January

Hello,

I hope you all had a great Christmas and New Years! This was probably one of the best Christmas breaks; not for any particular reason or because anything big happened. It was just the right amount of busy and restful. Laurence and I were able to work on a few projects, got to hang out with both of our families, and also have down time. It's left me feeling very recharged, and I am so ready to be back!

Big Howdy

So I'll go ahead and jump right in! This past Friday, we had an event at UTD called the Big Howdy. This is a welcome party some organizations come together to throw for the international students on campus. We do it in the Fall as well! We had around 400 new international students come to UTD this Spring!! 

This was such a fun event, and we had a pretty awesome turn out! There are so many things that go on throughout the event. For starters, there is free food which definitely draws students. There is dancing, and actually Abbie Malone, one of our FOCUS apprentices, taught some line dances to the students throughout the event. I walked into the room as she was teaching Thriller, and EVERYONE was on the dance floor. It was really neat to see so many smiling faces. Another neat thing about this party is that organizations have tables set up, so the international students can hear about what that particular group is doing on campus or how they can get involved more. We give the students these bingo cards as they register that have all the organization tables on it as well as some goals that will help them meet new people. They then turn those cards in to get added into this drawing for prizes, so needless to say, students definitely go to the organization tables. So we met lots of new people, and we actually got several students sign up to get more information! Be praying that those students actually show up and that we can really bless the international students on our campus!

Spring Welcome Week

This week we are going to do a Spring Welcome Week at UTD. We have three events that we are putting on to help meet new people on campus. We haven't done this in a few years, so we aren't super sure how it will go. Our hope is that the students in our ministry can use these events to help meet people in their classes, and it gives them something to invite people they're meeting to. 

We would really appreciate it if you could be in prayer for these events!

Student Testimony

Prayer Requests

Hello,

Christmas is right around the corner, and this semester is pretty much done. Normally I try to do some pictures in my blogs, but this month I don't have any. Instead, I have two ministry situations that I'd like you all to be praying over. They're both just sitting kind of heavy on my heart, and I'd like you to join me in praying for these woman!

Prayer Requests

Within the past month or two, we've had some pretty challenging ministry situations occur. The first has pretty much kind of worked out, but I would still really appreciate some prayers. I'm studying the Bible with a girl, and for a few weeks we struggled to meet with each other because I had a big ministry situation that I was dealing with and had to go to a core during our FOJ time a few times. Then she kind of cancelled on me and before you know it, it's Thanksgiving break. After I came back from break I begin finding out from other people that she's stopped coming to things. I had her boss call me and ask me about her, old roommates, and her core facilitator. I was pretty shocked! This just did not seem like the girl to disappear on people and responsibilities. And I was sad because I had neglected her and didn't even realize that she was struggling. About a week after Thanksgiving, she started responding to people, and I was able to meet with her and talk to her about what happened. She's seeing a counselor now and working through some stuff. She's trying to get more involved in community and spend more time with God. I'm so excited that she's doing better, and I would definitely appreciate prayers for her. It's hard when things like this happen so close to a break because people don't have much of a chance to make changes. They go home, they rest, and sometimes they forget. They come back and what had seemed so real, now seems like a dream. The change that really needed to happen gets pushed off. I don't want that for her! So please pray for her and for her break.

This capriciousness is normal for college students which is the crazy thing! You can be working with someone and feel really good about them, and the next day or maybe even a few hours later, they can be in crisis. So much can happen in such a short time! It's hard not to want to feel the weight of that sometimes. It's times like these where I just have to remember that God is the one in control; I can try to lead people to Him, but only He is capable of really changing people.

