Gifts of Joy

    The end of this school year can only be described as a gift from God! These last two months admittedly were quite exhausting and very difficult, but in all of that the joy of working for the Lord was so prevalent. Over the last couple of months, we had two of our biggest events of the year, we had our seniors graduate, and we had our small groups wrap up for the school year. 

    The first of these big events was our Resurrection Fair. We worked with a few of the other Christian groups on campus like BSM, ICF, Intervarsity, Newman Catholic Ministry, and Wesley. Our ministry took the lead on making this event happen, and we were able to secure a location in the highest traffic area of UTD. It was so special to have our campus be able to see our ministries not only celebrate our Lord, but they saw us do that in unity. It was also a really fun event. We had live music, an inflatable obstacle course, and each ministry had an activity booth. It was a great success and I am really proud that we were able to communicate the good news of the Gospel to so many people! I don't have pictures of the actual event because I was very busy during it, but enjoy these pictures of our set up! 

    The next big thing we had was our End of the Year Party, which is the first real one we have gotten to have since I joined staff! In 2020, we were unable to do anything, and in 2021 all we could do was a ceremony to celebrate our student leaders. This year though, we were able to have the ceremony, we had worship, and we had a lot of activities and food for the students to have a blast with. A huge blessing was that all the food we had catered was actually donated to us by Chiloso in Richardson! In the past when I was a student, we used to have to charge for this event so that the staff could afford to have food at our "banquet", but thanks to Chiloso, the event got to be very cheap and super accessible. The great consequence of this was that we had a massive event. Our ministry this year was around 350 people, but of those, only around 200 were coming to our Friday night services. Our end of year party was able to have a group of about 270 people at it! It was so cool to see such a large gathering of students who our ministry was able to bless, and so many who I was able to meet for the first time at this event. It was extra special, because during this event we honor our small group student leaders, and they were able to be honored in front of such a large portion of our ministry. So many of these people just showed up because of the leader's influence on their life, and it was sweet to see what that meant to some of them. 

    As a part of ending the year, we did have to say goodbye to our seniors and grad school graduates. We held our own low key graduation ceremony for them in one of the UTD parking lots, and allowed them to walk and be cheered for by the community of people that surrounded them through college. Having been at UTD for so long, many of the graduates were people I met as Freshmen my Senior year, and it was really cool to see their college career come to a close surrounded by so much love. 

    The last thing I want to shout out is that we had a few baptisms recently! A few of our guys named Harrison, Jadon, and Nhala decided at the end of this year that they wanted to make the declaration of faith to God in front of our body, and so we held a baptism for them at a house near campus. A lot of people were able to be there to love on them even though it had to happen on a weekend. Harrison in particular was really special for me to see baptized because I have been ministering to him for the last 2 years, and to see where Brandon was able to help take Harrison, and even more God take him beyond that was so heart warming. 

(from left to right: Brandon, Nhala, Jadon, Harrison)

(Nhala's Baptism)

(Harrison's Baptism)

(Jadon's Baptism)

    Thank you all so much for helping to make this ministry happen. The last year and a half before this school year was very difficult, but God persevered with us and did incredible work on our campus! I pray that as the world comes more and more back to normal, that God continues to grow more fruit at UT Dallas!