Why Overturning Tables?

One day in a garbage collectors community in Cairo, Egypt I struggled to help a donkey cart full of trash to make it up a hill. Romany, the young, Coptic butcher standing on the top of the hill, said only three words to me, but those words have rung in my soul for more than a dozen years. He simply said, “God saw that.”

It was a reminder that small acts of kindness that seem insignificant, even ridiculous, count for something in God’s economy.

One might be tempted to discount the voice of Romany – an oppressed minority  person living in abject poverty with little education. But Romany has a voice, and he has something to say to those of us from places that appear to be in the center of society. They may be words of encouragement or exhortation, but he has something to say.

This site is dedicated to handing the microphone over to people who are often excluded from society’s center. In fact those deemed marginal to mainstream occupy a different kind of center – the center of a different kind of kingdom.
– Scott Bessenecker

Who Is Scott Bessenecker?

Scott Bessenecker was born in Iowa and attended Iowa State University where he graduated in Business Administration after a failed attempt at an Engineering degree. Shortly after his graduation in 1985, Scott began working for a faith-based university student organization. It was there that he grew in his love for the world, for the excluded, and for university students. “Those of us from well-resourced backgrounds need to be in relationship with the excluded,” Scott says, “The insulation between classes is suffocating us and preventing us from learning from and contributing to one another.”

Like many writers, Scott hates writing but loves having written. He is author of three non-fiction books and served as editor for two others. He is currently seeking an agent for his first work of fiction, Nocturn, a post-apocalyptic story about the meek inheriting the earth. He lives in Madison, WI with his watercolor artist wife, Janine. They have three children, Hannah, Philip and Laura, and over the years have had a variety of people living in their home and sharing life together. 

In his day job Scott helps to plunge more than 2,000 university students a year into some of the most beautiful and broken places on earth to learn from and serve others.

SOME OF SCOTT'S TALKS