Our Ministry with Campus Crusade for Christ

Sending our Seniors to the World

Wed, 5 May 2010 14:57:21 -0700

Well, it has been awhile since we have updated you here on our blog, but we are hoping that will change soon!
Let’s start by recapping the last Weekly Meeting we had with our students. It is the end of another year, which is when we always have our Commissioning of our senior graduating students.
This is one of our greatest joys as ministers of the gospel, because we have spent years building into these leaders, and now we get to see them be sent out as missionaries all over the world.
To give you a few highlights: Jimmy will be going to the Dominican Republic for one year ministry with Campus Crusade for Christ on our first every STINT team! STINT teams are 1-year international internships with Crusade. Jimmy will be leading a team of five to a university of 160,000 students!
Another great story is Alyssa. Alyssa will be our first Cru at the University of Arizona intern! So she will be raising support and joining our team of 6 staff this next fall. We can’t wait to have her on our team, because she is such a quality woman of God.
Others are going into a nursing program, getting married and moving to Seattle, and many other things. Regardless of where they are going, we are confident they are going out more equipped to making an impact for the glory of Jesus.
Would you pray for all our graduating seniors, that Jesus would bless them as they go and raise up others to take their place on campus?
More pics below:

We have a New Campus Website!

Tue, 4 May 2010 15:46:23 -0700

Thanks to the generous financial gifts of some of our University of Arizona campus supporters, we were able to launch our BEAUTIFUL new ministry website. We couldn’t be more excited about it, so we had to share it with you!
Just go to the site once and you will see how nice it is. And for college students today, a nice website can make all the difference between them getting involved and reading the content on your site.
Our hope is that this website would help more of our involved students grow in their relationship with Christ, and would help lost students at the UofA come to know him!
But please, go see it out for yourself!
http://cruatua.com

Seven People came to Christ!

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 21:14:13 -0700

Just wanted to give you a quick update on how the Jesus without Religion outreach went. The presentation by Rick James was great, and went off without a hitch. Most importantly, we saw seven people indicate decisions to receive Christ! In the coming posts we will give you further details on all that Jesus did! Thanks for praying!

Please pray for our outreach tonight!

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 14:55:38 -0700

Hey everyone!

I wanted to ask you to pray for the outreach we have going on tonight. We are bringing in a speaker to speak on "Jesus Without Religion" and are asking Jesus to bring over 200 students who don't know Jesus. Would you pray with us, pray for the speak (named Rick James), and pray that Jesus saves many tonight?

Thanks! And we will give you an update after tonight, as well as a family update with more Piper pictures to come! God bless! Oh, and here is the website and info if you want to see it:

http://cruatua.com/

Life/Training/Piper Update (from CO)

Tue, 21 Jul 2009 13:08:25 -0700

Well it has been quite a long time since our last update, but we have been very busy here in Fort Collins, CO. Every summer on CCC staff either go on a stateside or overseas summer project, or they go to Fort Collins for 4-week training classes. This summer I had a leadership course with about 200 other staff to get trained in the director’s position (what we have been doing that last two years at the University of Arizona). Alisha has already had this course and so had the opportunity to coach several women who are going to be directing next year. In leadership development, it has been a great summer for God to humble us, challenge us, and continue to foster in us vision for reaching the University of Arizona. We are so blessed to have great regional & national leaders who are helping us grow in character and skill.
In other news, Piper is doing great! Alisha’s postpartum health problems have mainly calmed down and she is doing well too. On another high note, Piper is starting to sleep through the night for 6 hours or more! This is a huge blessing as many of you who are parents can probably understand!
For the next week all the Campus Crusade staff in the country will descend on Fort Collins and Colorado State University for our every-other-year all-staff conference. We have some big-time speakers coming in (like Tim Keller, one of our personal heros) and where we get some great direction and encouragement for what Jesus is doing across the world in CCC. Please be in prayer that the Lord would be moving and using the conference for his glory and to expand his kingdom further!
Below are some pictures and videos of our time in Fort Collins. We have had some time to make it to Rocky Mountain National Park, as you can see, and it is has been beautiful weather here. Enjoy!

