Spring is on its Way

January was the perfect month to kick off this semester: we had two weeks of planning before students came back, then two weeks to get the ball rolling with our ideas! After evaluating our fall semester, we realized 3 needs our overall Collin FOCUS community had: togetherness, engagement with scripture, and learning how to pray. With that, we separated into little sub-committees to take initiative in each of these areas. One thing our team really values is initiative. This is hard for me because I typically doubt my ability to come up with good ideas, but it pushes us to think outside of the box and try new things. When something fails, we troubleshoot as an entire team and come up with a new plan!

I'm on the prayer team and we've got some things planned ahead, but the togetherness committee has been doing a great job of getting our students to be together, safely, this semester. We found that our students were really missing community and living life together, so they brainstormed ways to help implement that. Something we do every week now is "Tuesday Hang" on campus. It's an outside, social distanced hangout time with lawn games, homework, or just chit chatting. We've met a lot of new students this way, as so many people have been missing life on campus. I think people are excited just to see people interacting and actually enjoying their time on campus! Here are a couple pictures of Tuesday Hang so far:

Something else we really felt the need to shake up was the structure of our small groups and teaching times. We were listening to sermons in cores then discussing them, but students were checking out and missing out on more relational time. So this semester, we've gone back to our traditional small group plan where the leaders think through what the students need, then create a study based on that. As you might remember, I had two small groups last semester, and since they were both so small, I decided to combine them - which has been amazing to say the least! Everyone has responded so well to the transition and now the students in them can get to know a couple more girls. On top of that, we've added in a weekly fellowship and teaching time we call Deep Dive. We have it outside with masks and socially distanced, so with our weather being kind of all over the place these last couple weeks we've had to make some adjustments and occasionally have it on Zoom. But it's been a treat to get to know some of the other students in our ministry and see students make new friends!

Here's a fun panorama shot of some girls bundled up and ready for Deep Dive!

As always, I'm incredibly proud of and thankful for our student leaders who have been flexible and patient with us as we've tried out new things this year. They've had some of the best attitudes when it's come to bracing the cold in order to be together! Of course when it drops below a certain temperature, we move to Zoom, but still the wind makes it tough sometimes.

This is Hannah, one of my exclusively virtual students! She made this jeopardy board to play with her core over the computer and it was too cute not to get a picture.

Thank you for tuning in this month! Please pray for us as try to teach our students in our 3 initiatives: togetherness, engagement in scripture, and prayer. Also, the weather was perfect for all of the outdoor things we do and we started gaining momentum...then it got super freezing and snowed (which has been a fun treat for sure). Please pray for us to regain that momentum and endure through more strange circumstances.

Let me know how I can be praying for you!

With love,

Jacy