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Still Moving Forward
Tough Times at the U. of North Texas

Jenny Anderson,
student leader

 
When we think of influential leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Abraham Lincoln, or King David, often their great successes first come to mind. The harsh reality is that it often takes difficult times to reveal strong leadership. Leadership involves more than gaining respect and success. Worries, weaknesses and doubts burden leaders as much as anyone else. The InterVarsity chapter at the University of North Texas recently learned some difficult lessons in leadership. The announcement in spring 1998 that all of our staff workers were transferring to other schools came as a shock to me and the other student leaders. It was a hard adjustment. The executive leadership team did what it could to take up the slack, as graduating seniors, but sentiments of hurt and abandonment prevailed. It seemed that a couple of us were going to have to carry the weight of the entire leadership team and the care of our chapter. I began to wonder why God led me to commit to this group.

Soon into the fall 1998 semester, my two closest friends on leadership shared that they had some serious doubts about Christianity. I had never felt so helpless. I tried to be sensitive and to walk through their questions with them, but there were no simple answers. Our relationships disintegrated from intimate to surface level.

My first thought was What have I done wrong? These are my friends, how could I let this happen? I spent nights repenting, crying and trying to understand how God wanted me to fix this problem—after all, I had caused it, or so I thought. The doubts and hurt persisted.

Ministry had always “worked” for me before. All my life, as the daughter of a missionary, I had watched ministry taking place. In the past, through the hard times and heartaches, I had been able to keep smiling. This time I had lost hope.

God hadn’t.

One Sunday, my pastor preached about the Lord’s challenge to depend on him in our weaknesses (Matthew 14:13–21). In the story of feeding the 5,000, Jesus told the disciples to give what they had and that he would come up with the rest. The disciples were overwhelmed by what God had called them to do. They thought they had to do it on their own strength, but they knew they didn’t have the resources to satisfy the physical needs of 5,000 people. Regardless, the Lord provided for the needs of all those people through his disciples.

Like the disciples, I felt that God had called me to a bigger task than I could possibly handle. My friends and my chapter were falling to pieces and I could only do so much to help.

Five chapter members started meeting to pray every Tuesday at 10 p.m. in the University Union courtyard. We interceded for each person who was struggling spiritually. Through prayer we realized that although the problems were bigger than us, they were much smaller than God. We reminded each other of our weaknesses and God’s perfect wisdom, timing and power. “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness,” God told Paul in 2 Corinthians 12:9. The Lord does not view ministry’s successes or failures by our standards.

One of our leadership meetings still remains vividly in my memory. We each had taken a turn to share how we were doing. Almost everyone admitted that they were struggling. Some of us were lonely, some were disappointed with God, and some of us just didn’t want to be at another meeting where more problems and concerns would be raised. It seemed that our leadership team was more needy than the chapter we had planned to be ministering to! An awkward silence filled the void that frustration, misunderstanding and hurt had caused.

“Why are we in leadership?” one of us asked. At that point we couldn’t answer. We prayed.

The fact that I took so much responsibility for my friends’ doubts and hurts revealed a deeply hidden confidence in my ability to do God’s work without him. It wasn’t God who had abandoned me; rather I had abandoned the Lord through my self-confidence.

The situation didn’t work out as I would have preferred. Today one of my friends continues to doubt what role God should play in her life. At the end of the spring semester 1999, our entire executive leadership team graduated, and at the end of fall 1999, the two people struggling in their faith stepped down from leadership. The remaining five of us were now three, because of more doubt and frustration. The Lord sent us two committed staff workers this last fall who have struggled to figure out where our chapter is at, how we got there and how to help us move forward.

Humanly speaking, some consider our chapter a failure. We are small, timid and we continue to lick our wounds. However, the One who is in control and is actively at work in our lives sees great opportunities to exceed our expectations.

Last semester our struggling chapter had the opportunity to see two of our friends, Bianca and Mary, commit their lives to Christ. We threw a party to celebrate their “first birthdays,” and the whole time I just couldn’t believe how God had been working in our lives all along! He definitely set up the situation so that we couldn’t take any credit for their decisions to follow him. All semester, none of our programs were well attended. Our leadership meetings often felt like they were doing more harm than good. But God did something much bigger than us in those weaknesses.

“I have always grown the most when I have seen God working through me in ways that I could never have done on my own,” says Ronnie Davis, one of the current exec members and co-leader of a guys’ Bible study. ”I know for sure that God has me in this struggle for a purpose. Looking back I will see all the ways God has led me, taught me, and loved me throughout everything.”

Sarah Das, one of the chapter leaders who graduated last spring, agrees. “I thought I knew that it was God who was working through me and not just me, but at the low point in our chapter, I saw what an utter failure I was at ministering to people! It was very hard to get past that and realize that God would be my strength. If I could give one encouragement to other brothers and sisters it would be to step back and see the big picture. God is at work and his plan will continue until he is satisfied that the work is finished.”

Ginger Moore, one of the staff who left in 1998 to go to the University of Louisville, felt all along that God was up to something. “When I found out that there would be no staff at UNT, I was shocked and sad,” she recalls. “After I had prayed about it, I suspected that the Lord was doing something very specific. I had a sense that the Lord needed the staff out of the way for him to do what he wanted to do in the lives of students. I had no idea what that was, though, and it was difficult to understand.”

I didn’t expect all this when I joined the leadership team. I wanted growth, but not the pain involved! God in his great wisdom chiseled away at my prideful confidences and showed himself to be the Rock of a firm foundation. The idea that hard times make people stronger is a lie. When you face hard times alone, they breed discouragement, bitterness and frustration. God’s intent in hard times is that we would turn to him, admitting our weaknesses, brokenness and inability to handle them. Only then can we, like Paul, truly learn to be “content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities, for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.”