Prepping for School to Start!!

 

All of our campus ministers with FOCUS at retreat!

Happy August! 

    I wanted to get an update out to you right before school goes back so you could know how to join me in prayer for one of our most pivotal times of year. It is so humbling as I think of you and your heart for college ministry, thank you for choosing to partner in me. It is an incredible privilege to be able to ask you to join me in prayer. You are truly a gift from God to me and the students at UT Arlington. 

The picture above is all of our campus missionaries with FOCUS at our staff retreat earlier this month. We go on retreat to prepare our heart and minds to be our best during the craziness of the first two weeks of school.We have 54 people on our team at large, which is already an enormous statement about God's faithfulness to us and our ministry in this corner of DFW. Join me in praying that each one of these missionaries would go out faithfully in the next two weeks and be attentive to the voice of God rather than their fears or preferences. Pray that they would all have an increasing awareness of The Spirit and His nearness to them. Pray that God would connect each of us and our students with those who are looking for him, and open the eyes of those who are not. Pray the harvest would be plentiful this year. 

This is my friend Lindsey and I at our staff retreat during the first week of August! For the last four years Lindsey has been working with our UT Dallas FOCUS plant, while working towards planting FOCUS at TCU with one of my UT Arlington coworkers, Rhett. They both have worked faithfully and humbly in the back ground for many years. This is the year Lindsey and Rhett get to launch FOCUS at TCU. This is extra special for Lindsey because TCU is where she went to school. In a lot of ways I resonate with her emotions and excitement because I feel the same way about UTA. Be praying that God will continue to open doors for Lindsey and Rhett and sustain them. Pray that pillars of a community that will be around for many years at TCU will be built this year. 

    The first two weeks of school at UTA are called Maverick Stampede! This is our most pivotal time of year. We get to attend to the seeds that our sown in this time quite literally for the rest of the year. This is one of the ways we get to meet new students, summer orientations! This is from a time Madison (our new apprentice) and I got to work one together. Pray that we would be faithful to the relationships we built at orientations over the summer, pray God would use the seeds we got to scatter during these summer months. 

    This is what I want to leave you with. This is one of our new student leaders Josh, getting baptized this year. I wanted to include this partially to ask you to join me in praying for him and our other student leaders, especially the new ones. But also to remind you of what this time of year could lead to in a year. Who knows who I'll be sharing with you decided to dedicate their life to Jesus next August, pray that it would be many. 

I love you and am so thankful for you, can't wait to share with you how God works in the next few weeks. 

In Christ, 

Sophie