A Note From a Personhood Volunteer

Hello there, from sunny and breezy Florida! My name is Kristen Au from New Jersey and I arrived here to work with the Personhood Now! team on Sunday afternoon. I am thrilled to be part of everything that’s going on over here. We’re already off to an exciting start for our second week on the ground.

Sunday began bright and early at 3:45 AM – maybe I should say “dark and early” – for most of the team. Everyone woke up and headed off to petition at a triathlon at Madeira Beach. Some of the athletes were impressed that volunteer petitioners had woken up so early just to make the event!

Later that day, the team stopped by the airport to pick me up. Along our drive back, they told me stories about the past week and walked me through our schedule for the next month. The family that is hosting me during my stay here in Florida generously invited the team for dinner, where we had an amazing meal that was not only tasty, but also healthy. (Yes, Mom, I am doing a good job of eating properly while away from home. ;)) Three hours later, we had discussed history, economics, politics, religion, travels, our culture, and, of course, their two adorable dogs and had found ourselves a family of incredible supporters in the day-to-day work of our project.

On Monday morning, the team drove out to Port St. Lucie to meet with the directors of the state-wide Personhood Florida initiative, Brenda Mac Menamin and Pastor Brian Longworth. Over lunch, we talked about places and people to contact for different networking opportunities. I was so encouraged to hear about what else had been going on across the state and to see that this project is so much bigger than our small Personhood Now! team.

That afternoon, Mrs. MacMenamin took us two private Christian schools where we got to share our brand new training workshop on personhood and petitioning with the students. Running our workshop for a first time was a little nerve-racking, but the huge positive response from the students in both classes reminded me that communicating truth like this is something that really matters. It was just fantastic getting the chance to visit those schools and get the word out that there really is something we all can do about personhood. God bless Golden Rule Academy and Treasure Coast Christian School as they train future pro-life advocates to our culture!

But our chances and opportunities to do things definitely did not end there! Today has been quite a full day for us. This morning, I was reading from Oswald Chambers’ book My Utmost for His Highest and one sentence really stuck out to me: “God can do nothing for me until I get to the limit of the possible.” I was still thinking about that as we began our planning for the weekend and the next couple of weeks, having little idea how true that quote was.

Originally, we had hoped to petition at the FPEA Homeschool Convention this Friday and Saturday. As we continued to look into that, we discovered we would have to be affiliated with a booth in order to petition inside of the convention hall and that all of the booths had sold out in January. I thought we were pretty much stuck, although our team did try contacting several booths to see if they would be willing for our team to be affiliated with them so we could petition at the Convention. After many calls, the Verity Institute agreed to have us be affiliated with their booth during the Convention.

Later on, we were able to visit with local pro-life activist Shannon and talk with her about her involvement in 40 Days for Life. She shared her own knowledge with us and gave us some more contacts and support so we could continue setting up meetings, networking, and preparing training workshops. Her passion for the personhood issue was such an encouragement to me and I know I am looking forward to working with her more in the future.

Our second meeting that day was with Pastor Jon Farris from the Crosspointe Church. He was really on board with our project and even found space for us to present a bit of information about our initiative during next Sunday’s service. In addition to welcoming us to petition before and after the services, Pastor Farris is also bringing this issue to the attention of a group of pastors that he is affiliated with. Being able to see those two meetings unfold really showed me God’s hand in this project. So many open doors! I had no idea that what I expected to be a little petition drive could be this exciting!

Finally, if all of this wasn’t enough, we headed out the Ray’s game at Tropicana stadium and had a great time petitioning before the game started. It was my first time ever petitioning, but I caught on quickly and loved being out there, standing up for what I believe is right. Judging by our nice stack of petitions afterward, it looks like we chose a really good time to come out, petition, and give away plenty of magazines.

And, to cap the day off, it looks like we’ll be able to stay with a host family over in Orlando during the Convention, which will really save in travel time and costs. So, overall, today was incredible: not just amazing, but quite unbelievable. I had my idea of what was possible and then God took that and turned it into something far beyond anything I could ever expect, hope for, or even imagine. I definitely don’t want to dramatize what has been going on with our team, but wow! God is growing my faith and showing me that prayer truly matters.