New Year New _____

Hey all,

Welcome back, hope this update finds you all well!

We're about mid way through this spring semester for our students in Denton, and there's been some really neat things going on.

We've been talking about dating and relationships in our Friday Night Fellowship meetings the past few weeks. This is probably obviously a pretty timely topic for a lot of our students. Many of them are making decisions on dating and how to go about that in a Godly way, and so we're spending some time engaging with scripture on how to treat people, how to seek wisdom in our decisions, and how to have accountability and openness in our relationships so that we honor our other members of the community in how we go about this.

We also just had our family night a few weeks ago. This is something we do every year to have a time where parents and family can come and see firsthand a little bit of  what the ministry does in their student's life. 

This semester's Pizza Theology was over the book of Exodus. We spent time talking about God's redemption of his enslaved people, his law and the way that that helped his people stand out amongst the cultures around them and get them closer to God's ideal for how they should live. Our students really were very positive about it and I know they learned a lot. I love getting to get together with the other campuses like this and learn about a topic in detail. 

This is at the end of our Pizza Theology during our Q&A time.

This semester me and my peer team guys (the small group leaders in our ministry that I meet with every week and mentor this year) are reading through a book called "Surprised by Hope" by N.T. Wright. This is one I got to read a couple of years ago, and found it so incredibly helpful in understanding the resurrection and the world to come from a truly Biblical perspective. I hadn't realized how much of what I believed about Jesus' return, the resurrection and heaven had not been based solely from scripture, but influenced by philosophers like plato, and has crept it's way into modern western christian thinking. The book helps us go back to the scripture and how the early church would have thought about these things, and it really does fill me with such a huge amount of hope and expectation for the day when God finished what he started with Jesus' resurrection and makes everything new again. I highly encourage you guys to pick up a copy of it and read it. 

Prayers right now for my peer team guys would be awesome. Some of them are struggling with some serious challenges the past few weeks. Pray for them to rely on God and learn to trust and totally surrender to Him, and pray for wisdom on my part as I meet with him and lead them towards him. 

Thank you guys for all you do and all of your support!

Ryan