January

 

Hey everyone!

Thank you for your support and for reading my blog this month. It's been such a blessing to see God working in the lives of students (and my own) so I'm incredibly thankful for your generosity and your sharing of the same Kingdom vision that I have!

    At the beginning of the month we had a staff development retreat! Most students were home for the holidays so we had some extra time to get together as a staff and get to know each other more and prepare for the semester. I really enjoyed this time. The Focus staff really feels like another family for me, so it was awesome to get to spend extended time with them, which has been so hard to come by this year because of the pandemic. We spent a good chunk of our time together discussing this book called Money and Power by Jacques Ellul. If you want to read something that will shake up the way you think about using money, go read this and get back to me about it!

    This is a picture one of our Collin Focus staff meetings. This semester we are really focusing on growing our ministry in these areas: togetherness, prayer, and Biblical-knowledge. We got real busy in coming up with events and opportunities for our students to spend more time together, in prayer, and reading scripture. Here are graphics for just a few of the things we are doing as ministry at Collin this semester:

At Tuesday Hang we are going on to campus at the peak hours of student traffic and inviting students to come get to know us and join our community. We strike up conversations with anyone willing and initiate friendship. Already a few people have started coming to my core because they were invited into friendship by someone at Tuesday hang. I'm excited to see how far our momentum takes us with this this semester.

Like I said, as a ministry we are focusing on the value of prayer and a consistent prayer-life for our students. The goal is that our students would "Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you." (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18). 

The half-day prayer retreat is going to be really special. We basically planned a time for the students to get away from their routines for a short while and invest in their relationships with God. First we will help teach them how to pray and then they will spend most of the half-day in solitude with the Lord. What an exciting opportunity! I'm pumped for these just for myself. 

The prayer challenge one was actually my idea - each week at "Deep Dive" (more to come on that) we'll be handing out a new challenge to remind our students to pray and to grow their hearts for other people around them.

  These are all new events/ recurring opportunities for our students to grow closer to God and gain knowledge of the scriptures. 

Deep Dive is something that I'm really excited for. We'll finally have a weekly opportunity to get our students safely together so that they can meet each other and get a better sense of the Collin Focus community as a whole. Also, this will be another opportunity to teach our students about the Word of God and build them up.

    I'm really excited for everything new that's going on in our ministry and I hope you are too! I don't just want to tell you about all of our events going on so that you think we're a cool, exciting ministry, but I want to ask that you would be praying for our ministry as we go through this semester and minister to our students.

    Please join me in praying that God would move powerfully in the hearts of our students as I and the rest of our staff team try to give them opportunities to connect to God and try to love each of them well. Thank you!