Rhythms and Foundations

A photo of all of the students at SICM this year. It's so crazy thinking of how many people God will impact through these students!

"There is a time for everything,

and a season for every activity under the heavens:

...a time to plant and a time to uproot...

...a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them...

...a time to be silent and a time to speak."

-Ecclesiastes 3 (excerpts)

In our crazy world of frequent moving, hectic schedules, and noise, the rhythms of the seasons are one of the few things that become predictable and constant (although only somewhat so in places like Texas). For those of you who aren't students, you may have experienced the harsh wakeup call of realizing that at some point in your life, summers are no longer a time of rest, fun, and eventually, boredom. I've definitely experienced that before. However, more than in most careers, ministers of students continue to work around the seasonality that school is defined by. The question is: what is this season defined by for campus ministers?

The summer is a perfect time for laying foundations. We lay foundations financially and relationally by fundraising and getting to know our donors better. We lay foundations of friendships with students who we weren't around during the school year. We lay foundations for the upcoming year of ministry by praying for the year- for the students we are going to meet, the students we will be working with, and for our own hearts and minds to be ready for it all. As we are doing all of this, we lay foundations in our hearts by spending time with God and in Scripture.

SICM

At the end of SICM, we pray for the students from each campus FOCUS is on. It was beautiful to see the hearts these students have for one another, and for the people they will be reaching out to.

SICM- the Student Institute of Campus Ministry- is an annual conference that seeks to train students from around the nation (but mostly from Texas) up to be disciple-makers and missionaries on their college campuses. It's where a lot of the students in our ministry go from simply being shown Jesus to showing Jesus to other, and it's where they learn wise and practical ways of doing that on a college campus. This conference is in a beautiful town in Washington called Bellingham and is hosted by a ministry called Campus Christian Fellowship. It primarily comprises a week of classes on everything from how to plan a Bible study, to how to reach out to strangers, to how to read Scripture well. The experience of SICM has been compared to that of drinking water from a fire hose (something I know we've allllllll done....right?), and this is a pretty apt description. I first went to SICM as a student in 2014, and it was awesome to get to be there as a staff person 4 years later!

One of our students named Charlie was baptized at SICM!

Prayer

• Pray for our students as they leave the continual pouring in of SICM and go back to very different environment of a college summer. Pray for what they learned to take root in their hearts, and for God to prepare them for the ministry they will be doing this fall.
• Many people on our staff and in our student body are getting married this summer (it's seriously ridiculous how many weddings I have on my calendar this summer)! Please pray that God would bless these marriages and make them into something that glorifies Him and shows others the love of Jesus.