Latinos Con Destino 09

The UT-Austin campus is made up of 16% Latinos (that’s very close to the percentage of Asian-Americans on campus) when we were studying the demographics of the campus. As we continued to study the demographics of our campus, we learned that approximately 600 Latino students are involved in a campus ministry, which means they have a relationship with the Lord, belong to a community that supports and encourages each other to grow in Christ etc.  That’s 600 Latino students out of approximately 8000! So what about the remaining 7400 Latino students on campus who may possibly not have a relationship with Jesus?

Cross ‘09 is a 3 day event (Nov 9-11th) that gave us the opportunity to cross into another culture in an effort to reach the Latino students for  Jesus in an effort to move toward fulfilling the Great Commission. This past month, the EPIC  and Destino (Campus Crusade for Christ’s Latino movement) teamed up with great hopes that God will spark  a  fire in the Latino community for Christ and to build momentum for the existing movment.

It was such a blessing to see how God moved during the 3 days! Many students from Destino have never shared their faith prior to this event, so it was a big step for them. It was exciting to see two girls make a decision to accept Jesus into their lives when students went out to share their faith or during a follow-up appointment.  Praise the Lord for all that He has done and will continue to do through the Destino students!

Please the students in prayer as they are following up with other students who may be interested in knowing how to have a relationship with Jesus or how to grow in their relationship with Jesus. Please pray that God will continue to fan the flames in the hearts of our Destino students so that they will continue to persevere and remain devoted to the works that God has started on the UT campus.

Breakthrough

Melissa (left) and her sister Melanie (right)

What I like about my job is that I get to experience the privilege of being a part of a person’s quest towards becoming more like Christ.

I have known Melissa since she was a freshman two years ago. It’s amazing to see how she has grown and matured in her faith. I can never thank God enough for the opportunity He has given me to journey life with her — to see her struggle and take steps of faith, and to see her rejoice over academic achievements and reach milestones in her walk with God.

I remember Melissa being the young fashionista who made an impression the moment she stepped in the dorm room where we had our first small group meeting in the Fall semester of 2007.

From the time I met her, I was convinced that she is a very bright, well-spoken young woman. However, so many hurts from her past prevented her from confidently voicing her thoughts. She used to just sit quietly and listen to the discussion during our small group meetings, and even during my discipleship times with her. Certain experiences in the past led her to believe that she is insignificant.

But God has definitely been working in Melissa’s heart.

After years of trying to mask her feelings of shame and insecurity, she finally unveiled her true beauty to me and to her friends who love her and want to know her deeper, hurts and all. She communicated how she understands God’s love even more now as she continuously embraces her freedom to express her heart to her family, friends and community.

I have been seeing how her interaction with people has been changing through time.  The girl I deemed as a bright, well-spoken young woman (but seemed reserved in the beginning) indeed has a lot of encouraging and significant things to say.  I think it’s safe to say that Melissa has been experiencing breakthrough — something I think we only experience through Christ.

A Beautiful Partnership

At the beginning of the semester, our team placed the first two weeks on campus as priority one. This was prime time for us to reach out to freshmen and to give our movements a huge lift on campuses all over the state of Texas. My wife TJ and I were charged to head up to Dallas and give UTD some assistance to get their movement going. After making some phone calls and some scheduling coordination, we had twelve different people with us sharing the Gospel to the students of UTD.

The representation on the team made it a beautiful sight to behold. We had two staff from the Austin team, two staff from the Dallas team, one volunteer, one alum, one potential church volunteer and five students who drove 180 miles that morning to join us. Working on such an eclectic group of people who all had a heart to see students at UTD know Jesus was extraordinarily fulfilling.

Human Value: It’s a Salvation Thing

Greetings from the University of Oklahoma, well, in retrospect I guess.  Part of my second year internship assignment requires me to “make plans to visit another team and learn how they are equipping their students to launch new movements,” so I chose to visit the OU staff team and my friend David Chang, who served with me on the Epic Movement Bay Area Summer Project, 2008.  My hope was to learn how the OU staff team ministered to and loved the fraternity and sorority students on their campus as well as serve the newly planted Epic Movement.  

There’s so much I can share in terms of experience, how the OU team equips their students, and the differences between OU and UT–OU has such a high percent of student involved in fraternities and sororities!  On my last day at OU, I met up with David Chang’s friend Michael, a biomedical engineering freshman, who was interested in chatting with David’s “intellectual Christian friend” (that’s me, in case the ‘intellectual’ threw some of you off).  Our conversation quickly moved to the topic of human value.  After he wrestled to soundly explain (to no conclusion) why he believed humans are all equally valued, I shared with him what God recently taught me: How do you determine the value of anything?  Is not the value of something derived from the price you’re willing to pay to have it?  I explained to him that nothing really has value unless something external to it delights in it, to a certain, extent and is willing to “purchase” it with whatever resource.  Then, we talked about human value: if there is no external being to “value” humans, then human value is merely based on one human’s perception of another, which is by definition, relative, and therefore not equal.  I introduced the concept of God to this young, declared atheist, explaining that an external being, say God, must delight in Man to the extent that “he/she/it” is driven to give up something to have Man.  David, the psalmist, sings, “he rescued me because he delighted in me” (II Sam. 22:20).  As believers, we know that God was willing to give up the blood of his beloved Son to purchase back what he lost to our own folly.  I lead Michael through a very graphic description of what Jesus Christ had to suffer in order to purchase us back, being mindful to include as many excruciating images of crucifixion I had come to learn over the years.  He winced over every detail.   

