It's been a busy month!

A few updates on some of the things we did in March:

1.  We have mostly wrapped up our invitations to SICM and purchased plane tickets.  5 of our staff (Mandy, Debbie, Casey, Matt, and I) will be taking 47 students to Bellingham, WA in May.  And in June, Travis and I will be taking another 8-10 students for the second session.  These are all first time attenders who have the potential to be leaders in the fall!

2.  We interviewed applicants for our internship program for the 2012-2013 school year and have selected 4 great disciples to join us on staff next year!  Sirak Asfaw, Katy Jordan, Melissa Kenfield, and Courtney Atherton are all awesome students who have been a part of our student leadership for years.  Katy and Courtney are both pursuing masters degrees and Sirak and Melissa will both complete their graduate degrees this summer before their internship starts.  We continue to pull in some of the brightest and best to take the gospel to university students.  We aren't sure about campus placements yet, but you will hear a lot more about these four from me in the months to come.

Sirak

Katy

Melissa

Courtney

3.  We had a 3-day campaign on campus at UTD (along with 4 other campus ministries) to raise awareness about Human Trafficking and share the good news about God's heart for justice and His mission to make things right.  Did you know that there are over 27 million slaves in the world today?  That's more than all the centuries of the African slave trade combined.  Even here in the United States, the Department of Justice estimates 100,000-150,000 people being trafficked, most of them children.  And 25% of them are in Texas!  God cares deeply about these people, about the captives and the oppressed.  Jesus announced his ministry with these words from Isaiah, which we would do well to not over-spiritualize:

"The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.  He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free" (Luke 4:18).

In these days when so much of our comforts and luxuries are made by people in terrible conditions overseas, when children are forced to be soldiers in terrible civil wars, and when girls and young women are forced into prostitution all over the world (so that men from Western countries can fly in and rape them), we need to make sure our voices are heard.  Will God be pleased with us for choosing ignorance about these things he cares so much about?  We worked with International Justice Mission (IJM.org) and they have a great website full of resources to learn and to help.

Students painted the "Spirit Rocks" on campus to raise awareness.

We had three of these 2-sided displays.  Students were on hand to start discussions with people who stopped to read.  A group of our students planned and built these displays all on their own!

The "sex mattress" drew plenty of attention all by itself!

4.  I started studying the Bible with a young guy back in November of 2010.  He was referred to me by his sister who had been a student leader at UTD during her time there, though he lived on the other side of the metroplex.  Since then, he's made a serious commitment to God, moved up to our area for school, and become a consistent part of one of our campus communities.  But he's also had a lot of forgiveness issues within his family, particularly with his dad.  They haven't really been speaking for years and this young man was really struggling with having a hard heart toward his father.  It's one of the topics we've come back to again and again as I saw (and got to be a part of) God working on his heart.  Well, a few weeks ago I got a text message at 1:10 am saying that he had called his dad and apologized and told him he wants them to have a relationship.  That woke me up for sure!  He said he was laying in bed and couldn't sleep but kept thinking about his dad and what God wanted him to do.  And he did it!  I know his dad was so thankful to get that call in the middle of the night.  Isn't God good?!  He has given us the ministry of reconciliation.

5.  Last one!  Sorry to be so long-winded, but one of the baptisms I attended this month really touched me.  Matt is a young man (now a grad student) at UTD who happens to be in a wheelchair.  He's grown up in church and has loved the Lord for a long time.  Well some of the guys were talking to him and found out that while he's wanted to be baptized in water for over 10 years, it just never worked out because of logistics!  How sad is that.  And so these young student leaders made it happen, and quickly.  I'm not sure I've ever seen someone literally beaming until that day.  I'll post the video so you can share in that moment.

Matt's mom got to be there.  You can hear her share in the video.

Thanks for your prayers and support.  Together, we are making a difference for the Kingdom.

Thinking about next year

It sounds a little crazy, but I'm already doing a lot of thinking and planning for next school year.  Our main event for student leader development is the SICM (Student Institute of Campus Ministry) conference that we take students to in Washington State each May.  Between our four campuses we have invited over 60 students to attend!  These are all students who have not been before and in whom we see the qualities necessary to lead in our ministry.  Actually appointing student leaders may still be months away, but the ball is rolling!  I'll have a lot more to say about SICM in the future.

