January Update

Hi all! Happy New Year!

I wanted to give you a couple updates from this last month. For starters, we wrapped up the year with an awesome Christmas party, which included a fort building competition. Our igloo fort (pictured below, but not very well...) was actually adorable, and apparently it didn't win because it was too short. But it's fine, we're preparing for a comeback next year.


Maserati, me, Hailey, Lauren, Miranda, Jasa and Vanessa with our igloo fort

Same peeps being weirdos. Love them all.

Since then, we've all been on break, and I got to go to Colorado to visit my family. It was lovely and snowy and I'd missed them a lot so it was great to see them. 

The whole fam: parents, siblings, cousins, grandparents, boyfriend. It was a good time.

Finally, we started off this semester with our annual all staff retreat. We spent the four days together hanging out, doing worship and in Q&A sessions with Brady and Shirley Bobbink who have been working in campus ministry at Western Washington University for over 45 years. They are the ones who started SICM (Student Institute of Campus Ministry), the leadership conference we send our students to every summer. It was incredibly helpful for all of our FOCUS staff to get to hear from them. That Sunday, they stayed in town to speak to our family of churches about the long term impact of campus ministry, and it was powerful. It's sometimes hard to see the impact you can have by just being faithful where God has put you. But what a neat position it is to be able to look back four or five decades and see the incredible work God has done. 

Brady speaking to our family of churches 

I think the biggest thing I've been thinking about over the past month is how big of an impact we can have with limited time. I am most likely going to go back to school this fall and take a break from campus ministry (I will keep you all updated!), but even if I didn't do that, my time here is likely limited. And it's tempting to think that I can't do much in two or so years of full time ministry, but that really is far from the truth. Brady was telling us that the man who mentored him and started the ministry that's reached thousands of students over almost fifty years was only there for one year. And yet he still had an incredible impact on the students up in Washington. You and I have that same opportunity! You never know who we can reach or how much we can do for the kingdom if only we are faithful to what God has called us to do.

Thanks for giving me this opportunity to work with these people. I am incredibly grateful and am doing my best to be faithful. Please pray that as we start a new semester, we make the right decisions about what projects to take on and which people to invest our time in. Love you all! God bless! 

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