Update on Piper and Mom

Thu, 21 May 2009 22:31:18 -0700

Well a lot has happened in the last week since Piper arrived! After all the tests on both Piper and Alisha, everything came out negative! This is very good obviously, as there was some potentially scary stuff that could have been going on. They never did really figure out what was wrong with either of them, just concluding they both had some minor infections. After a week’s worth of antibiotics, both were doing superb.
However, a day before Piper was due to be released from the hospital, Alisha’s incision started to have some problems. After seeing the doctor again, they had to open up the incision and drain fluid that had built up. Alisha now has a wound that should take 4-6 weeks to heal. She is also required to see a doctor daily in order to continue it on to healing.
As you can imagine, this became very stressful for both of us, but she is healing nicely. Piper is now home with us as well and we are just working on getting breast-feeding down, which was thrown off with all the tests going on. Home care will be able to visit us at home and do Alisha’s check ups.
Would you all just be in prayer that Alisha would heal quickly, and that Piper would get breast feeding well? And pray that we both get good rest and naps in-between feedings. Thank you all so much! Pray that we don’t stress over the amount of money this is coming out to either. Jesus is working patience in us, and growing our hearts in love for this amazing little girl!

Amazing story from a student

Thu, 21 May 2009 21:05:57 -0700

Well our lives are completely consumed (rightly so) with all that is going on with Piper, but in the midst of our crazy lives right now, God is still working in amazing ways through our students as the summer begins. Some are going off to our summer missions trips in Santa Monica and the Dominican Republic, and some are going to various locations at home.
But we thought we would share a story with you of one of our women student leaders. She was raised in a nominal Muslim faith, and Jesus changed her right before she got to college and joined our movement. Here is her letter of encouragement to our staff team:

“Hey everyone! I just wanted to write this to let you all know a little bit about what's been going on in my life the past couple of days and to thank you. I told my dad about me being a Christian and it has been a bumpy ride to say the least. I'm being ostracized from my family and it has been pretty rough. There is not much forgiveness and many trials, but I'm trying to rejoice in them as much as I can. But I have an older brother who is Muslim and we haven't gotten along in years, and probably over 6 years haven't had a full conversation with one another. We talked today for the first time and I have never felt more love towards him. I was able to explain to him about Christianity and to explain to him concepts that he didn't understand and talk to him about what we truly believe and to give him some understanding about Christianity. We were able to talk and make amends for the past years and were able to move on from it. I was able to show him what Christian love was something that I wasn't able to do before. I honestly would just like to thank you all for working on our Campus because I honestly believe that without Cru I would have never learned my religion this in depth and would never have been able to back up my beliefs like I was able. So i just want to thank you all for being such great Godly influences in my life and know that I will be praying that you all have a wonderful summer! I would also like to request that you could be praying for my family and myself.”

Photos and Videos of Piper

Wed, 20 May 2009 10:17:20 -0700

I promised we would bring you photos and videos, so here is the first batch!

Piper has arrived!

Fri, 15 May 2009 17:22:13 -0700

Well it certainly didn’t happen the way we thought it would, but Piper Abigail Jenkins has arrived!
Alisha has the whole story over on her blog if you would like to read it, but the gist of the details is that at midnight on Wednesday night, Alisha had a little bleeding that we thought we should get checked out. Once we arrived at the hospital, triage said that the baby wasn’t moving like she should have been. After talking to our doctor and performing an ultrasound, they decided that the baby needed to come right then! So they ordered a C-section to be done and after literally less than 4 hours after we left for the hospital Alisha delivered our baby!
She weighed in at a hefty 9 pounds, 3 ounces! Her length was 20 1/2 inches.
Soon after the birth the doctors noticed that both Alisha and Piper had elevated heartbeats and were not getting enough oxygen in their blood. So they put Alisha through tons of tests trying to figure out what it was (including a CT scan, chest x-ray, and more). They still haven’t figured it out, but Alisha’s heartbeat has lowered and she is feeling great. They are giving her some antibiotics to clear out any possible infection.
Piper has been breathing a little harder than she needs to, and they actually performed a spinal tap on her to figure out if there was any infection in the spine. Praise God, their wasn’t and it came back negative! This is good news. So it looks like they want to keep Piper in the hospital for another week just to make sure she is ok and clear of infection, but that is much better than the 3 weeks should would’ve had to stay if there were problems in the spine!
So now we are just getting used to feeding her and living life with her. We will keep you updated as more details emerge. Photos and videos will be forthcoming!

May Prayer Letter: The coming summer...

Thu, 7 May 2009 16:18:39 -0700

Here is our latest prayer letter for May 2009. We highlight three places where our movement will be this summer: Santa Monica, the Dominican Republic, and for us Fort Collins, Colorado, where Colorado State University will be our training home.
Click on the document below to download the PDF and read the letter!