Jeremy

Jeremy has been coming to our Free Lunch On Wednesdays (FLOW) at Lane Community College for about a year now and has slowly started taking on leadership roles.

Jeremy and I would often sit together at FLOW. He wasn’t a very talkative person, mostly just staring at his computer and speaking up every once in a while. Over time, Jeremy and I built a relationship. He attended several of our Bible studies and was generally a consistent attendee at our lunches.

Then, one day, the staff and I decided that we wanted to start doing a trivia game at lunch to try and engage the students more. It worked to varying degrees, helping us draw more students to lunch and get more traction. But the most unexpected thing happened: Jeremy approached me and asked if he could help with the trivia. This became one of my favorite times of the week. I would get to lunch early, and then Jeremy and I would sit around a table and talk about whatever the trivia topic was for that week. This was a step of leadership that I never really expected him to take.

But that wasn’t where his step into leadership ended. He now makes all of our quizzes for trivia, helps me set up for FLOW, and is involved in Lane Community College’s Council of Clubs on behalf of NCM. In fact, Jeremy is the main reason we have funding for all of FLOW for the last term of the year.

At the end of Winter term, the idea came up for NCM to ask for funding from the Council of Clubs at Lane Community College. I was put in charge of making this happen. The goal was to get all of FLOW funded for the spring term. The catch was that I needed a student to represent us at the Council of Clubs because staff members are not allowed to participate at the same capacity as students. This proved to be difficult, as students had finals during this meeting, and it was scheduled at an inconvenient time of the week. But Jeremy, being who he is, stepped up and told me he would do it at the last second—literally the day before the meeting. Together, we wrote a script for what he would say and talked about how he would present it.

Then the day came, and he presented what we had written in an amazing fashion. He did so well that the council voted unanimously to give us all the funding we had requested.

This is my favorite leadership story because Jeremy is someone I never thought would be used by God in this way at the beginning of my time here. But God did something amazing and made him one of the best parts of NCM!