weeks. Harrison would ask her, "Hey Laurel, do you want to see Dr. Hett?" When she would touch her head he'd laugh.

Laurel turned two years old on a camping vacation in Colorado. At the time, she could say a few words. Around November, she really started talking, and she could say almost anything she wanted. She talked a lot about Colorado, mountains, and sleeping in a tent. Dave said she was finally able to express all of the stuff she had stored up!

Laurel, age 2, hugs her dolly. We were camping at O'Haver Lake in Colorado.

When Laurel was three, I noted she was imaginative and social. She assigned roles in play and put herself in books. "I'm the little bear and you are the mommy. . ." She had an imaginary friend she named Jaya Bayma (I was never sure of the spelling or how she came up with that name!) Laurel liked playing with the little girls at Harrison's t-ball games that summer, and she was interested when Caleb started city league football practice because she thought there might be some girls she could play with. Sure enough, there were, and she did!

Also when she was three years old, Daddy brought home a Barbie bike with training wheels from a garage sale. She was excited to ride it and could pedal it right away and even rode it three miles on a ride in Sedgwick County Park. That fall the boys took her training wheels off her bike and put them on the top shelf in the garage, where Laurel couldn't get them. They did this possibly because I'd told them they'd learned to ride when they were four, and they wanted her to ride faster.

I was annoyed, though. Laurel had just turned four. I wasn't sure she was ready to learn, but I was pretty sure the nuts and bolts to put the training wheels back on were nowhere to be found. When the boys were at football practice Laurel got on the bike and I ran behind her as she got the hang of pedaling the bike without the training wheels. Before long she pedaled the few blocks to Columbine Park and showed Daddy and her brothers that she could ride. 

A year later, while in Bicycle Exchange to get a brake part for Caleb's bike, we saw the perfect bike for Laurel. It was a purple TREK and had a basket (which she had said she wanted), and tassels on the handlebars.  Dave told the sales guy, "If you saw how cute this little girl is you'd want to buy it for her too." I thought that was a sweet thing for a Daddy to say about his daughter.

Laurel was always good when I took her places. At PTA meetings she would sit in a corner and play with something I'd brought for her or look at books stored in the room. The three PTA moms I was closest to all had two sons each who were friends of Caleb and/or Harrison. One mom confessed to me later that one time when I wasn't around they'd had a lengthy discussion about how they all "wished they'd had a Laurel." She said she had told the others that even if she'd had a daughter, she was pretty sure she wouldn't have been a Laurel.

Since Laurel was so familiar with her brothers' school, her first day of kindergarten went great. When she came home, I heard more about what went on that day than I'd heard from the boys in an entire nine weeks!

Laurel, age 5, with her brand-new TREK bike.

We ignored their elementary school's guidelines on students being in 3rd grade before riding bicycle to school and let her ride to school with her brothers (Caleb was in 4th, Harrison in 2nd). One day she had trouble locking her bike with a new bike chain. She went inside and calmly told her teacher Mrs. Kennedy that she needed help. Mrs. Kennedy, who also taught both boys, said Caleb probably would have been worried and anxious, and Harrison might have been in tears, but Laurel was calm and self-assured.

Laurel always enjoyed going to Super Church and Vacation Bible School and listening to Bible stories at bedtime. When she had just turned 3 years old, she received a little pink Bible for reciting all of the 66 books of the Bible. The morning after March 9, 2005 (she was four years old) Laurel told me she had asked Jesus into her heart, except she said, "I didn't do the dead thing."

I didn't say too much, because I wasn't sure if she really knew the plan of salvation. I wondered if she thought accepting Jesus made you die immediately and go to heaven, something she wasn't quite ready to sign up for!

Later that day I heard her in an argument with her brothers. They said she wasn't a Christian and I heard her emphatically declare, "I am too a Christian, I asked Jesus into my heart!" You go, girl.

Laurel used her faith to help her be a good friend. When she was in 4th grade she told me about an incident at lunchtime. Her friend didn't feel well and was going to stay in the classroom and skip lunch. She could choose one classmate to bring a hot lunch from the gym back to the classroom to stay with her, and she chose Laurel. In the meantime at lunch in the gym, some boys made a mean comment to another friend of Laurel's. She was so upset she wanted to leave, but she didn't want to tell the teacher, Mr. Dexter, what they'd said. He asked her if she would tell Laurel, who he knew was back in the classroom. She said she would. At the classroom Laurel listened to her friend and hugged her. She felt the whole situation had been orchestrated so she could comfort her friends.

Laurel's compassion and creativity have led her to become an outstanding art teacher. She is also a fabulous Auntie, a caring girlfriend, a responsible homeowner, and a wonderful daughter. I am grateful.

Formal dining- Laurel inherited Grandmother's dining table and China cabinet after Aunt Julie decided she was finished with them. To celebrate the beloved table in its new home, Laurel prepared a steak dinner for family. I know Grandmother, who served so many excellent meals on that table, would be pleased and proud of her.

Laurel with her boyfriend, Kobe, who is also a teacher.

My Proof God is There

When I was eight years old I started a diary. Actually, I started a book titled "My Proof God is There," but like a lot of things, I second-guessed myself and erased my original title and replaced it with the bland "My Diary." The eraser marks are still there.

The inciting incident was a skirmish on the school bus, which I rode for nearly two hours every day as it went through the route picking up farm kids from our area north of Hillsboro, Kansas. I have re-typed it for ease of reading, but left most of my spelling errors. I was only in second grade, after all. 

Still, my second-grade faith challenges me. I got in the middle of a brother-sister feud and unintentionally broke his ceramic project. I felt terrible, but I couldn't fix the situation. All I could do was wait for God to work in the lives of my friends. I still remember my relief when I knew he had forgiven me. And I wrote this down so I would have proof that God was there.

My Proof God is There

My Diary

Dear Diary            May 15, 1977

I have been haveing trouble with Kristi. She told me to get Steven's bag because he had her blue pencil. So I got it. Steven was about to get it so I quick threw it to Kristi. Then I did not know what happened next but Steven started crying.I had no idea what happened. I tried to ask him but he just cried then when we were about to Sherry's house Steven gave me and ouffer (awful) smirk. I ask Kristy what I did to make him do that and she said I told you to GIVE me the bag not throw it. You broke one of his pottery peises. 

Now mommy asked me what my bible verse was and I said the Lord is my helper I will not fear what my friends do to me. She pointed right at me and said that verse is just what you need. It was!

May 16

Dear Diary,

Nothing today because Kris and Steven did not ride in the afternoon but I think Steven gave me a smirk at school otherwise so far so good.

May 17

My luck! Tomoro is fun day and I can't have to cans of pop because they will not give water or anything. And I can't have anything for refreshment. Worse yet on feild day!

May18

Steven has forgiven me! Oh thank you God. I geuss it was rather funny how he did it he said Karen I'll sit with you so you can break something but I could not have found a better way.

May 23, 1977

Dear Diary

I am sorry I have not wittern sooner first of all I went to the cud scout carvenl and I think Kris has forgiven me