The annual Community Prayer Breakfast in Elgin, started 26 years ago by longtime Courier-News Publisher D. Ray Wilson, drew 311 people to the campus of Judson University Wednesday. They saw charity volunteer Velma Sept of Elgin win this year’s D. Ray Wilson Award for community service and heard Lt. Gov. Evelyn Sanguinetti tell how she became a committed Christian only after multiple sclerosis threatened her career as a lawyer and pianist.
Like most recent prayer breakfasts, the event was held in Judson’s Lindner Fitness Center. But it evoked a different feeling this year. The lighting was turned down low through most of the program and, instead of having a succession of local leaders offer prayers for different sectors of the community, a professionally made video showed local scenes while Judson students, teachers and staff members read recorded prayers.
Each year the D. Ray Wilson Award is given to someone from the Elgin area who best exemplifies the dedication to charitable service that Wilson showed before he died in 2003 after serving 21 years as The Courier-News’s editor and publisher. Last year’s winner, Elgin arts leader Rise Jones, announced that the award committee had chosen Sept, a 30-year U.S. Postal Service employee whose volunteer work ranges from the Boys and Girls Club of Elgin to School District U46’s African-American advisory council and educational foundation, the Elgin Circle of Wise Women, the Black Women’s Association, the Elgin Community Career and College Readiness Committee, Elgin Area Women’s Connection and numerous other organizations.
Jones said Sept also sings with a group of her relatives called The Larkin Family and is active in New Hope Baptist Church of Elgin.
“She is always ready to serve, ready to go the extra mile,” Jones said.
“I worked for the Postal Service for 30 years and I said I would spend the next 30 years working for my community. It all comes from my mom,” Sept said.
Also nominated for the Wilson Award were District U46 administrator, Black Family Festival founder and frequent Elgin Community College volunteer Phyllis Folarin; fire department chaplain and Chilean aid organizer Pastor Henoch Fuentes from the Evangelical Covenant Church of Elgin; and fire department and prison chaplain Ben Manso, who is also the pastor of Primera Iglesia Bautista Hispana of Elgin.
Nick Salzman, a grandson of D. Ray Wilson and a member of the award committee, said that after his grandfather died, Salzman found a handwritten note in his desk. It said, “You are not the hand that holds the chisel. You are not the stone onto which the chisel carves. You are the chisel.”
In the keynote address, Sanguinetti told how she was born in Miami, the daughter of a Cuban refugee couple. After earning a degree in piano performance and becoming a lawyer, she said, “I was a church performer but I did not yet know Christ.” Then in 2007 she had a slip and fall accident and was found to be suffering from multiple sclerosis.
“You wonder why the Lord would do something like that to you,” she said. But “my husband told me to get busy living and stop dying.” After developing a deeper relationship with Christ, she said, she decided to run for the Wheaton City Council in 2011. That led to her being elected lieutenant governor last fall.
“I believe that God brought me here,” she said. “It’s only when you know how to be a servant to people that you are able to become a leader.”
