Hello there!
If we haven’t met yet, my name is Sadie Wilson. I’m a senior psychology major from Lodi, California and I am very grateful to introduce myself here as the SMU President for the 2021-2022 school year! As a kickoff to this semester, I'd love to share a little bit of my heart and vision for SMU with you. (Also, seriously, if we haven’t met, please come hang out with us in the SMU office!)
I’ve been involved with SMU since the beginning of my freshman year, and it’s been one of the best parts of my experience at Biola. Through mission trips, training, and countless conversations, my relationships have deepened, my perspectives have been challenged, and my faith has been strengthened. In the last three years, I’ve loved watching SMU grow in reaching more students at Biola who don’t fit a certain mold, better stewarding our resources, and doing ministry more sustainably and intentionally. In SMU, I’ve found a community that engages in the Great Commission with authentic humility and contagious joy.
As we start this new year together, I can’t tell you how excited and ready I am! We’re a week into classes and it still feels surreal that we’re actually back in person, especially after 17 months that felt like a minimum of ten years. I’m walking through a paradoxical combination of grieving the loss & processing the trauma our community has walked through since March 2020 while simultaneously experiencing a deep joy to be with everyone again. Maybe you’re feeling this too... At the same time, I can’t stop thinking about what a privilege it is that God has entrusted all of us with this unique year at Biola. It’s a year that feels like a clean slate: a year to reform culture, a year to be honest and reflective, a year to lay our own plans, futures, and dreams at the cross and wholeheartedly follow the Holy Spirit’s leading.
Last spring, I was praying about SMU in this uncertain year when I felt the Lord’s gentle whisper remind me that I didn’t need my own vision for SMU, I just needed to align with His. At that moment, a weight lifted off of my shoulders. God is far more jealous for His glory, more in love with His people, and more compassionate towards the brokenhearted and the lost than we ever could be. After prayer and asking the Lord to reveal His heart for this year, my vision for SMU is ‘Cultivating Readiness’ which is inspired by Galatians 6:9, “And let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart,” and by the theme in the Gospels of being ready for the wedding feast of the Kingdom of God. The phrases of weariness and losing heart resonate deeply in me as I think of how hope has been such a scarce commodity in the last year and a half. And, yet, I’m struck by this hopeful image of preparing for the harvest or the wedding feast. Further, these seasons of sowing and reaping, suffering and joy, death and life, lamentation and celebration, are all central pieces of the Christian walk.
In SMU this year, my prayer is that, in unity, we would cultivate together this attitude of hopeful readiness by continuing to advance the mission of God for the glory of God. This is a posture of complete reliance on the Holy Spirit to produce His fruit in us and through us and of confident expectation that God will bring His harvest even in the face of weariness, suffering, and waiting.
With this expectant posture, our SMU staff has already been praying for you and has been wholeheartedly and actively working to make SMU more inviting, more sustainable, more Christ-centered. We’d love for you to join us in praying Luke 10:02 every day at 10:02 (AM and PM), “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.”
I’m praying that when you’re experiencing weariness and exhaustion, hope invades your heart. I’m praying that when you’re tempted to pursue personal power, success, or social status, the Lord would draw you to engage instead in the joyful labor of the eternal harvest. I’m praying that, when He comes, we’ll be ready.
Sadie Wilson
SMU President
