For the first time, OnRamp just donated a vehicle in Houston! I am so stinking excited! While our ministry is generally confined to the Brazos Valley, we had a special opportunity to partner with generous donors in the city I grew up in to serve an Afghan family who were rescued after the fall of Kabul and brought to Houston to build a new life. Our client, whom we’ll call “S” for privacy, worked as a chef for the New York Times Kabul bureau. When the Taliban took over, the NYT committed phenomenal resources to fly at-risk national staff out of the country and help them resettle in America. I cannot speak highly enough of this company’s efforts to protect and provide for their Afghan staff. They supplied S, his wife, and their five children with all travel expenses, a safe apartment next to other Afghan refugees, English lessons, VISA assistance, and employment connections. With their help, S quickly found an excellent job at an upscale restaurant. The NYT was able to take care of everything… except long-term transportation.

Max Gerall, a friend and a frequent advocate to OnRamp, coined a term that perfectly describes our 105th client: Essential Aggie. These are the men and women who serve the TAMU campus in food services, custodial, grounds-keeping, and similar professions. They keep TAMU running. Without them, the campus would rapidly become unlivable and unusable. Yet despite their essential service and hard work, most do not earn enough to afford the necessities of life, such as reliable transportation. This reality grows worse each month as inflation reduces their discretionary income even further. For many Essential Aggies, especially those who are single parents, assistance is needed to make ends meet.

Enter Monica, our most recent car recipient. She’s a single mom of two boys who works at the TAMU Hotel and Conference Center. But when her twenty year old car began to break down, her biggest fear was missing work and losing this job…

A reliable vehicle is certainly a necessity in our community, but is it a matter of life-and-death? Yes, actually, for the subset of our clients who need a vehicle to attend life-sustaining dialysis treatments multiple times per week. These men and women need a vehicle they can count on to start every-time, without fail. They need a vehicle that can safely take them to transplant-grade hospitals and specialists in Houston and Temple. They need something large enough for a wheelchair or walker in many cases. And they need good air-conditioning in triple-digit weather like today so avoid overheating their already-taxed bodies. A reliable vehicle saves lives when given to dialysis patients. So this week OnRamp donated a beautiful Toyota Rav4 to our 104th clients, Daniel and Sylvia Estrada.

Time to share one exciting praise and one urgent need for OnRamp. Let’s start with the great news: God has faithfully built OnRamp’s Client Care Committee and Prayer Team such that we now fill a whole room! There are now 20 of us! We met in person Monday at Brazos Fellowship (thank you for the space - yours is truly one of the most generous churches in this community!) to get to know one another, discuss upcoming clients, and sample Crumbl Cookies. It was such a JOY to share this ministry with these 15 skilled, loving women. Yes, I was the only guy 😂

Ours is a faith of second chances, and third, and fourth, and fifth… forgiveness, grace, and hope without limit. When asked if we should forgive our brother seven times, Jesus responded, “seventy-times-seven,” a Jewish hyperbole for unlimited forgiveness. And when His friend Peter betrayed Him at His moment of greatest need, Jesus not only forgave, but fully restored Peter and lifted him back up into a life of joy and service. This is the hope of the Christian faith: that no matter how hard we’ve fallen, there is always HOPE for a new start. And it is our privilege (and responsibility) as followers of Christ to offer that forgiveness, restoration, and hope to one another.

So with that little sermon behind me (😂), let me tell you about how your support of OnRamp allowed us to share this restorative love of Christ with a brother named Tyler yesterday…

What does OnRamp do? Most assume we “give away cars.” Yes, we do, but that constitutes only one part of our overall mission to share the love of Jesus by blessing people in need of reliable transportation in every way possible. For some, that will require a donated vehicle, and that is what consumes the majority of our resources (donating cars is expensive after all!). But for many others, what’s needed is a timely repair, an Uber card or bus pass, or in the cases below, training on essential automotive topics such as how to drive and how to change a tire. So here are two examples of significant ministries OnRamp performed this last week that were not about “giving away cars.”

This article begins with a simple question, “Is there a meaningful Return on Investment for a local business that donates to provide reliable vehicles to the working poor?” The unequivocal answer is yes! There are actually returns in both the spiritual and economic realms for those employers who invest in helping the working poor secure dependable transportation.

Consider this: Time and again in Scripture, we find the concept of generosity toward those in need providing a return to the giver in the form of a fuller, more blessed life than they otherwise would have.

