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'How's the Weather' Is Door-Opener for Witness
Craig Pinley
MINNEAPOLIS, MN (August 4, 2000) - Although she works with some of the most severe weather patterns in the United States, Jo Bender is essentially a sunny, mild and bright kind of person.
Bender, weekend meteorologist for KSTP-TV Channel 5 Eyewitness News in Minneapolis, can light up even the most cloudy of days with seemingly boundless energy. Her disposition is no accident. A love for children and a willingness to serve God are two traits that serve Bender well as she works as a Christian journalist in a secular medium.
When Bender isn't broadcasting the weather, she serves as program director for Youth Frontier, Inc., speaking to school-age children all across the state and teaching values such as respect, courage and kindness. She currently attends Roseville Covenant Church in Roseville, Minnesota, with her husband.
"If you're on TV or in the news, kids know who you are and they listen to you," Bender said. "So I take this as a great opportunity to talk about Christ and I feel really fortunate to do that. It's fun. I like going to work, I'm fired up about life. And when I get to tell people that it's because I have a great relationship with Christ, then all the better."
A native of Anoka, Minnesota, Bender won the 1992 Miss Minnesota pageant after winning the Miss Rochester contest. The 22-year-old was working at KTTC-TV in Rochester at the time, having recently graduated from St. Cloud State University. Her staff was surprised by the pageant results. "When I told them I was going to win Miss Minnesota they laughed at me," she said.
Bender is grateful to another woman in the Evangelical Covenant Church (ECC), Brenda Strombeck, for paving the way as a Christian witness via pageant work. Strombeck (then known as Brenda Armstrong) had set a precedent by doing numerous speaking engagements in churches after winning the 1990 Miss Minnesota crown.
Instead of performing in the usual stint of parades and mall appearances scheduled by the pageant administration, Bender booked 125 speaking engagements at schools and churches over a three-and-a-half-month period. Following her pageant win, she was able to take off only 13 days in 12 months. It was during that vacation period that God touched Bender in a life-changing way.
Redeemer Covenant Church in Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, needed youth leaders for a mission trip to Texas and Bender volunteered to participate in the one-week project in spring 1993. She was so taken by the experience that she gave up plans to attend law school and served nine months in a short-term mission position at a church in La Villa, Texas, just across the Mexico border. Before leaving, she took the first U.S. Hispanic youth group ever to the 1994 Covenant High In Christ (CHIC) conference in Colorado.
"They had kept writing me and saying, 'Why don't you come down here?' Finally, Dale Lusk (Merge Ministries coordinator) sent me an application and said that I should come down, at least for a summer," said Bender. "I didn't know what to do at this time. I had been accepted to law school and I thought that maybe I should try this weather thing (as a television meteorologist) because that's what I had been in school for. It was a weird time. You know it's time to grow up, but you're really not ready to," she continued.
"I was asking everybody what to do and I met with every pastor I knew, but I was frustrated," she continued. "Finally one of the pastors said, 'Jo, you just need to lay out a fleece.' I didn't know what that meant, so I studied all about laying out a fleece. Something that became obvious to me was mail. I said to myself if God would just send me a letter from Texas on Tuesday, I would go (to serve in a short-term mission) because I had to have my law school application sent by Wednesday.
"On Tuesday, I got this postcard and it was from Reynosa, Mexico, where we went on our mission trip with Dale and Vicky Lusk. I had gone and painted . . . and I had talked to the pastor of the church there and he sent me the postcard. And when I got it, I said to myself, 'Well, I guess I'm going.'"
Bender spent the 1993-94 school year in Mexico and was fortunate enough to procure a public relations job a month after she returned to the United States. She missed the television industry, however, and took a job at WAOW-TV in Wausau, Wisconsin.
A year later she took a job at KMSP-TV in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and moved into her current position two years ago. Throughout this period, she has been able to find ways to work with youth and to share her faith, both in and out of the workplace. She jokes that "my requests that come to our speakers bureau are usually different than other meteorologists," but she is thankful that her past accomplishments often allow her a forum to speak about her present relationship with Jesus Christ.
"In my current job, I can't produce a logical Christian argument to any kind of problem I have (at work), but I think it's given me some unique opportunities that I wouldn't have in an organization that is Christian," she observed. "But, it is at a point where people ask me why I'm different. At that point, I get to tell them and they respond . . . it's really fun. I look forward to those conversations."
She says that sharing her faith is not a conscious effort on her part. "It's not like I have the opportunity or would be allowed to carry a Bible around the workplace," she said. "But, people know (about my faith) and sometimes that allows me to connect with other Christians and it allows me to open up some eyes to the fact that if you knew this guy named Christ, you're life might be a little better."
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