The second situation is what I was dealing with that made it hard to meet with the previous girl, and this one is still kind of working itself out. We've had people that don't go to college, who never plan on going to college, come to cores before. It's normally not a big deal. This year we had two non-students going to one of our woman's cores, and we saw that it was becoming a big deal. These two girls were just kind of hijacking the core. One girl specifically would be playing on her phone during the scripture discussion, then make any of the conversations about herself. It was really hard for the corefas to cut her off for a number of reasons, but they would try their best. That core had mostly freshman girls, and they were all inconsistent. The corefas went and talked to the girls, asking about their experience in core, and several of them brought up how easily the core would get sidetracked. Gosh I did not know what to do, and these corefas were also new! I should also mention that for sake of time, privacy, and length I'm leaving out a lot of details, so the situation may not seem as complicated or difficult as it really was. Anyway, Mandy and I brought the situation to our staff, and we decided that we needed to ask these woman to leave our ministry. We are a campus ministry, and what they both needed was a more long-term ministry, where they could meet people who could pour into them and had resources that we just don't have. So I went and had those conversations, and I promise you there is no good way to say we want you to leave our ministry and transition to church ministry. Those two woman were so hurt and angry. I had a 45 minute phone conversation (after I had talked to this girl in person) where she just ranted again me, saying we had no grounds to do this, we were being controlling, ministry should be open to everyone, etc. The crazy thing is that we don't always think that. We wouldn't say it's appropriate for a teenager to keep going to children's ministry. Or for someone in college to keep going to their youth group. At some point, we have to move forward. But she was not on the phone with me to discuss anything; she just wanted to be heard.  Anyway now their trying to go over our heads, and I think get Mandy and myself in trouble. It's just kind of a mess of a situation.

Gosh I don't even know really what to say about this situation. Honestly it just makes me sad more than anything else. Asking them to leave was a hard decision to make, and it lead to probably some of the hardest conversations I've had to have. I just look at how both woman reacted, and I look at the lives their both living and can't help but feel sad for both of them. I should also say that both woman are Christian and have a church home. We were not leaving these woman high and dry, and I offered to go visit other adult small groups with them if they didn't like what their church had to offer. But they both took being asked to transition so hard and very personal. I really do want what is best for these woman, and I want them to know Jesus. I guess that is my prayer request for this situation. It's such a sticky situation, and I pray that God would do what is best, both for the woman in that core and for these two woman. 

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Thanks for all your prayers! And for reading all of that. I hope you have a Merry Christmas and enjoy being with your families.

Student Testimony

October Update

Hello,

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

September Update

Hello,

I hope you've had a great September. On a non-ministry note, my sister-in-law is pregnant, and I'm so excited! This will be the first baby in one of Laurence and I's immediate families, and everyone is brimming with excitement. This past weekend she revealed the gender, and it's going to be a baby girl! I also just wanted to ask for prayer for a safe pregnancy.

Outreach

What's been going on in FOCUS has been just as exciting. Last week we set up display boards on campus and asked passing people to engage in conversation with us. Our display boards had a few questions on them and quotes, and we just asked students to respond. I have some pictures below of what we asked and a photo of the displays. You'll see we were/are asking about happiness, and we decided to do a display on this because of a Princeton Review Top 20 list. The list rated the Top 20 school that had the least happy students, and the University of Texas at Dallas rated fourth!!! Our staff were just shocked by how highly we had rated, and we wanted to go out on campus and talk to people about their experience. The conversations went really well, and it seemed like most people were open to discussing happiness and their thoughts on how religion influenced it. We'll be doing these same displays next week, so it would be awesome if you could be praying that God use this to impact our campus for Him.

Fall Camp

In September we also had our Fall Camp. I just wanted to share how great the camp went! One reason we do Fall Camp is to give an opportunity for more bonding. There are chunks of free time and discussion sections, so the cores end up getting several hours of bonding time. We see every year that having that time helps cores feel more comfortable and vulnerable with each other.  Our theme of camp was around community, and we had students sharing throughout the camp about their experiences with community. We had people share about how community has ministered to them, and also the costs that can come with being involved in community. The student sharing was so powerful. We also had posters around the room with one another passages from the Bible, and the students were encouraged to go write someone they've seen practice that passage. It was so encouraging all the things and names that people wrote on the posters! It was just so neat getting to hear stories of how people have been impacted by community and see our community encouraging one another. This was probably my favorite Fall Camp!

