AUGUST
Welcome Week
Welcome week 2023 was here, and it was hot! Like for real…I’m talking 105 to 110° each day 😳!!! It was insane! But nonetheless, welcome week was a raging success. So many new students plugged into community, cores, and bibles studies already and it’s only the 2nd week of school.
All the way from our board games in the freshman, residence halls, to being kicked out of the freshman residence halls and relocated outside, all the way to chalking up the sidewalk of the campus, to cackling and laughing way too loud with new personalities, to eating in the dining halls with freshmen that are trying their best to come across cool and collected when in reality they’re actually a lot more afraid/awkward/lost then they hope to look, to saving and texting over 80 to 100 new phone numbers (and that’s just me!), to our "Everything's Bigger in Texas" event, to our "Black People Meet and Greet," to our "Asian American Boba Social," to our "Mi Gente Latino Social," to our deep dive into the book of Jude, to our "Friday Night Fellowship Kick Off," to our on boarding of a new leader team, to our field night, to our bracelet making, to zombie tag, to Whataburger, to my mouth being so dry from talking to so many new people but loving it all the while, to walking people to their classes, to our worship unplugged night, to our carpool to church on Sunday with so many new faces… Welcome week was nothing short of what is promised: an uphill trek of event after event, but a critical time to introduce our new students to a Jesus Culture early on.
The mission of welcome week is not to get people to join our ministry, but instead it is to show the new freshmen that they can belong to a community that cares about and loves them before they prove anything. We seek to make a campus community experience a norm so that they remember the feeling of what its like to be welcomed in hopes that they either follow that feeling right away, or that they are able to recall that feeling when they get lost/when things get hard. College for the first time is more and more overwhelming as each freshman class gets younger because they all went through COVID at a younger age, which makes COVID more and more a part of their most impressionable years. On a campus like UTD where we are one of the statistically loneliest and most depressed campuses in the DFW, FOCUS and other ministries like ours, are bringing life, stability, and joy to the student body in hopes that they will one day run into Jesus himself.
STORY
A quick story that I mentioned earlier: there were two occasions where I ran into freshmen, who were a bit off kilter being on a new campus:
The first instance was with a guy who was in the lobby of the residence hall. He was clinging to his tote bag for dear life and, nervously, looking from side to side with shifty eyes, was trying to figure out if he was going to either awkwardly sit and join in it with the rest of the people who were playing board games, or if he was going to awkwardly leave the res hall knowing that he had no destination in mind and nobody to go with. As his eyes were shifting, my eyes and his eyes locked and I, very brightly and warmly said, "Hey, come on over! Wanna join us?" He scurry's over to the seat on the couch next to me and says, "Oh thank God! My parents just dropped me off and went back to Austin and I feel so awkward and lost. I literally just had a mental break down in my room..Wanna see a picture?"
The next story was kind of the same feeling, but this took place in the dining hall. I was meeting up in the dining hall with a new freshman that I had met the day prior, and her and I were sitting together. As we were sitting together, there was a girl who was adjacent to us, but close enough to us to where I could see all that she was doing. In my eye line, I see her, twice, try to FaceTime a friend, but to no avail. Both times the FaceTime call went to voicemail. As she looks up from the phone, she flips her hair, crosses her legs, her chest caves in and then her and I catch each other’s eyes. I ask her, "Would you like to sit with us?" And she says, "OMG yes, thank God! I feel so awkward and alone! Like, I was trying to call my friend, so I don’t just look like I’m sitting here by myself, but nobody answered. Plus, my roommates also said that they were going to come to the dining hall, but they’re not here yet, so yea. I just am here and I feel weird."
So what do we learn from these two stories? Freshmen in college need friends! They are brand new, a lot of them on their own for the first time, and they most often have no clue what college is like nor what they’re going to do. They understand their need for friends, but all the while, are too scared, and too out of practice in how to make them.
I am proud and thankful to be a part of a ministry that is able to intercept people who are feeling a bit at a loss. Providing students with the opportunity for connections where it would be very easy to feel alone and lost will never be unnecessary.
We are friends to people without cause because Jesus was a friend to us first without sensible cause. Freely we give because freely we have received. I thank God for the work that I get to do here in FOCUS on the UTD campus!
Thank you so much for being on my team and believing in what we do!
Enjoy these tiktok videos that I’ve been making since I’m officially the UTD FOCUS TikToker 😌
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