Happy New Year!!

Happy New Year to you!! I hope you had lovely holidays and are warm and well-rested for the coming year. I'm incredibly thankful for a job that gives me a two week break for Christmas. Because of this, I was able to go see my parents and one of my sisters for a whole week after spending some time at home in Plano and with Alex's family. December flew by, as students were only in classes for a week of it before final exams. I do remember those weeks getting colder and colder, though, so I think we were all ready for some time off of meeting together outside in the chilly air. I am grateful that we can keep on meeting safely that way and that our weather is still very fair in comparison to most other options. So I'm eager to get back to seeing students regularly and getting this semester started! Here are some family pictures from the break!

Something we did right at the end of the semester was an outdoor worship night. A generous church near Collin College let us use their large lawn to have some socially-distant time together before the break. It was so sweet to see so much of our community come together when we rarely get to do that this year.

Our Collin staff team spent some time last semester brainstorming needs in our community and from that we made 3 little subcommittees of sorts to make some game plans and get them rolling. I'm on our prayer team with Kristen and Joey and something we came up with for our students - and pastors too - was a prayer guide for the month long Christmas break. It had different resources to engage with then respond to, focusing on a different aspect of prayer every week. Here's a link to all of the guides if you'd like to do it on your own: anyfocus.org/collin/prayer . I have been working my way through it and found it refreshing and helpful in the way I think about prayer and communication with God.

We've got some exciting changes in the works for this next semester, so I'm eager to see what I will have to share with you at the end of this month! Please pray for the beginning of our semester and all of our adjustments. We are still trying to discern what is best for our community in our current circumstances. I think everybody needs a bit extra motivation coming out of this break since we typically start the semester off with a giant Winter Camp (which we aren't having this year for obvious reasons). So please pray for our energy and hearts to remember why we do this!

Thank you for tuning in this month!

With love,

Jacy