Rachel's Challenge

"Don't let you're character change color with your environment. Find out who you are and let it stay it's true color."

Rachel Joy Scott

Last week, I attended a life changing conference called the "CYCLE Tour" which stands for  Cooperative Youth Conference & Leadership Experience. At this conference we had several inspirational speeches, but there was one in particular that will stay close to my heart forever: Rachel's Challenge.

Rachel Joy Scott was sitting outside the west wing entrance to her school eating lunch with a friend when she became the first victim of the Columbine shooting. Two boys, Eric and Dylan, had put bombs in their school, and when they failed to explode they started shooting. Rachel was shot four times.

Rachel was involved in one of the most horrific incidents in our history, yet when people hear the story of Rachel's life they find it neary impossible to focus on her death. Three weeks before her life was ended Rachel wrote a paper for her fifth period class called, "My Ethics, My Codes of Life." In this paper, she challenged others to, "start a chain reaction of kindness and compassion," which is exactly what she tried to do herself. Two examples of Rachel following her own advice are Amber and Adam.

Amber was a new student at Columbine High School. As she walked through the halls she found that no one would talk to her, or even look her in the eyes for that matter. At lunch she decided to try to break out of her shell and sit with a group of girls she spotted in the cafeteria. When she asked to sit down they laughed at her, and she left to go sit by herself. While she was eating her lunch she just happened to look up and catch the eyes of a girl across the room: Rachel. Shortly after Rachel had spotted Amber she got up, went over to Amber's table, and asked her if she wanted to come sit with her and her friends. Amber wanted to say yes, but said no because she was too shy. So Rachel did the next best thing - she walked back to her table got her stuff and all of her friends, and sat next to Amber. This was the first time anyone at Columbine had shown Amber even the smallest hint of kindness. As it turns out, Amber had moved because her mother had lost her life only a month beforehand and she wasn't only facing the fear of a new school, but the fear of leaving school only to return to a motherless home.

Then there's Adam. Adam was late to class when two large boys threw his books to the ground and started bullying him. Rachel was coming down the hall and saw the commotion; she sprinted to the boys rescue. She stepped between Adam and these boys, curled up her fist, looked them right in the eyes and said, "if you touch him again, you're going to have to fight me!" At this time the boys had three options: Beat up a girl; Get beat up by a girl; or Walk away. They chose the latter. After this incident Rachel went out of her way to find him in the hallways everyday to see how he was doing. Adam later said that had Rachel not intervened he would have lost his life, not due to the two boys who had harrassed him in the hallway, but because he had planned to take his own life shortly thereafter.

After her death they found six journals which contained five challenges. These challenges have become part of what is now known as Rachel's Challenge and inspire people around the globe.

 The challenges are:

1) Look For the Best in Others: Eliminate Prejudice

People show you what you look for. If you judge a person in a negative way immediately, they will only ever show you their negative side, but if you judge them positively or fairly they will show you who they really are. Rachel believed in giving people three chances to show you who they really were because first impressions can be flawed.

2) Dare to Dream

To make dreams real, Rachel said you must first: Dream big; Write your goals down; and Keep a journal. She said that by writing your dreams down, they became real.

"Glory only comes when one persues their dreams!" - Rachel Joy Scott

3) Choose Positive Influences

Rachel admired people such as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mother Theresa, but above all Anne Frank. Rachel admired how Anne put her heart and soul into her diary which later inspired the world. It was Anne's writings that lead Rachel to leave behind her own journals and her Legacy. Both Rachel and Anne's deaths were influenced by Hitler: Anne was part of the Genocide known as the Holocaust and Rachel's killers murdered her on Hitler's Birthday.

4) Speak with Kindness: Words Can Hurt or Heal

We have all heard the phrase, "Random acts of kindness," but Rachel was very deliberate with her own compassion. She chose to reach out to three specific groups of people: Special needs students; New students; and Students who were bullied.

5) Start Your Own Chain Reaction

Rachel hoped to achieve this by first starting with those you were closest to and branching out. At the conference they had us close our eyes and imagine Rachel standing in a doorway surrounded by all the people we care about most and ask ourselves if we died tomorrow would all of these people know how much we cared. They asked us to make it our mission to make those around us feel loved.