February 29 was the deadline for graduates to apply for the FOCUS internship for the 2012-2013 school year.  We've had a number of graduating seniors interested in the internship and have had a lot of conversations about whether being on staff with us for a year is a good fit.  After all the applications are in, we'll start interviewing them this weekend.  We've also been having conversations with our five interns from this year about what next year looks like for them.  One of my main roles now is leading the staff, so thinking through who will be on our senior staff and who we will accept into the internship (and also which campuses each person will work on) is one of my primary strategic decisions for the year.  I'd love for you to join me in praying that God will give me clear direction on this.

A couple cool things from February--First off, I had the opportunity to attend a couple of baptisms.  My intern Andrew had the chance to study with and baptize one of the guys in his group last week.  Taylor is a great example of how ministry can work.  He was invited last year as a freshman by one of the girls in our group.  He came around some but more than anything began forming friendships with some committed Christians.  This year he came around more, but it was at Winter Camp that he decided he needed to be a disciple and asked Andrew to baptize him.  So they've been doing some intense Bible study these past few weeks about what it looks like to be a disciple and about the meaning of faith, repentance, and baptism.  He's counted the cost and decided make Jesus his Lord!  He is serving on our tech team and planning to live in my house next year so he can be surrounded by strong Christian influences.  Ministry is a process and can take a long time, but the good news is we have lots of people in that process!

Andrew got to baptize him.  He did a great job!

Taylor's family got to be there for his baptism.  It was great having them join us on campus.

We also had a joint worship night with some of the other campus ministries at UTD.  It was awesome to join together and share what the Lord is doing.  Every year, more people are catching the vision of reaching these university students with the good news.  I got to meet a young man who just moved here after college for work.  He has a heart for campus ministry from his years as a student and has hooked up with a local Korean church who wants to reach Asian-American students on campus with the gospel.  He emailed me some thoughts about seeing our fellowship that were encouraging and I want to  share them with you:

First off, I want to say it was truly a blessing to meet you and attend the praise night last night. I was encouraged to see God moving through your fellowship and I really felt like God was doing something great at UTD.

I also wanted to relay that your members were awesome. I was so blessed by Jonathan, Kendall, and the young man that introduced me to you (I forgot his name!). They made me feel welcomed and really showed the love of Christ to me.

Last night, gave me a nice burst of energy to continue to serve ... with a fervent heart.

This was our combined praise team from three ministries that night.  They enjoyed working together and I was pumped about the diversity (Only 2 white people! :-) as we work to reach a diverse campus.  

Thank you for all your prayers and support.  The Lord is doing great things!

It's already February?!

UTD Students at Winter Camp doing the Comet "Whoosh"

We're back from Winter Camp and going full-force into the semester.  We took a great group of students out to Bridgeport (the picture above is just the UTD students, not Collin, Richland, or UNT!). Eddie Howard, who has spoken at Winter Camp a couple of times in the past, joined us again this year sharing lessons looking at the character of Joshua in the Old Testament.  I think one of the most impacting lessons for me was when he talked about being "bud-nippers."  He was sharing how avoiding problems today just leads to bigger problems tomorrow.  The Israelites weren't completely obedient to God when entering the promised land and generations of their children paid the price.  Eddie talked about how when we don't nip things in the bud, the monsters we face today can become other people's monsters in the future.  As we came back from camp, I've started seeing how that message of urgency has spurred some students on to dealing with tough issues and sins in their lives.  Sin is never fun and is always messy, but it's always better to deal with it today than tomorrow.  One of my dad's many repetitive quotes is, "Sin will always take you farther than you want to go, keep you longer than you want to stay, and cost you more than you want to pay."  We all need to deal with stuff now--be bud-nippers!

A quick story about the day I came back from camp: I got home, unpacked, and took a nap.  I woke up at 5:01 pm and saw a text message from a student saying he was getting baptized at 5:00 and wanted me to come.  Thank goodness everything runs late in college ministry!  Michael is a guy who was pretty inconsistent last school year, but this year he moved in with some committed disciples and it's been great for him!  He's been studying the Bible and building deep spiritual relationships.  He was so impacted by the "walk & talks" at Fall Retreat that he's been setting up his own walk & talks with guys in the ministry every since.  His roommate Jonathan (who leads our tech team and plays drums sometimes on our worship team) has been studying and talking with him for months.  Had I done this baptism, it might have been a bit more polished, but our impact is really limited if everything has to go through me.  I know I'm doing something right when I just get a text message that exciting things are happening and I can be a part if I make it in time!

