[Richard Spillman] Victory

I taught at Pacific Lutheran University for 35 years. A few years in, I committed myself to dedicate the first five minutes of each class to telling my students a story about God’s work in my life. I would tell my students that while the technical material we were going to cover in class is important, it is not nearly as important as their relationship with God.

In October 2007 one student complained and I was called into the chair’s office. He told me that I must stop because my contract contained a clause that, in effect, said I could not preach in class. Violating it would be grounds for dismissal.  It didn’t make any difference that this was a “Christian” school or that faculty were free to ridicule the Gospel all they wanted. The small print in my contract, which I must admit I had never read, forbade any religious instruction in my classes.

I was faced with a dilemma. Should I continue to talk about God or should I honor my agreement and stop? I decided that I would not be a good witness if I did not keep my word, so I sadly stopped. I had no idea of the miracle God was about to perform.

The ending to this story was set in motion months before my run in with the department chair. Earlier in the year, the university sent out an email announcing that PLU had received funding to develop “service-learning” classes in which students would be required to volunteer in the community. The university would support four such classes and wanted faculty to apply. At the time I decided I could revamp my privacy class to focus on the lack of privacy in the homeless community and have my students work with organizations that served the homeless.

 I learned that my course was one of the four selected for funding. The university was very excited about my proposal because it was the only one to come out of the sciences. They had expected that “service-learning” classes would be limited to the social sciences.

I could once again tell students how God was working in the homeless community, only now the same university that had ordered me to stop would PAY me to do it.

Now the students had to go out and work directly with the homeless of Tacoma. Just a few blocks from school was a Christian organization called the Crossing. The Crossing provides clothes, showers, laundry facilities, food, and prayer for the homeless. It needed volunteers and I suddenly had fifteen students who needed a place to volunteer. It was a perfect match. Now, rather than just getting a short five-minute story, most of my students would spend three to five hours a week at the Crossing watching God work. They would have stories of their own. 

In fact, I asked the students to keep a journal of their service time. I only began to realize the full extent of the miracle God had performed when I read those journals. One young man had to work up the courage to approach a homeless client and engage in a conversation. When he did, he wrote in his journal, “I am beginning to feel like there is a purpose for me.” This student began to think deeply about his belief in God. He decided that he would start to pray for the homeless and for the work of the Crossing.

Another student was amazed at the power of God to change lives.  She wrote, “I realized that these people [the volunteers at the Crossing] were changing lives around by believing in them and teaching them about God and the power of prayer.”

Two students wrote about the prayer they received from the workers at the Crossing. One was a Chinese student who had very little knowledge of God, yet she was so moved when Garrett, one of the pastors at the crossing, prayed for her. She ended her paper with “God’s blessing be with us.”

The other student that was moved by the prayer he received wrote, “Marcia prayed for me because of my lack of faith and prayed that God would show Himself, and guide me to pray and worship Him as my Lord and Savior. The more I came to the Crossing and talked to others that worked there, the idea of religion didn’t seem so far out of reach for me. This is something I’ve struggled with for awhile now, and I feel that with some time and help from people like Marcia and Garrett, I can overcome my stubbornness towards religion and find my faith in God to become true.”

     Across the board, the lives of my students were changed far more than they would have been by my little five-minute stories. When I was ordered to stop what I was doing I felt powerless and hopeless. Little did I know that God was ready to explode in my classroom. What the enemy had tried to destroy had instead multiplied tenfold. I really learned to understand what Joseph meant when he told his brothers as recorded in Genesis 50:20, “As for you, you meant evil against me but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result.”