God Tells Student to Decline Student Loans and Ask Strangers for Cash

Over at Addicting Info, Jameson Parker writes about Battenfield’s “calling” to ask fellow believers to pay for her college tuition at televangelist Pat Robertson’s Regents University School of Law. She’s debuted a begging website called Operation Law School where she says “God asked me to go to Law School for the good of the Kingdom of God. Help me raise $28,500 by 5/1/15” and there’s even a trailer (above) craftily posted to YouTube to hopefully push her begging viral. From her website:

[A]fter much prayer and wise counsel, I have decided to let you in on this part of my life so that you will know what God is doing in and through me.

I do not believe in taking out student loans because the Word of God says not to, and He asked me specifically not to, so I have permanently declined my loans in faith, trusting that He will provide the full amount. …

I am not just another 20-something going to law school for law school’s sake. I’m doing it because the Father asked me to go for a very specific, strategic reason.

Who doesn’t go to law school for a reason? That’s much too much debt to just go whistling into a decade or more of Sallie Mae purse-snatching.

Look, I am a Christian who prays every day and actually likes going to church. An usher from my place of worship was just in the New York Times, I’m into this Christianity thing. But Battenfield’s request sounds ridiculous to me. Anyone who is a Christian prays for God’s direction in their lives, which includes anything and everything from college choices to whom they should marry, but that doesn’t mean Jesus doesn’t want you to pay your bills.

Still, I’m sure someone will give Battenfield coins for her crusade, whatever it may be. At this point, she just wants to “reach the wealthiest of the wealthy and the poorest of the poor in America with the Gospel” which sounds like a run of the mill televangelist spiel I’d hear on late night TV. Still, if she becomes the barrister version of Noah and the arc, someone call me, until then, I’m not donating to Battenfield’s personal building fund.