January!

 Hello all!

The New Year is here. It is officially 2025, and I am over halfway done with this 10 month long apprenticeship! I am so grateful for this opportunity to learn about God and serve at UT Dallas in so many different ways. There is a lot of anticipation coming back to campus at the start of a new semester. There are new students, new schedules, and new relationships that grew closer during the break. I feel like I have so much to share in this post, but I will try my best to not inundate you with too much information. As always, please reach out if you want to talk more, for I am on this journey with you!

One thing that is probably the most clear to me after this month is that I need to buy a winter coat. A hoodie may be enough for 75% of Texas winter, but that remaining 25% is brutal. And that 25% is what we saw at our Winter Retreat weekend. Shoutout Mr. Towery for saving the weekend by letting me borrow one of his jackets. Temperatures dropped to the teens, but we still had over 700 students drive out to Glen Rose, TX to spend a weekend growing closer with God and each other! This is the largest number our ministry has ever had at a retreat like this!

This is a large time commitment for students (spanning from Friday to Monday afternoon) right before school starts. There are five different teaching sessions with tons of worship before and after. This year, the topics circled around submitting everything about us to Jesus through our jobs, identity, sexuality, and considering the call and the cost of following Him. For so many students, this is the first time they realize that the faith they are stepping into is so much larger than themselves. It is encouraging and motivating to see so many young adults making the decision to sacrifice time and money for Jesus and each other. This retreat creates a lot of momentum coming out of a long break and going into a new semester, so would you please pray that our students continue to spur one another on?

My group of guys that were able to come that weekend.

In core (my weekly small group), we are starting a five or six week plan that will go through the call and the cost of discipleship, similar to what we talked about in one session at the retreat. They say repetition is the friend of the adult learner, so Felipe and I have chosen a few values that we want to heat up quickly in this new semester. This next month, we will talk about the power of invitations, the call to be a disciple, the cost of being a disciple of Jesus, and the transformation God can bring through His Spirit. It is really starting to feel like the metaphorical snowball 'core' of friendship in our small group is condensed and tight, so from that we are starting to see some of our guys invite their friends to experience the fellowship through going out to eat together, invites to church, or playing games together after class. Last semester, we talked a lot about Acts 2: 42 - 47, and this semester we are taking that momentum from not just looking inwards at our group, but also considering Acts 1:8 to become a witnessing community of Jesus to other people. Our group can sometimes approach 30 people a week! We struggle sometimes to fit in the apartment we meet at, so I think we will have to shift to meeting at my house. There is always room for one more person though, so what a good problem to have!

It is almost comical how much I eat in the dining hall now. Sometimes even twice a week. Everything has kind of come full circle at UTD, but I see the dining hall as like 'port city' for college campuses. Every freshman goes there multiple times a day, and it is so easy to simply invite someone to eat with you and get to know them over that meal. 

Class wise, I am knee deep in the New Testament now. Along with it, we are reading a textbook by N.T. Wright called 'The New Testament in its World'. We get to sit in virtually in Dr. Rikk Watt's New Testament class out of Regent College, a graduate school of theology in Vancouver. The most important thing I am learning when reading the New Testament is how necessary it is to read the literature in the context and culture of which it was originally written. So much of what Jesus did connects to the history of Israel. Reading these books right after a semester of studying the Old Testament is expanding my mind to seeing new ways Yahweh revealed Himself through Jesus. 

It is a very thick textbook, and I have to look up a lot of words that I do not know....

We have a campus ministry conference at the end of each year in Bellingham, Washington with a sister ministry that grew similar to FOCUS. We travel with a few hundred students to spend a week learning about ministry with our students who are invited. Would you please pray for conversations with students as we start planning for this week in the spring?

People laughed at me tucking my pants into my socks, but at least my ankles were not cold.

Me and Kole in San Diego this past November.

One person I want to highlight this month is Kole Von Runnen! Kole and I have been in similar circles for years in FOCUS, but this year he transferred to UT Dallas where I got to officially meet him when he joined our leader team. Quickly, he became one of my favorite people to hang out with, and I am very thankful for his friendship. He is so genuine, loving, and serves our ministry in so many different ways. He is so willing to be the hands of feet of Jesus at UTD, and I love being able to join him. Love ya, Kole!

This semester has started off strong, and I am excited to see where God takes it! Hopefully, God also allows the sun to make more of an appearance during the day too. I miss spring and summer. The songs of the month that I have been listening to are 'Nothing New' by Brandon Lake and 'Joy' by Chandler Moore. Let me know what you think!

With love,

Paul M