Oh, What a Privilege It Is

This year has been such a blessing to me and it really is a privilege to get to work in ministry full time. This month has been marked by early mornings and late nights, laughter and tears, a yearning for Christ and renewal in His body. None of this could have happened without your generous support and prayers, so thank you so much for all that you have done for me over the last couple of years!

Focus on Jesus

I briefly talked about our one-on-one study that we do called Focus on Jesus (FOJ) in my blogs earlier this year, but wanted to highlight this study this month because God has been doing SO much! This year, I have the opportunity to start FOJ with several different girls in my core and different girls in our community. Each week, I have watched God show up in each of their lives over and over again, and it has been a blessing to me to read scripture over and over again as a reminder of what the truth really is. While the lesson is for the students, I find myself being taught over and over again by the girls that I am doing it with and by God. One-on-one discipleship is what changed my life and it is what has continually changed the lives of people around me over and over again. It is such a blessing to me to be able to do this study with these girls and an honor to be a part of what God is doing on campus. Would you join me in praying that all of the girls that I study with yearn for the heart of God and for the girls they will study with, that they too will seek out the heart of God?

Rez Fair

Each year, FOCUS hosts an all-ministry event on campus called Rez Fair (short for Resurrection) to celebrate Easter. This event has continually been one of my favorite things that we do because the goal of the event is to get the different ministries together, and despite our various differences in theology, celebrate the thing that unites us all- the resurrection of our Savior. I am always in awe of the joy that this event brings to our campus and the amount of laughter, silliness, and playfulness that comes from all of the groups participating. If you know anything about the demographic of UTD, you will know that our students are usually far from playful, so to get them out of their shells and into the joy that Jesus brings really makes my heart happy. This year, I got to participate in the event with one of the students that I have been meeting with that is not a Christian. She told me after that she LOVED the event and thought that everyone was so nice! Would you be willing to pray for her, that she would come to know Jesus in His timing and for all of the other students that encountered Jesus during the event?

His Hands and Feet

Something that I have been reflecting on this year is the call to be Jesus’s hands and feet. In Matthew 25:34-40, Jesus talks about responding to people in need with love, ultimately responding to them how He would. Over the course of the semester, I have been thinking a lot about how Jesus responded to all sorts of people that he interacted with coming back to the ideas of faith expressing itself through love (Galatians 5:6). I’ve started to learn that loving people is not only meeting people where they are at and showing them compassion, but it is also calling them back to the cross and asking people to take up their mat and follow Jesus (John 5:1-18). This semester, being the hands and feet of Jesus has pushed me to reconsider what love is and how Jesus loved people- that His love pointed people back to Truth and out of the darkness they were walking in. Would you join me in praying that my heart would continually be shaped by Jesus’s love for us and the students that I get to meet with would also desire to walk in love?

Thanks again for joining me in ministry this year and for being so supportive of all that God is doing at UTD! Your prayers and support have been so apparent and appreciated!

Until next time,

Jessica :)

P.S. Can you find waldo?