There were many remarkable things about Rachel including her kind heart, words of wisdom, and her strange insight to the future.Years before her own death, Rachel had a premonition that she would die young. She told her family and friends and teachers that her life was going to be short and she would never experience the same things they would. A few days after her death a man named Frank called Rachel's father Darrell and said he had dreamed about Rachel's eyes. He had dreamed that she was crying, and where she cried life started growing up out of the ground. "Does this mean anything to you?" Frank asked. Darrell said no but he would contact him if it ever did. Six weeks later Darrell got a call to come pick up Rachel's backpack which had been held for evidence. In her backpack was the sixth journal, the last entry to this journal had been made twenty minutes before the shooting. A drawing of Rachel's eyes. And from her eyes came thirteen tears - also the number of people who were killed that day - that hit a rose and then turned to blood before they hit the ground.

There were several other journal entries in which Rachel talked about her looming death. Eleven month's before her death she wrote: This will be my last year, I have gotten what I can. And just days before the shooting she wrote a poem which stated: I'm dying, quickly my soul leaves, slowly my body withers. It's not suicide, I consider it homicide.

When Rachel was thirteen years old, she traced her hands on the back of her dresser and wrote, "These hands belong to Rachel Joy Scott, and will someday touch millions of people's hearts." She never got to see just how right she was.

I have accepted Rachel's Challenge and am hoping to inspire others to do the same. I see myself, the people around me, and my future in a whole new light thanks to Rachel Joy Scott and the amazing life that she lived. I consider myself blessed for getting to hear her story and letting it impact me the way it has. I only wish I could thank her personally for what she is doing in my life.

To learn more about Rachel's Challenge go to:

www.rachelschallenge.org

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www.facebook.com/rachelschallenge
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www.twitter.com/RachelsChalleng
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www.vimeo.com/rachelschallenge

RACHEL JOY SCOTT

1981-1999

"I am sure my ways of life may be very different from yours, but how do you know that trust, compassion, and beauty will not make this world a better place to be in and this life a better one to live? My codes may seem like a fantasy that can never be reached, but test them for yourself, and see the kind of effect you have in the lives of the people around you. You just might start a chain reaction."

The Girl on Pump 5

A few weeks ago, my mother and I pulled into the gas station. Momma told me to put $20 in the gas tank and then run inside to pay. I stood by the car and did as I was told to do. When I went a penny over I had to go to the window to grab the change that I needed. My mom rolled down the window and asked me, "Do you believe God speaks to people?"

"Of course!" I responded. "Why?"

"He is telling me I need to pay for that lady's gas," Momma said and then pointed to the girl at the pump next to us. She was blonde, in her mid to late twenties and had two little girls in the car. Nothing about the woman told me she was in need but if my mom said that's what God had told her to do, I believed her. "Go give her this five dollars."

At first I protested because God hadn't told me to help this woman, but Mom eventually convinced me. If that's what I was supposed to do, who am I to argue?

I took the five dollars to the car as she was about to pump her gas. She didn't see me at first so I had to get her attention. "Ma'am?" She looked over at me. I held out the five dollars for her to take. "I want you to have this."

The woman looked shocked. "I couldn't take that. I don't even know you."

"God told me to." I simply said.

The woman stood there in disbelief. "I can't believe this! Are you serious? I can't thank you enough for this; I only have two dollars. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you."

I handed her the money and walked back to my car where my mom was anxiously waiting to hear how it went. She drove me to the doors so I could pay. "It went great. She couldn't stop thanking me! And I know God must have been speaking to you, there is no other way you could have known she only had two dollars," I said as I left the car to go inside.

I paid the bill and came back to the car. I buckled my seatbelt and looked over at my mom who had not yet started the car. She was holding another twenty. "I want you to go in and tell them to make sure the girl on pump 5 gets twenty dollars in gas."

I quickly ran back inside and did what I was told. As we were pulling out of the parking lot my mom pulled up next to the woman and she immediately started thanking us once again. My mom cut her off, "I want you to put twenty dollars in your gas tank."

"That's too much!" The woman protested.

"It's already payed for. God Bless," my mom said as we pulled away. Momma was tearing up and didn't want anyone to see her cry.

I turned around just in time to see the woman nearly collapse against her car in tears. Her oldest daughter, who couldn't have been older than six years old, stuck her head out of the car window and started rubbing the back of her mother's head. I turned back to face my mom tears running down my face as well. "Why did we give her another $20, Momma?"

"When I first reached into my wallet I was told to grab a twenty, but I decided to only give her a five. When you told me she only had two dollars I knew God had initially wanted me to give the woman twenty. So the five was just a bonus," she said.

"And why was I the one that had to do it?" I asked.

"Because, I knew that when you saw how we had helped her, you would know what it truely meant to be blessed by blessing others." And I did. Though I wasn't on the recieving end, I was blessed. I Am Blessed.