We have a lot of students visiting for the first time with the start of a new semester, so be in prayer that our students will be faithful, loving missionaries and will demonstrate the love of Jesus to each and every one.  The enemy is at work as well, but "we are not unaware of his schemes" (2 Cor 2:11).  We'll continue living out the message of a crucified God who deeply cares about every student, even those who have set their hearts against Him.  Pray that we will look more like Jesus than all the false images of God that the world has offered.

I'm so thankful for each of you and your heart for the campus.   God is good!

A New Year

Happy New Year!  It's time to kick off another busy semester of ministry!  We leave for Winter Camp on Friday and we have 250 people signed up to go.  Compare that to last year when we took right at 200 people--I think every campus is taking more this year than last!  I'm sure I'll have more to share about camp when I write again in a couple weeks.


The last few weeks have been a needed break for all of us on campus, staff and students alike.  I've used the time to rest, be with family and friends, read some fiction, work on curriculum, write letters to students, and study more deeply into the New Testament.  It's been great!  I spent the last weekend with my staff at our second staff retreat of the year.  What an amazing group!  Every one of them is gifted and intelligent and has a huge heart for God and for people.  Every one of them could be incredibly successful in the marketplace because of their education, character, and experience.  And every one of them has carved out a place in their life to love and serve college students because of their conviction that Jesus loves those college students.  I feel so blessed to be on this team.


We spent the weekend talking about thinking strategically--looking beyond the next week or month or semester and making sure we are ready for what God has in store for us 5 or 10 years from now.  We wrestled with finding a balance between planning for the future and staying open to letting God lead us each step of the way.  I don't know if we came up with the right answers, but I think we were asking the right questions!  So much of it comes down to being faithful with the work we've been given and letting God prepare us through that for the work ahead that only He sees.  It's easy to read the scripture and skip over the long periods of preparation that are dealt with in a sentence or two--the first 80 years of Moses' life, the first 30 of Jesus' life, the 10-15 years between Paul's conversion and the beginning of his missionary ministry, etc.  But those times are crucial to accomplishing His purposes.


I've already heard from a few students about their reflections on last semester and the goals they are setting moving into the next.  One guy wrote in an email that, "This past semester has largely been about seeing what following Jesus looks like when the rubber meets the road."  What a great lesson!  Our goal for these students is a lifetime of ministry.  I told one of our women small group leaders this last month that we needed to cut back on how much ministry she had taken on--an unhealthy amount--because our goal for her is to be mentoring women into spiritual health 50 years from now, not burning out in a one-school-year blaze of glory.  God is preparing each of us for tasks He has ahead--you too!  He "knows the plans he has for us."  He has good works that He has "prepared in advance for us to do."  And He using life as teacher and disciplinarian, that we might experience a "harvest of righteousness and peace" once we've been trained by it.  


One quick story, this time from a FOCUS alumna who is doing ministry at a university in another part of the country.  I found it an illustration of something my dad always says--that there are lots of open people out there; they just aren't open to us yet.


She took a friend who had always been reluctant to discuss anything spiritual to a lecture about assisted suicide held on campus:  


After the lecture, Amanda and I went to a coffee shop to enjoy live music as 
we embarked on possibly one of the most engaging 2 hour conversations I have 
ever had.  Our conversation was lively as we discussed our thoughts and feelings 
about the practice of assisted suicide.  Then, Amanda grew quiet as I proceeded to 
explain to her that I believe there is a purpose in absolutely everything, even 
suffering and pain.  It took her a few minutes, but she finally confessed to me that 
she could not agree.  After a few more minutes of silence, Amanda explained that 
she was an atheist.  As we continued our conversation, she stopped me and 
declared, “Wait, wait.  Iʼm sorry.  I just need to understand.  I just told you Iʼm 
an atheist, I donʼt agree with your spiritual beliefs... and you still want to be 
my friend?  You are not like the Christians I know!”
In that moment, I could feel the giant wall come crashing down.  What a 
crucial opportunity I had to embody Godʼs unconditional love and truth in her life!  
This was a crucial moment that deepened our friendship and caused her to open 
up to me about spirituality and life in a way that was unprecedented for us.


