This morning I arrived in my office to find the latest copy of the Voice of the Alumni, the official publication of the Bob Jones University Alumni Association.  I anticipated this issue because the creation of the Michael T. McCaskill Memorial Scholarship was to be announced. Flipping through the pages, I found what I was looking for!

Voice of the Alumni - Volume 83 Issue 3

Then I checked my email to find that over night more than $2000 had come in toward the Ride For Mike! The project is getting off to an awesome start! I’m getting more excited about the ride just because so many other people in Memphis, Greenville, and Raleigh are.

Spread announcing the formation of the endowment

Finally, as I flipped to the back of the magazine, I found the short piece on the Ride for Mike. The important thing for me was that I wanted to find the RideForMike.com URL listed. Ahhh, there is was in bold letters. Here’s hoping there will be more people taking part because they see this.

Photo with Ride For Mike article

For Jonathan Pait ’91, pedaling a bicycle for six hours a day is nothing out of the ordinary.

Jonathan, who seres as the Alumni Association’s Events and Services manager, has participated in cycling events each year since 2006. Last year he relayed with a team of cyclists from the Palmetto Peloton Project, riding in six-hour shifts from Greenville, S.C., all the way to Austin, Texas. Their efforts raised tens of thousands of dollars for cancer research — a cause with a great personal significance for Jonathan. His cycling efforts have all been in memory of his friend Mike McCaskill ‘o3, who died in 2007 of a brain tumor.

But Jonathan’s next challenge promises to be more demanding than anything he’s attempted so far. In the fall of 2010, Jonathan plans to ride solo from Memphis, Tenn. (Mike’s birthplace), to Greenville (where Mike attended BJU) and then on to Apex, N.C. (the Raleigh-area town where Mike served as a youth pastor). That a distance of more than 700 miles — all to be covered in one week.

And this time, the money Jonathan raises will be going not toward cancer research, but directly to a DNSF scholarship in Mike’s honor, to help ministerial students afford college.

“This is going to be tough,” says Jonathan, nothing the difficulties of riding solo and covering 100 miles each day for a week. but the cause outweighs the difficulties: “This ride at its heart is really to remember Mike,” Jonathan says. “This year I did not want to focus on the battle surrounding Mike’s death. What I want to do is focus on drawing attention to what he lived for — to serve Christ as a youth minister. I couldn’t think of a better way to do so than to work with the McCaskills in raising money for this scholarship.”

To learn more about the journey and to find out how you can support Jonathan’s effort, visit RideForMike.com.

Thanks to everyone who has participated by giving so far. We are on our way to meeting the goal of $10,000 and, frankly, I think I may have underestimated the generosity of people who have joined me in this project. Not only that, but I also learned yesterday that there are a couple of guys in Memphis who plan to ride out with me for a couple of days! That will be such a huge help to me!

Wow! This is so much fun!