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April Update!

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Spring has sprung and I could not be more thrilled to get to enjoy the warm sunshine finally! I thought that I loved the rain and winter but turns out I definitely enjoy sitting by the pool and wearing shorts much more. So with Easter being this Sunday, we decided to do an outreach event on campus to hopefully spark some spiritual conversations about what Easter means. We hard boiled a ton of eggs and decided to go old-school and set up a table and have students on campus come and dye eggs! So many people would walk by and make comments about how reminiscent dying eggs is for them and how much fun they used to have doing that as a child. Well, we gave them the chance to dye some eggs as a grown adult and it was awesome. The cool thing about the outreach event is we got to have longer conversations with people while they were dying the eggs. I got to talk to one girl about her family's Easter traditions growing up and what Easter means to her we had a really neat conversa

March Update!

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I am so incredibly grateful that I get to do what I do. This year has been the biggest blessing I could have received from my gracious and loving Father. I am surrounded by the most supportive staff who are not only helping me grow as a minister but they are such sweet friends to me. The students I get to work with are so fun and crazy and make me laugh a lot and I have been learning so much from all of them. God is so so good to me for placing this ministry into my life and allowing me to be apart of it again this year. Students engaging with their peers on popular conceptions about love. We had a really neat outreach this month! We had signs posted up in the flower beds in the center of campus that had quotes from various people, movies, and novels that show our cultures popular conceptions about love. We also had signs that with quotes from scripture on how love is defined by God. All of the quotes on the poster were posted without the person who said each one and we just as

February Update!!!

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You guys, I love my job, I love the students I get to work with, I love the people I work with, I love the classes I get to take and how much I am learning and I love getting to experience the Lord in new ways and grow in intimacy with Him. I am so so filled with gratitude that the Lord has given me this opportunity to do this apprenticeship. In January, all of the FOCUS ministries on the different college campuses packed up and loaded their cars and headed to Sky Ranch located in middle-of-nowhere Van, Texas. This is one of the most impactful things that we do as a ministry for me and I know that it is so meaningful to so many students as well. In my last blog post I talked a little bit about what Winter Camp is and what we do there so I won't bore you and repeat all the details. But I will share with you the ways in which this past Winter Camp was meaningful to me. I had a really neat experience with the Lord that might be hard to explain on paper (well, word document) but I

January Update!

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Happy 2018 everyone!!!! I'm so excited for all the new and exciting things that are happening this year! December was a really awesome month! We had our Christmas party for the UTA campus and it was so encouraging to see all the students who came into this ministry during Welcome Week there at the Christmas party at the end of the semester. All of the Core groups prepared a Core performance for the party that had to incorporate Christmas, Disney (the theme was Disney Christmas), school spirit, and a lot of other really funny and pretty ridiculous things. My Core wanted to reenact the Nativity scene but use characters from the Lion King which was hilarious and so fun to plan! Overall, Christmas party was a really sweet time to reflect on how faithful God has been this semester and all that he is doing in the lives of the students at UTA! My Core after our performance! My sweet friend Lauren I have talked about before made the decision to get baptized this past month! Meetin

December Update!

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I love these people!! Core has been such a blast with them this semester!  It's crazy how fast this semester has gone by! Last night, we had our last large group Thursday Night Fellowship of the semester and it was so encouraging to see so many people that we had met in August during Mav Stampede continue to come and grow so immensely in just a few short months! God is so good and he continues to be faithful in carrying out his work and allowing FOCUS to be a part of that! Pizza Theology  Twice a year, all the FOCUS campuses come together for a really neat and special event. Pizza Theology is a time where students get the opportunity to dive deep into interesting topics that would be otherwise be hard to cover in the 30-40 minute sermons on Thursday nights. This years topic was exploring the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5-7. The Sermon on the Mount is considered to be the most important sermon ever preached as it came straight from the mouth of Jesus and contains the co

October Update!

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So many neat things happened this month I can't wait to tell you about! The first exciting thing that October brought was Fall Camp! Fall Camp is an annual event that is specific to each college campus. UTA had ours at Camp Copass in Denton, Texas and it was seriously such a fun weekend. There was a couple organized sessions in between the free time that we had to hang out with one another, but the most impactful session to me was the worship night.  Students gathered around for the worship night One of the questions we discussed was "what is something about God that you are just in awe of?" The responses were amazing from all the students. Students reflected on the beauty of all God created, how vast the universe is that we know very little about, how human beings are so intricately and perfectly made by God, and so much more. We probably sat there discussing how awesome God is for about an hour and nobody ever ran out of anything to say. This time was really im

Ministry heating up as the weather cools down

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This month has been a whirlwind in the best kind of way. One of the things I am most excited to tell you about is my Core that I get to lead this year with my good friend Taylor. Cores are our same gender smaller communities that most people know as a small group. Students leaders within FOCUS are asked each year to facilitate one of these groups and so far it has been amazing to see how many amazing leaders UTA FOCUS has! Taylor and I have a great group of girls this year who have been really faithful to showing up and are really eager to grow in their relationship with Jesus. God is continually teaching me through these girls that he is so good at watering the seeds that have been planted allowing us the joy of seeing the harvest. Picture from our first Core!  Someone who has been really encouraging to me is my friend Lauren. I met Lauren at the very beginning of the semester at our Board Game Night we had during Mav Stampede. God really laid Lauren on my heart and I just se