I'm reminded of the deep and explanatory evangelism instructions the Holy Spirit gave Philip in Acts 8: "Go to that chariot and stay near it."  So that's my challenge to myself and to you this new year.  Go stand next to someone who needs God and be ready for the opportunities that come up.  They may not be open to you yet, but that doesn't mean they aren't open to our amazing, loving, forgiving, life-saving God.  Thanks for your love and prayers and support.  I'm one of the most blessed people on earth.  


"From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded; and from the one who has been entrusted with much, much more will be asked." - Jesus

No One Left Behind

With Winter Camp fast approaching, I've been pondering our long-term policy that with anything we do, we don't let anyone not participate because they can't afford it.  We don't have a lot of expensive events.  Most never top $5.  But Winter Camp is about $135 for a four-day, three-night experience and SICM in May can run over $500 for 9 days in Washington State.  These are expensive trips, but as I look back over the years I realize that they are the two most impacting times of our calendar year.  There's something about getting away from our regular routines for a few days to study and pray, worship and play, and build deeper relationships.  Students that go into these times lonely come out with friends; students that go into these times wavering come out having made solid decisions.  Emotional camp experiences aren't our goal, but when added on top of months of one-on-one and small group Bible study, mentoring, and relationships, these times away can engage students' hearts in a way that is hard to do in one hour in the middle of a busy school week.


And so back to our policy--we don't want anyone to stay home because of money.  And the Lord always provides richly!  It reminds me of 2 Corinthians 8:13-14, "Our desire is not that others might be relieved while you are hard pressed, but that there might be equality. At the present time your plenty will supply what they need, so that in turn their plenty will supply what you need. The goal is equality."  I always tell students who allow someone else to pay for them to make a commitment to pay for someone, somewhere to go to camp in the future (not necessarily through FOCUS).  The result has been more than I expected, as is usually the case with our God!  Some students who received such a scholarship once now pay for someone to go every year.  A couple years ago, we paid in full for a sophomore who had recently committed her life to Christ to go to SICM--a few hundred dollars.  She was so impacted by that trip that the next year (her junior year), she got a part-time job on campus and wrote me a check for the full amount to pay for a freshman to make the same trip.  A couple of weeks ago, one of the girls approached me and said her family just didn't have any money to pay for camp because things were really tight right now.  I was blessed to get to tell her, "no problem!"  Literally within 10 minutes a grad student approached me and said he wanted to pay for an extra student to go.  Last week I had a community college student say he couldn't even afford the $5 for pizza at our Pizza Theology event.  About 30 minutes later, a sophomore told me he wanted to scholarship 4 or 5 people for Winter Camp!  An alumnus who we have helped attend events before just paid for a student to attend Winter Camp and told me to let him know when more events come up.  These young disciples are learning, as the Philippian church did, to share in "the matter of giving and receiving" (Phil 4:15).  


Christ has truly brought us a better way, a different way to live within our culture.  My prayer is that these students will take this willingness to invest in the spiritual life of their brothers and sisters out into their families and churches and workplaces in the decades to come.  This is exciting stuff!  


In the spirit of Thanksgiving, I'd also like to say thank you for all the many ways that each of you has blessed my life and ministry.  Reaching universities for the Lord is a community effort, and I feel so blessed that He has put each one of you in my life and let me be some small part of yours.

Last year's Winter Camp crew.  We're expecting even more students this January!
If you'd like to help pay for a student to go to camp (in part or in full), feel free to contact me.

A Busy October!

This past month has been crazy but awesome!  I have so much to report so I'll jump right in.

October 1-2, we took a little over a hundred people down to Mt Lebanon Baptist Encampment for an overnight retreat. This is an awesome time for new students to plug in and build friendships in the ministry.  In fact, we significantly discount the retreat for students who are new to the ministry to encourage them to come.  We had 96 people sign up and ALL 96 showed up (plus a few extras), which may be the first time in campus ministry history that we had zero no-shows!  That's a testimony to all of our student leaders working hard to get people there and make it a great experience.  Our theme was "Everyone Has a Story" and my favorite part was when 4 of our students shared their stories with the whole group of how God has brought them to this point.  Two came from Christian families and two grew up not knowing about God, but it was amazing to hear how Jesus used peers to bring each of them to know Him and begin living for His kingdom!  Then we split up in pairs and let everyone share their own stories.  It was a great experience.

