November Update

Hey everyone, I hope you all had a fun and restful Thanksgiving! Over the break I got to spend some sweet time just hanging out with girls in my core, like McKendry in the picture above. There was a lot to praise God for this month, including you! I am so thankful for all of you and your heart for the Gospel and college students. Every day as I meet with students and get to be on campus, I am blown away that all of you are generous enough to make my job possible. Thank you, thank you, thank you for your support and partnership! I want to share some more exciting things from this month so let’s jump in!

We got to host Pizza Theology for our students this month! Pizza Theo is an event we host every semester. It is an exciting opportunity for students across all of our campuses to get together on a Sunday afternoon and learn about God at a collegiate level. We really care about our students pursuing God with all their heart and their mind. This is a great chance for our students to pursue God with our minds in the same way they pursue their academic studies. The topic for Pizza Theology this semester was "How to think like a Christian". A big portion of this teaching was focused on giving our students tools and language to identify different paradigms we have, and how to chew the meat and spit out the bones of these different ways of thinking. Something I'm still thinking about is what paradigms I have that guide my thought life and decisions, and how to help other people identify theirs, so we can better align ourselves with God.

This month Lizzy and I joined our core with Nathan and Josh's core (who are two of our guy student leaders) for one Tuesday and the four of us led a core on worship. It was seriously so much fun and really meaningful! We spent the first part of our time together discussing and reading scripture over the idea that worship is simply the acknowledgment of God as creator and us as creation. This idea of responding to God in accordance with both his identity and ours, can really expand what we categorize as worship, it leads to the conclusion that our lives ultimately can be a worshipful response to God! We were then able to respond to this discussion in singing, honoring, and praising God as a group for who he is and what he has done. We also got to do this outside around a firepit which was super fun!

I wanted to leave you by introducing you to another girl I meet with every week and get to study the bible with! This is Cassidy, she is a sophomore interior design major at UTA. This is legitimately the only picture we have together (we were shopping for Christmas decor), which is crazy because Cassidy has quickly become one of my favorite people. She is passionate, eager to learn, and has readily invited me into her life, even the hard parts. I love getting to be her friend and watch her love for God and people continue to grow. Join me in praying for her that she would continue to let God shape and transform her, and that she would come to know and love him deeper than she ever has this year.

Here are some more fun pictures from this month, this is our women’s leader team celebrating Sarah's birthday this month! Sarah (third from the front on the left side) directs our ministry at UTA, I am grateful for her and her friendship.

This is from a game night McKendry and her roommate hosted for some girls in our ministry, it was so fun! Thank you all again so much for your continued prayers and generous support, it is hard to communicate how big of an impact your support makes on the lives of these students, and myself. Looking forward to updating you next month, Sophie.