Welcome to the New Year!! Here is an update on how God has been using me over the past month or so and what He has been showing me!
What I've been doing:
Worship Collective - One of my favorite things we do as a Worship Team involves our Worship Collective. The Worship Collective is a monthly gathering for anyone that helps facilitate corporate worship at the five campuses of The Austin Stone. We have a vibrant and collaborative team of worship leaders, musicians, production teams, visual artists, songwriters and storytellers that are leading our church every single week in adult worship, kids worship, and students worship. Most of those people aren't even required to do what they do, they just love serving and volunteer for us on a regular basis! So, the Worship Collective is the time where we get to serve and pour into our team, and let them know that we are so extremely grateful for everything they do. We literally couldn't do it without them. The last Worship Collective we did was my favorite one to this date. It was during the Christmas season so the collective was Christmas themed and of course, tacky sweater themed. We shared an amazing turkey meal and had time to get to know our volunteers and their stories, which may be my favorite part of the night. We then went into the auditorium and had a time of worship around a baby grand piano in the middle of the auditorium. We all stood around it and sang Christmas songs and worship songs in the round. I think that may have been the first time the advent season clicked in my mind. It was such a beautiful moment of worshiping God's faithfulness to bring us the Savior He had for so long promised.
Paradigm - I had the opportunity to go back to the first Paradigm service of the spring to help transition into the sanctuary. For those who don't know, Paradigm is the college ministry that I went to in college that I owe so much of my spiritual growth with Jesus as well as the place where I first began doing audio. It was encouraging to see just how much I had learned since I had been gone and fun to pour into the volunteers the knowledge and skills I've learned in this residency. Paradigm will always hold a special place in my heart. I love what they are about and the way they continue to make disciples.
Moving - I just recently moved into a new house in the St Johns area of Austin with a handful of guys that are on the worship team. St. Johns is one of the most impoverished areas in Austin and a place where The Austin Stone does a lot of our ministry for the city. The guys I've moved in with are extremely missional and so desperately want the people of this area to surrender their lives to Jesus. I'm so excited to live here and grow in being missional and grow in my love for the lost. It's also like three minutes from the office compared to twenty minutes at times from the old apartments so I'm definitely OK with that.
What I'm Learning
Being Saturated in the Word - God has continually been pressing this into my heart over and over again. Romans 10:17 says "So faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ". That verse has rattling around in my mind a lot recently. The word is by no means the end itself, but Jesus is and the word is what leads us to Him. Our faith is produced by God knitting the word into our hearts and our worship of Him grows when our faith grows. How crazy is it that the creator of the universe, whose words created mountains and galaxies, who holds all things together, wants us to intimately know him, and has made a way through Jesus for that to happen. That's the God I want to know and the way He has chosen to reveal Himself is through His word. "Open my eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of your law." - Psalm 119:18.
Prayers
Please continue to pray that God would keep growing my desire and affections for His word and ultimately grow my desires and affections for Him.
Pray that God would equip the guys I am living with and my self to be missonal in every way that we can. Pray for the people we come in contact with, especially our neighbors. We want to see these people in love with Jesus. We know that only He can do that, so we are begging Him to do it.
I Love you all so much. Without your support I would not be here doing this. You are playing such a huge role in this season of my life and I am so so grateful for you.
Pictures from My Residency
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