UTD Fall Camp!

Another major event this month was a staff wedding!  Tyler, who has worked on staff with us first at Collin College and now at UTD, married my sister Brianna, one of our interns at Collin this year.  This has obviously been in the works for awhile, and we are all delighted.  From a family standpoint, one of my favorite people in the world has joined our clan.  From a ministry standpoint, they set the pace for our students of what done-right looks like.  They sought wisdom and asked advice; they kept their relationship pure; they spurred each other on spiritually and encouraged one another to keep serving and ministering to others; and they used this season of dating and engagement to serve the Lord and grow their friendships.  We couldn't ask for a better example!  They are moving into a little house about 5 houses down from the "Allen House," one of the main gathering places for our Collin College ministry.

If you haven't watched the baptism linked to on the main page, you can view it at anyfocus.org/updates/baptism.  Sam is a student from China who came to FOCUS and started studying the Bible last school year.  He's been a faithful student of the word and has been seriously counting the cost of this decision for months.  He and his girlfriend Rachel (who was featured in our student testimony last month) are starting up our pre-engagement counseling because they want to have a godly marriage.  Just as exciting to me is Stephen getting the chance to baptize Sam.  Stephen is a grad student who is leading a small group for the first time.  He grew up in a Catholic tradition that really stressed knowing the Bible and being serious about faith, but he had never made the jump to finding out what truly being a disciple was all about.  It's been amazing to watch him transform from someone who thought he knew enough into a disciple who knows he has a lifetime of learning ahead of him and finally into a disciple-maker!  What a Jesus-story!  Some of my favorite conversations over these past few months have been with Stephen as he shared his heart for Sam and sought wisdom on how to help Sam become a Christian.  And after the baptism the other night, Stephen told me he has started studying with a couple more Chinese students who want to know about God that Sam introduced him to!  Opportunities like this can really snowball in campus ministry.

Lots of students laid hands on Sam and prayed for his new life in Christ right after his baptism.

Over the past weekend we had our All-Church Retreat.  When Northeast Church started that tradition back in 1998, it was just a great time to take everyone from every age group out to the lake and build the kind of family relationships God had laid on our hearts to build--a community where you don't just know a few peers, but where everyone has relationships across the age spectrum.  This year, it served as a gathering point for people from 2 churches and 4 campus ministries.  It was a good time for me to reflect on how ambitious the Northeast family was all those years ago with our 2020 vision--50 churches by 2020, including vibrant campus missions on every campus in the metroplex.  We always said we wouldn't force it and that we didn't know what that would look like.  We wanted to let God drive that and see where He would take us, but we also wanted to dream big for Him.  Now here we are in 2011 and we have 2 awesome, growing churches and exciting, growing ministries on 4 campuses.  We have visions for churches in Greenville, Richardson, and Denton in the near future.  The statistics are clear that most people coming to Christ for the first time are coming through smaller, newer churches where it's easy to build real relationships.  And so we are doing what we can to stay small and new and relational.  We're praying about sending missionaries to UT Arlington, Texas Woman's University, North Central Texas College (the community college in Denton County), SMU, 6 more Dallas County Community Colleges, 3 more Collin College campuses, and Texas A&M Commerce--and that's not all the campuses in this city!  There are multiple FOCUS alumni and past interns who have a heart for campus ministry and are waiting for the right time and place to answer the call as a campus missionary.  I say all that to say this--God is doing His deal and we are getting to take part in it.  I hope each of you will continue to pray about your role in impacting these campuses and these cities that are strategically placed to impact our world.

One final random piece of encouraging information.  Every year at UTD, one of the service fraternities (Alpha Phi Omega) has a big event called Trick or Treat for Canned Goods to benefit the North Texas Food Bank.  They send out small teams of students from other student organizations to go house to house collecting canned goods on Halloween night.  They count up the totals for a little friendly competition.  We usually do pretty well, but here's the email I received this morning about the results:

Captains!

First off, I want to thank you for coming to out to support Network Community Ministries and Alpha Phi Omega. Without your participation, we couldn't have made this event such a success. Together, we collected over 2,800 lbs of food for them! This was well over our early expectations, so congratulations to you all! 

