He is Risen!

Hello and happy easter weekend! I hope that all of you are having a wonderful spring season so far, it has been so nice getting to be outside more enjoying this beautiful weather, I hope you’ve enjoyed it too!

Every spring, it is always neat to see some of the fruit of God’s work in the year, as students decide to take their faith more seriously, proclaim their faith through baptism, or commit themselves to being more present and vulnerable with one another. I have been encouraged this month to see two girls in our ministry, Hannah and Shree get baptized! A part of Shree’s baptism that has been roaming in my head this past week went something like this: “Before Jesus, I believed in lots of spirituality type things, but I went through different phases of it. First, there is no God, the earth is God, and even went to the point of believing ‘I am God’. It wasn’t until Lindsey (one of our campus pastors) invited me to study the Bible with her, that I met the real God.” Praise God for the way that he is patient with us and untangles the lies we believe about ourselves and about God. I am so proud of Shree and cannot wait to see what he does in both her and Hannah’s lives!

Every year in the spring, we always have a group of students From Western Washington University come to Texas during their Spring Break to serve our campus and help us do outreach! We have called this week: SOW (Spring Outreach Week), and it has been a blast! Each day, we have had a different activity for students walking by to engage with. On Monday, we asked students if they wanted their shoes cleaned, which allowed us to demonstrate how Jesus washed his disciples feet and tell them about that story. On Tuesday, we had students write down things that burden them on wooden hexagons, which we then glued on a wooden cross. On Thursday, we had colored hexagons which we had students walking by write on them what they thought qualities of a redeemed world would be. We then glued those colored hexagons onto the wood colored hexagons with the burdens on them, showing that Jesus carries our burdens and promises us redemption, a great hope we can trust is coming. The Washington students have been killing it with the outreach this week! They have been going out on campus when flow slows down at our booth to go and find students they can talk to and engage in spiritual conversations with.

This Wednesday, we had our annual Rez Fair on campus (Rez is short for resurrection), where we celebrate the resurrection of Jesus! We had over 17 student ministries and churches from the surrounding areas come and join us by setting up a table and an activity for students to engage with. It was awesome!! Our FOCUS table had a prompt that said, “Ask a spiritual question, get a cookie” and I got to overhear lots of students come up and ask their questions. I was so encouraged by the gentleness yet directness of the answers that the students working the table would respond with. Overall, it was a great event where after taking a step back and observing things from above, I was so thankful to God that we even had the opportunity to share about Jesus and celebrate his resurrection in public! I had a conversation with some of the Washington students and they were really encouraged by how many people came by and were receptive to hearing about Jesus. They mentioned that doing ministry at Western is hard because a lot of the students there are anti-Christianity and often protest any of their efforts to share about Jesus. Please join me in praying for students on campuses where it’s hard to preach Jesus! Campus ministry is such a special area for doing God’s work. I believe God will continue to soften people’s hearts to hear him and that we just have to be faithful!

Please also join me in praying as we start heading towards the end of the spring semester! We have been having conversations with our student leaders and thinking through ourselves what it looks like to finish the semester well. How do we stay faithful to the students in our cores, our one on one studies, our classes, etc? How do we prepare students for the summer where their routine changes, but we still prioritize Jesus above everything else? If they are going back to their hometowns, how do we help them think through finding a community over the summer? Join me in praying for wisdom, discernment, and encouragement as we wrap up the year and start thinking through leaders for the next year. We will be sending a group of prospective leaders to Washington state in May and will be having conversations on leadership over the summer. Thank you so much for all of your support! I am so excited that you all get to be a part of what God does at UTD! Love, Andrea