Thanks for praying for our ministry and for investing in what is happening on these campuses. I wish I had time to tell you all the cool things that are happening this year, and I know that none of these things would happening with out your faithfulness. Let me know if there is anything I can be praying for you about! As always I'm going to end with a student testimony. 

Student Testimony

Back At It Again

Hello,

I hope you're doing well. I have so many exciting things to share with you this month! First I want to thank you for all your prayers for our welcome week and beginning the new school year on a positive note. I really do believe they helped so much!

Welcome Week

Games going on in the Residence Hall
The Residence Halls mainly have freshman in them,
so we met a lot of new students who had moved in earlier that day! 

Our welcome week went so well. Our students did such a great job of meeting new people. We started out our welcome week meeting students in the dorms, and it was so encouraging looking around, seeing so many of our corefas and returners there. We needed that many people there, too, because there were so many new people that needed to be met. It's been so encouraging to see people we met at different events coming to the rest of the events, showing up to FNF, and going to cores. I added some pictures of the different events we had. 

United Worship
The different Christian organizations on campus get together to worship God and meet Christians who are interested in community

Zombie Tag
We invited the people we'd been meeting for the past couple days to come play. Some of corefa's realized it was one of the new girls birthdays, and they brought cupcakes and got everyone to sign that girl happy birthday!

Fellowship Meetings

I'm sure you could have guessed this based on how I said our welcome week went, but our kickoff Friday Night Fellowship was completely filled! It was great getting to see some students who have been gone all summer and catch up with some returning students, to see some new faces we've been meeting at our events, and to see people I don't think I'd seen before at all. 

 I don't think I shared this in my past blog, but this year we started a new fellowship meeting that meets on Tuesday nights. I've been leading that, and I wasn't sure what to expect from it. It was new, so I knew not that many people would come. It was meeting at 8pm on a Tuesday, so I wasn't sure very many students would want to come to it. The first night we had around 50 people come, and I was shocked by that! I had figured we'd have somewhere around 20-30 people. The next week I also had pretty low expectations for how many people would show up. I knew several people had come because they were interested in seeing our new service and wouldn't be back again the next week. We had 50 people show up again though! Those people hadn't come back; new people had come. So for the third week, I expected about 50 people to show up again, but instead we had 70 people come! It's been so great just seeing how our students are inviting new people. Numbers don't matter, and I would have been excited if we had fewer people come. The reason why it's so exciting that we've had more people is because I can see how hard our students have been working on meeting new people and inviting those people into community and a relationship with God! Our theme this year is "All In." It has two different meanings: 1. we believe that everyone is welcome in the community, and we want our outreach to reflect that, and 2. we want people to be all in for Jesus, and I truly believe I've been seeing our students reflect both meanings of our theme!

TNF service

First FNF service of the school year

Thank you again for all your support and prayers. None of these exciting things could happen with out those things! I hope this was encouraging to hear, and like always, I'm going to end with our student testimony.

Student Testimony

Ulises Solis 

Accounting

UT Arlington

Senior

"In high school and throughout my early college career, I was someone who would call myself a Christian but was not living my life as a follower of Christ. My life revolved around getting drunk most weekends and I would sometimes even go to church on Sundays with a hangover. There were a few moments during that time of my life that made me want to quit what I was doing, but I felt like God wouldn’t forgive me. When I transferred to UTA during my junior year, I felt lost and didn't know what I wanted in life. I just knew that I didn't want to keep living the life I had been living up to that point. During my first week at UTA, I was biking around campus and accidentally ended up at the first Thursday Night Fellowship of the year. I met so many welcoming people that night. I was invited to a core and my friend Cole asked to study the Bible with me. Before FOJ, I truly thought that there was no way I could be forgiven. But as the study progressed I learned about how much God loves us and how much grace he has for us. That's what led me to be baptized, which was the best decision I've ever made. I feel like God used FOCUS and all the people within the ministry to reconnect me with him. If it wasn't for me accidentally going to a fellowship night, I don't know what I would be doing with my life right now. Now I'm starting my first year as a student leader with FOCUS, and I'm praying that God works through me the same way he worked through my leaders last year so I can help other students who are lost like I was."

