Thankful!

With Thanksgiving just behind us and the celebration of our Lord's birth just ahead of us, I am filled to the brim with gratitude. If, after the cross, God never did anything for us again, he would have already given us way more than we deserve. But in his goodness, God continues to bless us richly and boy has he done that this month in our community!

Open House

Open house was such a cool experience! Families and friends of our ministry came out to check out what FOCUS is all about and many of you were there :) I absolutely loved hearing students and parents share about how God has transformed lives through FOCUS and seeing a group of people so diverse in age, church denominational background, and ethnic culture worship alongside one another!

Love seeing our students worship with their families!!

Holiday Festivities

I absolutely love that God has taught our community not just to spur one another on in obedience to Christ but to enjoy the gift of laughter that God included in his creation. It was such a blast dressing up as the emotions from Inside Out with my fellow UTA staff and partying the night of Halloween away with my core! In addition, my co-facilitator Nathan and I were hard at work last night working on our core's skit for tomorrow night's Christmas party and boy ddid I love getting to film it with them! (Catch it below 😉)

They didn't commit as hard as I did, but I still had fun ;)

Silly guys being silly

Our theme was "Christmas of the Future" and we like anime...

Outreach

Outreach has been so encouraging this month! Every week we go on campus and pose a question to passersby in hopes that spiritual conversations will emerge, and emerge they have. In the past month alone, God's given me two new international student friends to meet with weekly and has brought several more young men and women into our cores!

I promise we only posed like this for the picture...

Keep FOCUS Growing (KFG)

KFG is here! As you all know, our campus missionaries are supported by generous ministry partners like you (THANK YOU) who enable us to do what we do, but it takes a lot more than campus minister salaries to enable FOCUS to function! Outreach activities and materials, administrative support, new campus plants, and Bible study materials also cost money, so KFG is our annual campaign to prepare FOCUS to be around for the long haul!

This year, some of our generous ministry partners have banded together and agreed to match up to $36,000 in total donations during this campaign. So if we receive $36,000 in total contributions, they will kick in a SECOND $36,000. Our students have already banded together to give a staggering $9,000 so we are well on our way! If you would like to be part of keeping FOCUS around for future generations, your chance to give will be THIS TUESDAY, December 3rd, Giving Tuesday! Click here for more info :)

Either way, I am so thankful for all that you guys do to support our ministry and the work God is doing on these campuses!! I'll see you in January on the other side of KFG ready to tell you all about what God did through this campaign.

With love and gratitude,
Jalen