Now, I know you have all been eagerly awaiting the results, so, without further ado, here they are:

Top Teams

• In 3rd Place, with 250 cans collected... Sons of Faded Glory!
• In 2rd Place, with 256 cans collected... Kooky Core!
• And, in 1st Place, with a WHOPPING 365 (yes, you read that right) cans.... JESUS SWAG!

<All 3 of those teams are FOCUS discipleship groups!>

          Top Organizations

• In 3rd Place, collecting 206 cans with just one team... ODPhi (AKA Team Unimaginative)!
• With 207 cans and barely securing 2nd Place... Pre-Pharmacy Association!
• And... the grand prize winner... with 1426 cans and easily securing their spot as the Champions of TOT...
  FOCUS!

Isn't it cool to see how hard these students work when working for the Lord and not for men?  What a great witness to the campus community and beyond.  God is good!  Let me know if there is anything I can be praying for you this November.  For the kingdom,

Brandon

It's been a great month

I've spent a lot of time in my personal study this month looking at and thinking through the first few chapters of Genesis.  I'm amazed by God every time I take a fresh look at Him.  This time around, I was struck by the various "curses" in Genesis 3 & 4.  Human sin has serious consequences, breaking down our relationships with each other, with God, and with the world itself.  Yet, God barely finishes letting people know the new reality they've brought on themselves before He starts dispensing grace--moving to heal all those relationships.  Adam and Eve don't destroy each other, they build a family "with the help of the Lord."  Cain isn't in danger of being killed when he's cut off from his family--God Himself is his defender in the midst of exile.  And even as humans are cursed with death and cut off from the tree of life, God sets into motion His plan to conquer death and deliver us once and for all through Jesus.

Sometimes we struggle to reconcile the way God reveals Himself in the Old Testament with how He reveals Himself in the New Testament.  But God himself has declared, "I the Lord do not change" (Malachi 3:6).  James would write much later that the Lord "does not change like shifting shadows" (James 1:17).  And so we've been theming our sermons for Friday Night Fellowship (FNF) on campus with the theme "Unchanging."  Our current sermons series is about messages from God to His people.  His consistent message that He loves us, His invitation to repentance and forgiveness, His call to love Him and one another.  I hope you'll join me in praying that students will encounter the true and living God in the months to come--our unchanging, loving, gracious God.

The UTD ministry leaves for Fall Camp Saturday October 1.  This overnight camp is such an amazing chance for these young men and women to get to know each other at a deeper level and have more fun together than they can get in a couple hours a week.  One thing that we do every year that is especially impacting is our "Walk & Talks."  The student leaders pair up the students from their small groups to go off and share their stories with one another.  So many new friendships and discipling relationships have started out of these purposeful conversations.  The students rave about them every year.  Say a prayer that God will do something awesome at our camp this weekend!

Our corefas (small group leaders) are already dealing with some heavy stuff this year, so be in prayer for them as they have such a unique opportunity to minister.  In the past couple of weeks, I've heard from student leaders about issues with sexual immorality, homosexuality, loneliness, rage, betrayal and forgiveness issues, suicide of a friend, alcohol addiction, drug use, emotional fits attributed to demon possession, students cutting themselves, intense paranoia, sudden death in the family, dealing with serious injuries, obsessing over someone of the opposite sex, and a student going to jail.  And those are just the ones I know about and can think of off the top of my head!  But we know who loves these people and has the answers to every one of these problems.  So be in prayer for these student leaders that they would have supernatural wisdom and that the Spirit would gift them with all that they need.  Satan is at work, but "we are not unaware of his schemes" (2 Cor 2:11).  And pray for these students that they would turn to God and experience radical deliverance, comfort, community, and healing.

The five "corefas" that I mentor weekly.  Two are returners
and three have stepped up to lead a group for the first time!

Finally, I had the chance to make a quick weekend visit out to San Jose, California to spend two days with a couple of UTD FOCUS alumni who have gone to work at Google.  It was refreshing after a busy August/September and encouraging to see two guys who were in my small group as freshmen doing great and serving the Lord on the west coast!  Here's a picture of us during my tour of the google campus:

Thanks for your love, your support and your prayers.  You are truly making a difference on the campus and beyond.