August Rush

Hello,

I hope you're all doing well. I can't believe August is already here and the school year is about to start! We are having our Corefa Prep this weekend, and I would really appreciate your prayers. If you don't know what Corefa Prep is, we have all of our corefas come to this. This kicks off our time together serving the UTD campus for the year. We learn who the other people on the team are; we have some leadership development time where we talk about the way we do ministry and some different axioms that help them in their ministry. And we help get them excited for meeting new students and equip them with some ways to do that effectively. We'll also be inviting students in our ministry who won't be leading a core to a portion of this to help equip them to meet students as well. We could use prayers that this kicks off our year in a really positive way, it gets the students pumped up to meet new people, and for safe travels for everyone who are having to drive in for this!

On another note, a girl I've been meeting with this past year made the decision to be baptized!!!! She's been in our ministry for a few years and first got plugged in at Collin College, and she decided that she was finally in a place where she could fully commit her life to God. She had her first corefas do the baptism, and they were so blessed by the experience to get to do that. I attached a video of the event, and I hope it encourages you.

Student Testimony

Pita Lerma 

General Studies/Psychology

North Central Texas College

Junior

"My first year at North Central Texas College, I felt insecure and ashamed that I couldn’t go straight into a four year university like my other friends. I walked the halls with a “get in and get out” mentality, and went on like this for almost a year. I believed that I was a Christian, yet lived a complacent and distant life from anyone who challenged the walls I built around myself. I put on a face that told the world I was self-sufficient and feared the day that someone would know the truth of the hollow life I led. My second year at NCTC, I was plugged into FOCUS by a friend who knew that what I needed was a strong community in order to flourish. I attended a fellowship night where I was quickly embraced by a number of people who seemed eager and genuinely interested in getting to know me. Before I knew it, I was invited into homes, movie nights, a one-on-one bible study, and countless other opportunities that tore down the walls I built. Over the next couple of years, I grew in vulnerability, friendship, joy, and fell absolutely in love with Jesus and his people. Through this ministry, I not only met the man I get to marry, but also gained strong and sweet friendships that push me to love God and people deeply and intentionally."

Prayer Requests

I hope you are all doing well!

Mandy, Dawn, Sandra, and I have almost finished finalizing the woman's leader team at UTD next year! Which is a huge relief and blessing. Thank you so much for your prayers!!

If you could keep our staff's fundraising in your prayers, that would be amazing! I still have about $300 of monthly donation's I'm trying to fundraise; It seems like we're in a good place as a staff, but August is quickly approaching. I know that God is more than capable and big enough to meet our needs as a staff. The biggest way He works is through people, so I wanted to invite you to be thinking and praying about whether you know of anyone who would be excited about supporting this campus ministry! Just email me if you can think of anyone.

Thank you so much for all your prayers and support!

Student Testimony

Harrison Wijaya

Collin College - Spring Creek

Finance

Freshman

When I came to the United States from Indonesia, I was pretty concerned about what life would be like. I immediately assumed I’d have a pretty lonely time at Collin. I heard about FOCUS but wasn’t really interested since I didn’t have a connection point. Interacting with strangers had never been my strong suit. Little did I know that God was listening and was ready to meet my needs. My first day on campus I met Graham, who told me about his involvement with FOCUS and introduced me to his friends. He followed up with me, and that was a huge way God started giving me a vision for what my life could look like.

Through one-on-ones and pastoral messages, this community has taught me the impact of reflecting Christ in every word I speak and action I take. Through my 

friendships, I’ve been shown how we can best love one another by putting all our efforts into blessing strangers like me. I've also had the opportunity to honor God at home by getting to live with five other guys from our community. Being in FOCUS, I’ve learned that God wants to open my eyes and heart to truly be shaped into someone who loves Him and those around me in all areas of my life.