Time to tell the story of our most remarkable client yet. While every OnRamp client has overcome obstacles, none until now suffered kidnapping, suicide bombings, and Taliban beatings. But our 102nd client family faced all this and more last year as they fled Afghanistan to find a safe home here in College Station. With their permission, let me share the story of Saboor and his family of five.

Yesterday, we were privileged to give a practically new Toyota to a single mom building a new life for herself and her daughter. While we can’t divulge her identity or share her picture, we can tell you about how this courageous woman fled an abusive relationship in Houston, got clean and back on her feet with the help of Celebrate Recovery and Elizabeth House Maternity Home, grew as a parent through training from Methodist Children’s Home, and is now successfully employed and growing stronger by the day.

The engineer in me craves efficiency in all things, including OnRamp’s ministry. I want to help the maximum number of people for the minimum amount of dollars. But that’s not how ministry works. As my former boss Brian Fisher was fond of saying, ministry is about effectiveness, not efficiency. And effectiveness, measured as positive transformation for a person or family, often requires inefficient inputs.

Case-in-point, last week OnRamp provided replacement vehicles to two existing clients who suffered major vehicular setbacks through no fault of their own.

A strong Board of Directors is a diverse Board. Diverse life experiences, skills, and racial and socio-economic backgrounds are crucial to discerning how best to serve people in need. This week, God blessed OnRamp with the addition of three diverse and highly skilled new Board members who I’m thrilled to introduce to you…

This, ladies and gentlemen, is why OnRamp exists: not to buy or fix cars, but to transform families. Here are three recent followup interviews with clients who received reliable vehicles from us in the past year…

Last Saturday we threw quite a party to celebrate our first 100 clients gifted reliable vehicles. When Julie and I launched OnRamp 4 ½ years ago, we expected to give away a couple of cars a year. We never thought we’d hit 100. Maybe 50 by the time I retire. We’re now at almost 50 a year!

We knew this day would come, we just didn’t know when or who our 100th client would be. Now we do. Yesterday, a single mom raising her young son and taking care of her ailing mother, received this low mileage Mazda sedan from OnRamp. She’s asked for anonymity, but has given us permission to share her story.

If Easter is ultimately about the hope we have through Jesus’ new life, then what better way to celebrate than by sharing HOPE with a family in desperate need! Today, OnRamp gifted a beautiful minivan to our 99th client. For her safety, we can't share her name, picture, or identifying information, but we can tell a bit of the story.

OnRamp wouldn’t be near our 100th client without the dedicated work of our Operations Director, Stephanie Mason. But as we’ve grown, we’ve realized that we need more help to manage and administer our expanding teams of volunteers, advocates, and clients. So last week, we hired Cassidy Somervill as our Care Director.

Last Wednesday, March 23, OnRamp had the privilege of donating TWO reliable cars to our next clients.

Last week, I (Blake) had the privilege of giving a vehicle to our 96th client, one of the sweetest, dearest women I’ve ever met. For safety reasons, I can’t tell you her name or show you her picture. Here is what I can tell you: she’s a widow who is raising her toddler great-grandchild on her own to rescue this precious child out of a very bad situation.

OnRamp has bought, donated, and repaired more than a few vehicles over the years - well over 100 at this point. Through that work, we’ve learned a great deal about how to buy, sell, maintain, and enjoy affordable, reliable vehicles. Blake Jennings, our President, and Rami Cerone, our Head of Vehicle Acquisition, have launched a new podcast, Behind the Wheel with OnRamp, to share these lessons.

“War is a defeat for humanity.” Pope John Paul II

As we grieve the violence in Eastern Europe and pray for Ukraine’s deliverance, it would be easy to assume this war’s suffering will remain foreign to our small, Texas town. Images of children sheltering in basements and homes burning move us to empathy, but rightly feel half-a-world away. We feel insulated in the heartland of the Unites States, safe from the devastation of this invasion.

And yet, John Paul was right. War anywhere is a defeat for humanity everywhere because, in this globally connected world, all suffering spreads. And sadly, it tends to hurt the most vulnerable far worse than it hurts the rest of us. At the moment, the expansion of suffering comes primarily in the form of rapidly rising prices for essential goods. According to the World Bank, the war has already driven up the price of wheat 67% over just the last month, which is not a surprise as Russia and Ukraine produce more than a quarter of the world’s wheat supply. Corn has likewise risen 26% so far in 2022. And the staple everyone’s talking about, gasoline, continues to reach shocking prices per gallon. Let’s look at this one in detail.