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New Year New _____

It's time for an update friends!

First of all, I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and New Years, and that you got to talk to or see people you love over the holidays. Nicole and I really enjoyed the time off during the break this year. We drove to New Mexico for a couple days with some friends and saw some really beautiful stuff (pictures below) and loved getting more time with Grant, Shayla, Kristen and Pedro. The rest of the break was so restful and enjoyable, and by the time the time off was coming to an end I was really looking forward to getting back to work and getting back at it! Previous breaks have been a lot more busy and I would come to the end of them almost as tired as before, but I'm really thankful that I think God is showing me how to rest and refresh well before getting back to the work to be done.

WINTER CAMP
This past weekend was our annual winter camp! We had our speaker John Stackhouse, a theologian who now teaches at Crandall University for the weekend, and it was really refreshing and encouraging for our students and our staff. He talked about how christians should live in our modern culture which was a really helpful topic for our ministry.

LEARNING
I wanted to give y'all some insight into the classes/learning portion of my job lately. We finished up our last class on Ian Provan's book "Reformation and the Right Reading of Scripture" which was a really helpful resource for thinking through how we should reach scripture with right approach. This semester I'm taking a class on Exodus, where we're spending about a week per chapter reading commentary on it and discussing. So far it's been a lot of reading but Im excited to get some more time in the Old Testament!

I'm also preparing for a three part series on justice that we'll do later in this semester, so for prep I'm reading through some material on how God interacts with evil in the world, what justice from a Biblical standpoint looks like, and what part of our work as disciples falls into that realm. With so much talk on social media about justice, and seemingly so little action behind that talk, I want our students to have some time tor really think through what this should look like in their lives for the rest of their life.

Things to be praying for:

 - NCTC Our lil campus in Corinth needs to build a real sense of community on its own apart from UNT and TWU. Please pray for our students who help there to get a vision for it, and for God to send people our way who will want to be a part of what God is doing in that community.

- TWU similarly, TWU is in a big growing stage. This is a really exciting thing going on in our Denton ministries so pray that God will continue to bless that campus!

Thank you guys for all you've done to support me and this ministry! God is blessing us tremendously through your support!

A few NM pics:






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