A Dream Granted by Nina Borum

April 25, 2016

Each year I am allocated $2,000 to spend on making dreams come true for PTM students. Considering we have about 200 students, you can imagine how difficult that task can be! Usually, I find opportunities that benefit a group of students instead of just one to make the most of our budget but sometimes making the dream of one student come true is worth it.

This past weekend, we took a group of students on our annual PTM Wide Retreat. During this retreat, we intentionally present the gospel to them through worship, bible teaching, small groups and tons of large group games. Due to the success of our Christmas Tree Pickup Fundraiser, we were able to take 75 total people on retreat this year.

Unfortunately, there was one student, Joeuan, who didn’t turn in his permission form for retreat and was replaced by another student. A day before retreat he showed up to programming and let us know that his bags were packed and he was excited to go on retreat. It was a sad situation because someone would have to tell him that unfortunately his spot was taken and he would not be able to go.

Site directors pleaded with me to let him go anyway. It wasn’t an easy decision for me because I was already a few hundred dollars over budget and I needed to find a way to cut costs. After some thought, I decided to bring Joeuan into my office. As I called him in, I still wasn’t sure if I was going to say no or yes, but I wanted to speak with him. I simply asked him why he wanted to go on retreat. He went on to tell me that he thought that retreat would help him to manage his anger better and that he wanted to learn more about Jesus and have fun. He said that he’d been lonely since his dad died a few months ago and that sometimes his uncles were too busy at work to spend time with him. I asked him if he had a PTM mentor yet and he said that he didn’t have one but would really like one.

My mind was racing trying to find a loophole in our budget. I wasn’t feeling great that I was already over budget but I knew that I needed to find a way to send Joeuan to camp. It suddenly dawned on me that Joeuan’s dream was to go to retreat and I could make that happen with our dream fund! Even though our dream fund is already dwindling and we still have 8 months left in the year to stretch it, I knew this was a dream worth granting. I also knew that I had to do more for him than to just let him go to retreat, I needed to find him a mentor.