Daily Prayer Thread - 28 Sep 2004

Isaiah 26 (KJV)
⁹ With my soul have I desired thee in the night; yea, with my spirit within me will I seek thee early: for when thy judgments are in the earth, the inhabitants of the world will learn righteousness.
¹⁰ Let favour be shewed to the wicked, yet will he not learn righteousness: in the land of uprightness will he deal unjustly, and will not behold the majesty of the LORD.
¹¹ LORD, when thy hand is lifted up, they will not see: but they shall see, and be ashamed for their envy at the people; yea, the fire of thine enemies shall devour them.

(MSG)
⁹ Through the night my soul longs for you. Deep from within me my spirit reaches out to you. When your decisions are on public display, everyone learns how to live right.
¹⁰If the wicked are shown grace, they don't seem to get it. In the land of right living, they persist in wrong living, blind to the splendor of GOD.
¹¹You hold your hand up high, GOD, but they don't see it. Open their eyes to what you do, to see your zealous love for your people. Shame them. Light a fire under them. Get the attention of these enemies of yours.

Note: Ongoing prayers for Joy Junction and the Director of Joy Junction, Jeremy Reynalds, would be appreciated. Thank you.
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September 28, 2004
Jeremy Reynalds
P O Box 27693
Alb., NM 87125-7693
Tel: (505) 400-7145
www.joyjunction.org

Joy Junction's Jeremy Reynalds Bares His Heart:
Says Recent Stress Has Made Him Feel "Emotionally Unglued."

    Feeling totally alone, deserted and abandoned I racked my brains for a solution.

    It seemed as if things were falling to pieces around me and I was powerless to do anything about it.

    Money – or the lack thereof at Joy Junction – Albuquerque's largest emergency homeless shelter – was the problem again.

    On a recent afternoon sitting alone in my office I felt as if I was coming emotionally unglued. It seemed as if the weight of the shelter's entire $1.2 million dollar annual budget rested on my shoulders.

    There was the weekly payroll to be met and late in the week we were nowhere near to having the funds we needed. I mentally visualized the line of people trooping into the office in a couple of days expecting their paycheck. After all, they had a right to do so. They had worked for it, and the responsibility was mine to make sure that the funds were there to make what they had earned a reality.

    To make things worse, our business manager had just told me in a tense telephone call, there were insurance payments and a laundry list of other bills which all demanded our immediate attention.

    Then as if that wasn't enough, I had just found out that a sizeable bequest upon which we had been counting to help us navigate through the stormy financial waters leading to the (hopefully) upcoming season of giving may not arrive until the end of the year.

    Unlike previous years when as I worried about the financial needs of Joy Junction I experienced chest pains and even dark depression, this time was different – I felt emotionally traumatized and unable to think. In fact, I would have liked nothing better than to jump in my car and drive and drive and drive – and forget about Joy Junction.

    I wondered if it would always be like this. Many years ago a friend in Santa Fe had given me some wise advice which back then I dismissed. (Since then I have come to see how true his words were). He had told me that running a nonprofit always means dealing with money woes. "You'll never have enough money," he said.

    I guess the question is how many more times I can deal with the ever increasing financial strain. Because we're a faith based ministry and not a social service agency we don't receive any money from any branch of the government (and that's the way I want to keep it), but it does mean that when we run short of funds we can't go to the city council hat in hand asking for a financial bail out.

    I can already hear some of you saying, "Well, they'd just better cut back and live within their means." True, and we did that and planned a more conservative budget for this year than we might otherwise have done. But we didn't even meet that so we're taking emergency steps to deal with decreased revenue. We don't want to be examples of the old adage (which goes something like this), "When your outgo exceeds your income it will be your downfall."

    But as I thought about where we could cut back and provide less I also reflected over the last few months – the busiest ever in the 18 years I had run Joy Junction.

    On many nights during the height of summer we had sheltered 200 people – sometimes way more. This was a sharp increase from other years, when even in the depth of winter with temperatures plummeting to the 40 degree level and sometimes lower we had only sheltered about 150 people.

    Unfortunately that increase in people hadn't resulted in corresponding increase in income to the shelter. We had seen one of the worse summer slumps ever in donations.

    While we and other non profits locally and nationwide always anticipate a slump in donations during the summer months, until 9/11 we had things pretty well figured out financially.

    During the last couple of months of the year we always received more income than needed to run the shelter for those months, so we put the excess funds into a savings account upon which we could draw from the next year to help us get through those traditionally difficult cash shy summer months.

    In addition, again prior to 9/11 we had developed a small group of faithful donors who would give us gifts of stock in the summer which we could sell as needed and apply those funds to help meet any budget deficit.

    However, the events of 9/11 changed the whole giving cycle - with the result that we generated much less revenue than anticipated to carry into the coming year. Then as if that wasn't enough, the crash of the dot coms very effectively disposed of the formerly disposable funds that had been given to us by generous donors.

     The liberation of Iraq served to further compound an already very difficult financial situation. Understandably, people's attention was focused on the Middle East and international events.

     BUT: while I understand and support that different focus, while international issues of incredible significance are being played out, local needs are still continuing regardless. Homeless women and families with their children are still in desperate need of a safe place to stay and while we're glad to able to provide for those needs, we can't do so without community participation.

    So I'm issuing a plea from the bottom of my heart, not only for Joy Junction but for all the other rescue missions and faith based ministries around the nation. More than ever, we need financial and prayerful support from our friends to keep going. Yes, we know that God supplies but He also uses His children to do so. Will you help?



    For additional information about Joy Junction go to http://www.joyjunction.org

For more information about other rescue missions around America, check out http://www.agrm.org

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