January 2025

Happy New Year! (Both on the Gregorian calendar and the Chinese lunar calendar.) I just celebrated Chinese New Year with some friends from FOCUS and church, it was a fun time sharing in some traditional Chinese cuisine like dumplings, green scallion pancakes, sticky rice, fried rice, braised pork belly, mung bean soup, and sago soup (I’ve never typed some of these dishes out in English before so that felt weird). Unfortunately, as always, I’m horrible at taking pictures, so you’ll just have to trust me that it was a good time of fellowship and eating!

I pray that your new year has started well. There are always things to be thankful for, a few that come to mind for me are:

• My brother recently bought a house and we moved him into his new place and moved some students in FOCUS into the house that he just vacated to finish out the lease, all in the same day. It was a whole operation and I wouldn’t be exaggerating to say that 40 or 50 people came by to help out throughout the day. It was hectic, but also a testament to our community for showing up in big and small ways.

• We recently wrapped up Winter Retreat. As you may know, this is our largest event of the year and this year was our biggest one yet! Over 700 people came out through the weekend to listen to the sermons, connect with the broad FOCUS community, and invest in their relationship with God. Praise God!

I would love to know what you are thankful for so far this new year!

At the beginning of each semester, we have a staff retreat to refocus as a pastoral team on the mission and vision and get ready for our students to return to campus. This retreat, we talked about love being at the heart of everything. Galatians 5:6b says The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love. What a beautiful reminder to try to emulate the love that God first showed us, that in everything we do, we should do with love. Especially in an age where people may focus more on what divides us rather than what connects us, we are called to love in all circumstances. And of course, I just have a picture of some of us playing Mysterium (we lost).

If you’ve not met Paul (Micus), one of our apprentices this year, two things you should know about him are that he loves college volleyball and that he is extremely competitive. One thing you should know about our relationship is that when we play on the same volleyball team together, we almost always lose. And that brought about this “grudge” match (and this flyer). We both drafted teams and duked it out in a best-of-3 match, where my team eventually won 2 games to 1. It was all in the name of good fun, no worries.

Our church had another (unofficial) Cultural Appreciation Day! Some old faces and some new participated this time around—I had more people who told me they were going to participate but either forgot or got sick! There’s been a string of illnesses that have been going around our community since November! I guess that’s a downside of having a close-knit church body, there’s really no stopping them from giving and getting each other’s sicknesses. I wore the shirt that I got in Africa (though it shrunk so much in the wash that it barely fits me already). I just think it’s so cool to see people dressed in heritage clothing or in the clothing of cultures that they appreciate. I think it’s easy to get lost in a sea of sameness when you just look at all the t-shirts and jeans or shorts (we’re a casual church). This is a gentle reminder that the kingdom of God is not one nation, but every nation, tribe, people, and language.

Here is everyone at Winter Retreat (at least that were there on Saturday morning). If you really squint hard, you’ll find me in the very back! What a great (and tiring) weekend! If you’re interested in listening to any of the sermons that were given at Winter Retreat, you can find them on YouTube or Spotify! This year, we focused in on a topic I’m sure you’re all familiar with, Following Jesus, but we wanted to really dive deep into what it means to do so. If you have some time, give them a listen and see what you think!