Beyond the Living Room

For eleven years, Denise Watkins ran a free tutoring program from her apartment on East 71st Street in Chicago. Every Tuesday and Thursday, twelve neighborhood kids squeezed around her kitchen table to work on fractions, read aloud from chapter books, and eat the oatmeal cookies she baked fresh each session.

Some nights, after the last child left, Denise sat alone at that same table and wondered if any of it mattered. Test scores barely budged. Two of her former students dropped out of high school. She told her pastor she felt like she was pouring water into sand.

What Denise didn't know was that one of those kitchen-table kids, Marcus, carried her voice with him all the way through college and into graduate school. In 2019, he founded Brighter Paths, a literacy nonprofit that now operates tutoring centers in fourteen countries. When a reporter asked where the idea came from, Marcus didn't hesitate: "Miss Watkins's kitchen table."

Isaiah tells us that the Servant of the Lord felt the same exhaustion — "I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing." But the Almighty had a purpose far beyond what the Servant could see. "It is too small a thing for you to be my servant to restore the tribes of Jacob," God declared. "I will also make you a light for the nations."