God is on the move!

 

Hello everyone!!! I hope that each of you have been having a wonderful and blessed month. It has certainly been a busy yet incredibly awesome month for us here at UTD. The students have moved in or moved back to campus, classes have started, and God has been moving all throughout these last couple of weeks. We kicked off our Weeks of Welcome by adding an extra day of outreach because the freshman class is so large this year that they added another day of move-in. That means that students started moving in a week before classes started and they were certainly looking for things to do. During that first week, our student leaders came, invited and befriended as many of the freshmen as we could.

Move in party to meet new freshmen at the dorms!

Throughout the whole weeks of welcome, our student leaders/core facilitators SHOWED UP BIG TIME! I have seriously been so impressed with each of them. At those first few days of move-in, not a single student walked by without being invited to join us. Many students came back to consecutive events because of the constant invitations to come. Our students spent hours in the dining hall meeting the incoming freshmen, messaging students on Instagram who followed the FOCUS page, and contacting students they met at freshmen orientation. I heard several students express gratitude to us for putting on events for them that week which helped kickstart a lot of friendships that I hope and pray will continue to grow throughout the school year.

Student leaders messaging incoming students!

Meeting new students at the dining hall!

Because our core facilitators have been so on top of it, I was struggling to meet students at the beginning of welcome week who hadn’t already been invited to future events/gotten plugged into a core and into FOCUS. Haha what an awesome problem to have! We just had our first Grove fellowship this past Friday and we had over 330 students show up! We have never packed out Hoblitzelle Hall to that extent, so we had to keep bringing in extra chairs for students to sit. Brandon, our FOCUS director, gave the message at The Grove and as he spoke on Mark chapter 8, he brought us to the question of “Who do you say Jesus is?”

Hispanic Meet and Greet!

The first Grove!!!

Our very first UTD Olymipcs! Go Team Red!

Throughout these last couple of weeks, I have been earnestly praying that every student that we have gotten to meet would come face to face with Jesus and that they would fall radically in love with him. I pray that each person would be transformed by Jesus’ immense power and I come to the passage in Ephesians 3:17-19 where Paul prays, “that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.” Every time I have met up with a student that we have met during these last couple of weeks I have shared that we as a staff and leader team have been praying for them before they even came to UTD. That we have been excited to meet the students that God has already been working in and that we just get to come alongside and join him. One of the students (I’ll name her G for privacy reasons) shared with me that she didn’t really come to college looking to get involved in any kind of ministry and didn’t intent to further pursue her faith. However, she met me and my friend Andrea during her first night on campus and our kindness and authenticity drew her in to continue coming and now she plans on joining our core and is curious about who God is. Another student (A) I met at our Mi Gente Latino Meet and Greet and we met up later that week to get to know one another. We had a wonderful time and later that day she came to our first Grove night. When I was dropping her off at her dorm after I took her out for ice cream with some students, she said to me, “I’m really glad I met you. You are like my older sister at UTD”.... WHAT!!!! It seriously feels surreal, special, overwhelming, sweet, overjoyous to be someone that God gets to work through on this campus. The opportunity to love and care for students has filled me with so much joy and purpose and I am so thankful to be a part of it. As I was telling my roommate the story above of A, she reminded me of Jesus in Matthew 9 which says, “When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd.”

Lunch after church with students!

Nyellie and I became friends a year ago after meeting at the Latino Meet and Greet. Now she's off serving God earnestly and powerfully as she leads core this year!

From the bottom of my heart, THANK YOU for supporting the work that God is doing on this campus. Please continue to pray for us as we begin friendships with each of these students, that we would never lose sight of Jesus as we point people towards him. That God would be the one to speak through us, to be our source of strength. I cannot wait to share with you what God continues to do here! Blessings, Andrea