WHAT. A. STORY! Client #86 received her new minivan today in record time. Project Unity nominated this dedicated single mom of five kids under six years old (I can’t fathom the exhaustion she must feel at the end of the day!) I can not overstate what a worthy client she is! To quote her sponsor, “Her greatest strength is HOPE!”
Weeks of prayer and hard work culminated in our biggest donation ever yesterday (Dec 7) as we gifted a pair of vans to two amazing charities in Brenham, Texas. I struggle to find words that capture the joy I felt crowding in the tiny, yet beautiful confines of the Washington county tax office to gift a massive 15-passenger van to Adult and Teen Challenge and a mint Honda Odyssey to Our Daughters’ House. Add them up, and we were a 36’ long caravan of vans from BCS to Brenham - our biggest donation ever by value (vans are pricey!), tonnage (and heavy!), and impact (they will each serve dozens if not hundreds of clients in the coming years!) Let me share a bit about each of these amazing organizations to help you see why OnRamp invested so much time and treasure to partner with them.
Grab the tissues and get ready to hear Melissa’s story. We were blessed to donate a reliable Toyota to her in May and it has utterly transformed her life. Here’s her story, shared with her permission, provided by Tara Lazaro. Melissa recalls the intense pain she felt in her legs as she walked five to six hours a day to get to work, rain or shine. “I'm shaking just remembering it,”
Rather than focus on the vehicles OnRamp needs, let me tell you about one of the families on our waiting list hoping to receive a vehicle this month. This family, a husband and wife with 3 school age-children, has just one vehicle: a 20 year old SUV with a failing transmission, no AC or heater, and only 1 working window. Oh, and when it rains, the car leaks.
We chose Isaiah 61 for this year’s OnRamp Christmas ornament because it reminds us of Jesus’ heart for the poor, the struggling, and the suffering. It reminds us that Jesus chose to identify with the lowly and rejected of society; not the rich and powerful. Our culture fixates upon those with fame, beauty, intelligence, strength. Jesus fixed His eyes on the weak, the sick, the dependent, those in need - the polar opposite of Instagram-influencer-society.
Through an amazing chain of unlikely events, OnRamp was chosen three years ago as a Capstone Research Project by the A&M Bush School. A class of graduate students spent a year studying transportation-related charities throughout the United States to identify best practices for our fledgling ministry. Among the many lessons learned, one particularly stood out to me: there are only about a dozen charities like OnRamp in the entire country, and only one besides us in all of Texas!
Today we’re celebrating client #82; not an individual, but a whole organization! This is the second time we’ve been able to bless an entire charity with a reliable vehicle designed to empower their ministry to people in need. The Nest (https://thenestbcs.org) is a local Christian nonprofit dedicated to helping the lost, hurting, and addicted find healing and learn to live again.
Yesterday (Wednesday, Nov 3) we had the privilege of blessing two deserving local women with reliable vehicles. Client #80, Kandise, received this sweet blue Toyota Scion (I’m a huge fan of non-monochrome car colors!). She serves as the Transportation Operations Supervisor at Brazos Valley Center for Independent Living, a wonderful organization dedicated to providing freedom to seniors and disabled adults through services such as free transportation to medical appointments. Unfortunately, Kandise’s own vehicles died, and after paying for food, housing, and medical bills, there was no money left to buy an affordable vehicle, especially in today’s inflated used-car market.
I stand behind most of what I preached over my thirteen years on the Grace Southwood stage (the only preacher without any speech-related regrets was Jesus!). But there is one lesson I taught multiple times in early sermons that I do wish I could take back. When preaching on the biblical concept of “service,” I sometimes falsely equated serving God with service within the programs of the organizational church. Serving a ministry of the local church certainly does count as serving God, but so do many other types of service that occur outside the walls of the church.
I’ve been longing to share this story about a sweet widow OnRamp has been able to help through your generosity. To protect her identity, we’ll call her “Naomi,” a widow from the book of Ruth in the Old Testament. She lives out in the country in a home of her own off a dirt road. She and her husband built a family there, with four generations living under one roof. But just like Naomi, both her husband and her son died, leaving her on her own to care for her family.
Two months ago, on Aug 9 (which happens to be my wedding anniversary!), we got to celebrate OnRamp client #75... and this one's extra special! We were blessed to donate this reliable #Toyota Rav4 to Naomi, the new Director of Survivor Advocacy at Unbound Bryan College Station, a ministry that supports survivors and resources our community to fight human trafficking in the Brazos Valley.
Today I’m giving thanks for the amazing generosity of a summer project team at Grace Bible Church who bought this great minivan for an Afghan refugee whose family desperately needed reliable transportation. They escaped their country right before the Taliban took over and began violently persecuting their community. Now settled in Houston, they needed a large vehicle