I was blown away at Michael’s response: “I never knew there was Someone out there who valued me just as I am; even my parents have trouble doing that!”  Humans are equally valued: we are all worth the blood of a holy God—a price none of us can pay!   Because of that, I told him, as a Christ-follower I have come to love my neighbor all the more, for they are worth the torture, the humiliation, the death—and resurrection—of my God.  How amazing is God to move in Michael’s heart and tell him exactly what he needed to hear!  Michael not only became a theist that day, but also chose to not count the Message–that there is a God who delights in him so much that He was willing to let His own Son die in Michael’s place–as foolishness (I Corinthians 1:18).  PRAISE GOD!

Please continue to pray for Michael that he would be drawn to God, and pray for David Chang to have more opportunities to follow up with Michael.

Survey says…

After asking the Lord to place in our path a gal to share our faith with, TJ and I scanned the room for long black hair in the student union.

Found!

“Hi my name is Ti and this is my friend TJ. We’re wondering if you had about 10 minutes to take this picture survey.”

“What’s the survey about?” the Asian American student asks.

“It’s a 5 question survey about life and spirituality answered with pictures.”

“Oh, no thanks.”

“Ok, have a good day!”

Rejected!

Next?

The next gal says, “Sure! I have some time.”

Nancy quickly reveals her struggle concerning her family through the survey. It turns out Nancy has some choices to make. She’s graduating this semester and is deciding to become a nun or go to medical school (to fulfill her parents’ dream). Nancy shares her personal testimony of following Christ and how it affects her family. I share my testimony with her and we both cry from the pain that it has cost both of us and our families. We pray for each other.

Later that week, Nancy invites me to visit her group that meets every week to worship. I’m amazed at their love for Jesus. I plan to visit again to speak, share, and challenge them to continue seeking after His will.

It’s no mistake that TJ and I met Nancy at the student union that day.

Epic Anthology Conference

We have arrived in Dallas for our Epic Anthology Conference!  Tonight, over 100 students will fill these seats.  We will spend the weekend seeking God together and exploring how our individual stories fit within God’s big story.

Our Austin ESM team has spent months planning this weekend.  This is first ever central Epic Conference for the Asian American students in our region.  We are praying that God will use this time to greatly impact the lives of students!  Will you pray with us?

The bible is an anthology- a collection of stories that lead to one overarching story – God’s Story. It is an anthology that records how God’s plan is played out from the perfect beginning of time to the now brokenness of humanity… from the rescuing of humanity to the complete restoration of His Kingdom.

The Epic conference is designed for us to explore these stories and find out how ours fit within…

We are part of the anthology.

We know of many students who are attending with a friend and don’t already have a personal relationship with Christ.  We also believe that many of our students who are involved with Epic are going to meet with the Lord and be challenged, make significant decisions about their lives, consider where they are going to spend their summers, and be faced with the reality of how God desires to their lives as a part of His story.  Please pray with us that God will radically change the lives of students this weekend!

“This is already hell”

Apathy and indifference are two words that strongly come to mind when I think about students at UT Austin. In the past couple of weeks that I’ve been meeting new students randomly on campus to survey their thoughts and opinions about culture and spirituality, I’m finding that many people have either not ever thought about deeper things in life or that they have been seeking to only want to believe in a God that they want to be true rather than the just and holy God who really is. A few questions and thoughts I’ve heard are:

“How can a person who’s lived their whole lives doing good without belief in God go to hell while a person who has done lots of bad in their life still go to heaven by just believing in God?” AND “This is already hell.” OR “I don’t care if I go to hell because I won’t be able to feel it.”

To give them the opportunity to investigate on their own, I’ve sent them to: http://www.EveryStudent.com

Please pray for these students to be broken and hunger and thirst for God.  And that as they seek him, they’d find him.

Prayer for UH Epic Movement launch

This Monday, November 3rd, part of our team will be traveling to Houston to launch a new Epic Movement at the University of Houston. Praise God for already providing us with this team, a key student that has a heart to reach their campus with the gospel, a table and a room to advertise Epic and to gather interested students.

Please pray for a safe trip to and from Houston during which our team can pray for students at UH and for us to have the compassion and eyes of our Savior and that our team will rely on Jesus’ strength and not on our own.

Go Cougars!

Proven wrong by Jesus!

It’s exciting to meet Vietnamese students on campus because I can usually easily connect with them. Also, I feel like Vietnamese students are sometimes overlooked and not reached by Christian ministries.

I met Annie outside Starbucks on UTSA’s campus. She filled out one of our surveys earlier that week and said she’s interested in knowing God more personally.

I asked her while she drank her coffee where she’s from, what she thinks about UTSA, about her family, and about her spiritual background. After Annie told me that she grew up attending a Catholic Vietnamese church with her family, stereotypes of the Vietnamese Catholic church started rushing into my head. I thought, Annie probably knows every tradition of the Catholic Church and may think that this is what it means to be a Christian.

“So how do you want to grow this year in your faith?” I asked. Annie said, “I want to grow closer to God and know more about God because I teach in the children’s ministry at my church back home. So if I grow stronger in my faith here, I can bring it back home to the children of my church.”

From here, with praises to God for already working on Annie’s heart, I told Annie about Epic and why it exists. I then asked her, “If you were to die today, how sure are you that you will spend eternity with God?” She wasn’t sure how to answer the question, so I shared the gospel with Annie and spent extra time talking about John 1:12 “Yet to all who received Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God.”

Annie came to our Epic meeting that night and ended up in my bible study small group. She demonstrated again how eager she was to know more about Jesus.  She continues to attend Epic’s weekly meeting.

God is at work in Annie’s life. Praise Jesus for this, and pray that she continues to grow so that she can share her love for the Lord with the children at her home church and at UTSA. Praise Jesus for also proving that my stereotypes of Vietnamese Catholic churches can be wrong.

UT/UTSA Epic students at our fall retreat

They came, they learned, they ate, they laughed, they didn’t sleep, …they grew closer to Him!!!