His mercies are new every morning!

Hello everyone and welcome back to my ministry update email! I hope each of you has been getting enough vitamin D, I know I have definitely been missing the sun lately here in DFW.

This past month has been a very blessed one! I can see God moving in many ways through many different people and it is an honor to get to share that with you all!

This month, I started up a yarn club that meets every couple of Sundays to crochet and knit together and it has been so fun! Even though we have only had a couple of meetings so far, there is so much interest on behalf of the students to learn and at our first meeting, three girls started learning how to crochet! With FOCUS being a fairly large student organization, it has been neat seeing friendships start to form among girls who don’t usually get to interact with one another at larger group gatherings. These past couple of weeks, I have met a couple of girls who are not in FOCUS that are interested in Yarn Club, so I’m hoping that this can be a useful tool for outreach as well!

One of the things that has been on my mind lately that I feel God really laying on my heart is something that I heard one of our church pastors say in a sermon this past month. He said, “Sometimes we separate out our ‘biological family’ from our ‘spiritual family’ as if our brothers and sisters in Christ aren’t our actual family, but are separated in our minds. I don’t think that it has to be that way. I think God wants us to regard one another as actual brothers and sisters, and to be fathers and mothers to one another. So that when someone comes into our body who has a need for a brother, sister, father, mother, grandparent, son, or daughter, we can be that for one another actually.” I think often I can feel sad that I am away from my family back in San Antonio and can feel that I am alone, but God has really been showing me lately that I can open my heart to allowing my fellow believers here to be my true family too.

I see this so much as I do ministry with students! As I get to know their stories and the gaps that they experience in their families, whether physically or emotionally, the more that I see the real need for the body of Christ to serve as family members to them. It has been an earnest prayer that God would open my heart and the hearts of my brothers and sisters to really see those needs in one another’s lives and that the Spirit would empower us to be Jesus to them in those needs. It reminds me of the Scripture in John 13:35 where Jesus says, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”

I have seen that kind of love expressed this month. Throughout that second week of November, many of our cores paired up to spend some time together eating, chatting, and thanking the Lord for what he has done in their lives this past year. My core had the opportunity to gather with Paul and Jadon’s core, and it was so fun! We spent some time going around and sharing what we were thankful for, and it was so sweet hearing so many of them express that they were thankful to God for this community where they have been able to build real friendships and grow in their relationship with God. I love it here!

One of my favorite parts of ministry is getting to study the Bible with students. This past month, I was able to get one of my core girls a Bible and showed her how to use it (how to find a book, what the big numbers and the small numbers meant) and it has been an overwhelming joy watching her flip through her Bible and watch her get so excited when she can find a Scripture all on her own. I have had the opportunity to earn another girl’s trust who is facing a lot of family trauma and is just now realizing a lot of it and how it has affected her. I have been studying with another girl who is now going to be starting her final semester in college and is starting to think through how she is going to invest in her faith after college.

It’s kind of a lot! But it is a true honor and privilege to get to be God’s mouthpiece through all of it. My honest request is that you would keep me and our students in your prayers. It is so easy to rely on my own wisdom and understanding sometimes instead of always pointing my girls back to Jesus every time. It is difficult not to want to speak into every aspect of someone’s life, but instead to have discernment to get students to get to their own conclusions with where they are at with God and let Him transform them. It is challenging to not make students feel like their lives are something to be “fixed” or that they need to “do” more or less of something to be a “better Christian”, but that the truth is that they would see themselves the way that God sees them: as precious even before they “did” anything, but that He loves us simply because we are his children.

Whoo! Every time I get to writing this blog, I wonder if I have too little to say, but each time I start typing it’s like there’s not enough space to say it all! Thank you all so much for reading this, it means a lot to me to have your support. Hope you all have a very Merry Christmas!

Yours,

Andrea