Founder's Story

I will start by answering the question that most people ask in response to hearing about Sojourners Journey, “How did this idea come about?” To be honest, this question was asked by my father many times throughout my life, and my mother would look at him and say, “Bill, she’s a dreamer.” 

This dream started over 6 years ago when I returned home from Youth with a Mission Denver CO., also known as YWAM. YWAM is a six-month international youth mission program dedicated to serving Jesus thought the world. During my time there I spent 2.5 months in Thailand, we were there shortly after the tsunami hit. So we dedicated a large portion of our time to their relief. We also worked with the prostitutes in Pattya with the Tamar Center. I came home from that experience knowing I had a great desire to serve the Lord. Initially, I had dreams of God sending me somewhere amazing and exotic like Africa. But, when I came home, I knew my place was here, in Sparta, and in the beginning it was to spend the last year and ½ of my mother’s life with her. 

I struggled for a while trying to find out what it was that God wanted me to do for Him. I couldn’t identify any spectacular or obvious gifts that made it easy for me to figure out what my whole role was in this life.......in fact, like many if not all of us, I'm sure Ill spend my life time figuring out what that all entails.

I remember someone telling, if I found myself in this situation simply look at what God has given you and go find a need. In my journey to do this, I got connected with Mary Masters from Families 1st. She shared with me that she felt what Monroe County Needed desperately was an emergency shelter. To be honest I had hoped for another answer, it wasn’t quite the picture that I had hoped for. I was one of those people who had preconceived notions of poverty, welfare, homelessness, and teen pregnancy. Dare I say, I judged them, separated myself from them, even ignored they existed. Over the past five years God has softened my heart, and allowed me to see the deeper complexities of a cycle that so desperately need to be broken: “poor choices, leading to fatherless children, uneducated mothers without stable incomes, children left in shattered, broken homes and the cycle continues. God has allowed me to see the helpless, misdirect child in all of us, he called us to love the unlovable, to befriend the friendless, to achieve the unthinkable.

~Katie Bennett