I hope you are all doing well. I can't believe next week is Thanksgiving! I'm so excited; Laurence and I will be going to Amarillo to see my family. Prayers for safe travel would be appreciate:)
I'm going to jump into my cool story! One of my favorite holidays is Halloween. I'm not really sure why. It's one of the few holidays my family celebrated, so maybe that's why it has a special place in my heart. I also know celebrating Halloween can be controversial for some christians, but every year I like to make sure FOCUS throws a Halloween Party, and we use it as an outreach event. I think it's just a great opportunity to invite non-christians to something, and it shows them that you can have fun without having alcohol. This year we have more people working on outreach at UTD, so we stepped up our game. We decided to have this huge outdoor event. We were going to have dancing, face painting, 9-square-in-the-air, and giant jenga. We had some businesses donate some prizes, so we had a costume contest and a raffle where people could put their names in if they brought a friend. We advertised all of campus, and I was so excited! As the event grew closer, the weather grew tempestuous. It got cold and rainy, and our outdoor event became unlikely to happen. I started working on a back up plan, but it's really hard to get room reservations on campus. We were asking last minute, so there was little to no chance that we were going to be able to just move inside. Moving off campus wasn't a great idea either because this was an outreach event. People who don't go to our organization don't want to drive off campus to go to something. Anyway, I had our officers check into getting a room, just in case, and God worked a miracle! We were able to get a large space on campus, inside, last minute! We had to change some of what we did, but all in all I think the event was a success. The coolest thing about it was seeing how God worked throughout the situation. He really did provide for us. One of our staff was talking to some students who weren't a part of our ministry, and they told him that they didn't know Christians could have that much fun. I should also mention that we were really nervous about how face painting would go, but it was a huge hit! Mostly for international students. They were lined up the whole night to get their faces painted! Most of them said this was their first time celebrating Halloween, and they were so excited to get to do something. Keep FOCUS Growing
It's that time of year again! Our Annual Keep FOCUS Growing Fundraiser is about to start. If you aren't familiar with this fundraiser, we use this money for a lot of essential things. This money goes towards paying our administrative teams salaries and the salaries of staff members who didn't get fully fundraised. We use this money to buy outreach materials for the different campus. We have used money that comes from this in the past to plant the UTA and SMU ministries. This fundraiser has been so helpful for making sure we're set up as a ministry to be around long-term!
This year people have been extremely generous and agreed to match donations! We have a total of $33,000 of funds that people have agreed to match. That means that your donation, up to $5,000, will be doubled!!!!
If you're interested in giving to it (which I really hope you are!), then here are some different options for you to give. You can go to our website - anyfocus.org/kfg - and donate that way. If you would like to give without any credit card fees being taken out of your donation, you can give to us through facebook. Find as at FOCUS - Fellowship of Christian University Students. You can also send a check to us, and you can find the information for where to send that on our website -anyfocus.org/donate.
On Tuesday, November 27th (or giving tuesday), we'll be doing a special KFG push through and Facebook will also be matching donations!
I really can't mention KFG without thanking all of you for your support. It's crazy to think that FOCUS has already been around for 20 years, and the only reason it's been able to last that long and look the way it does now is because people, like you, have been so incredibly generous! I'm just blown away and can't ever say thank you enough. I hope the student testimony is encouraging to you and shows you how crazy cool the impact your faithfulness is having on these campuses!
Student Testimony
