The Calm before the Storm

The past few weeks have been very exciting as our planning for the semester has gotten underway and the time left until the start of school has flown by!

To give you a glimpse into all that we are planning, I want to share with you what is on the horizon for us.

This Tuesday (Aug 16), we are having a Leader's Retreat for all of the students connecting to our ministry. This is a time and place that vision for walking with God and reaching other students with the gospel can be cast and a plan can be forged to carry it out.  Passion can be stirred and direction given as students learn to own this ministry to their campus.  Please pray for any last minute planning that we must do for this.


On Friday, August 19th, the official move in day at GSU will be a very busy time for us.  This is an opportunity our ministry takes each year to serve the freshmen moving in for the first time and it helps us build relationships with them.  Many student leaders in our movement have testimonies that God started working on their hearts as they met a Christian helping them move in on that weekend of their freshman year.  Pray for us to have great favor with students we move in and that even these we meet through move-in day would one day be added to God's kingdom.

And just so you know, I want to share a word from God's Word that I will be giving to our students during that Leader's Retreat.  It is out of Galatians 6:14.  In this verse, we see Paul telling the church, "May I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world was crucified to me and I to the world."  Without going into too much detail, the Lord showed me that the only object worthy of boasting in is the cross of Jesus Christ.  His powerful life and sacrificial death to make sinners right with a holy God is the only thing to make much of.  And that is going to be the drum we beat all semester: we want to make much of Christ.  And we want to experience great joy in God as we do so.  If we, as Christians, can begin to make much of Christ in every facet of our lives, we will experience great joy, we will be holy like God has designed us to be, and we will live lives that provoke spiritual hunger in people so that they can get to know this same God and Savior.

That is our desire this semester!  More to come about this vision and direction in updates to come.  Until then, pray for me and Corrie that we will:

1. Make much of Christ in our marriage.  We are praying that, in our 2nd year of our marriage, we will grow closer to one another and learn how to love each other and God better through all he teaches us.
2. Trust God with the plans we as a staff team have made.  Pray for God's blessing on them and that if He sees fit to change any of them, we would be ok with that.  
3. See God work mightily at our Leader's Retreat.  We want this time to really empower our students to own this ministry and lead in it how they see God calling them to.  Pray God would give us as a staff team wisdom as we lead that retreat.  Pray for great passion and vision for the advancement of God's kingdom to be cultivated here.

Thank you all for lifting us up in prayer.  What you do through prayer is not preparation for the "greater" work of ministry here at GSU.  Prayer is the greater work!  

We love you and are thankful for YOU!

Mike and Corrie

Our GSU staff team