March 2024: A Wedding, Some Baptisms, and A Connecting Core

 MARCH 

A Wedding 

SoOoo, Renee, my roomate (and best friend/sister/discipler) got married! 😍 What a joyous and momentous occasion! For those of you who have been with me on this journey from the beginning, you know that Renee is the reason that I am following Jesus as an adult and is the reason why I am working for FOCUS in the first place! My friendship and roommate-hood with her has been one of the greatest gifts to my life to date. By working with her since 2018 and then living with her since 2020, I have been able to watch her up close and learn SO much about what it looks like to  live a life surrendered to Jesus. While this is the end of an era, its also the start of a very beautiful new chapter for the both of us! And wanna know something even cooler? Her husband is gonna be my co worker at UTD on our FOCUS staff this coming Fall! What are the odds?! 

Anywho, enjoy some photos of the ceremony down below! 

A Baptism

A beautiful thing about this semester is that people have been getting baptized left and right! How beautiful is the amount of random sporadic baptisms where people are making a vow to Jesus and to living a life dedicated to him. Praise God! If I had to guess I think there have been at least 6 already this semester and I wanna say half of those have been since coming back from spring break! I will never cease to be stunned at seeing college students take Jesus seriously because that was just so far from anything valuable to me back in my day. 

Here are some photos 

A Connecting Core 

My core has hit a breakthrough! After a long time coming, they are finally connecting with each other and not just me (praise God). After talking with some of them, I realized that this class of freshmen are the ones who missed 2 years of high school because of COVID, so they really do experience the effects of isolation and lack some of the social skills that are just learned by being around people. I had the idea to ask the discussion questions and then remove myself from the circle so that they had no choice but to make eye contact with someone else other than me and so that they had to learn to facilitate conversation without me there! Sometimes you just gotta push them out of the nest so they can fly! We went from a room of strangers with awkward pauses and silences to a group of girls who were relating, laughing, applauding each other after each person shared, and who were "piggybacking" off of what the other person said. Let's just say that after this night some of the girls who come to core, but normally leave quickly, were lingering and wanting to hang around and connect! God did what he does best!

Here’s a sneak peak snippet of what it was like 🤫🫣

Here are some of their faces again so that you can be praying for them! Please pray that they would each come

to know God and choose him! Please pray that they would begin to see their need for him and their need for life beyond themselves!

I am so thankful that I get to be a small piece in their journeys. It’s all because of y’all, my supporters, that I’m able to be a part of their lives. Thank you all so much for what you do for our ministry and for The Kingdom!