Winter Wonderland!

At the first snowfall, we enjoyed a chilly walk through the Washington Heights neighborhood which has beautiful, old houses and picturesque landscapes.

New Life at Parkside

God is taking the movement (ie: college ministry) at UW-Parkside to a whole new level. In the Spring students were asking for more one-on-one discipleship and opportunities to share their faith and talk to people about spiritual things on campus. During our two days a week there we have been meeting any student we can that seems to want to have a ministry at that school. A typical meeting in the past consisted of around 25 people. Last week we had 43, the most that have ever attended!

Ben regularly meets with four guys, and I meet with two girls, all of who comprise the leadership team for our ministry. I know Ben loves the guys, and he will just have to get on here and talk about them himself, but I want to brag about the girls: Stef and Steph. Two totally different girls, two very faithful women who have a heart for students at their school to know Jesus and live lives that reflect his goodness. They lead a Bible study together, and God is using them to challenge the girls who attend to take steps of faith and apply what they are learning to their lives. Steph has started meeting one-on-one with one of the girls on the softball team who is wanting to grow in her relationship with God and become more involved in helping others grow.



Four weeks ago Ben was in the dorms with Luke, a wrestler at UWP, when they saw a guy sitting in the lounge who had been coming to Cru events but Ben really didn't know. They talked about his spiritual background as they got to know him, and were starting to go through a booklet that outlines what the Bible says it means to be a Christian, when his girlfriend came in. They continued the conversation and Ben asked Sarah what she thought about all of this. She didn't grow up in church, and had never been given the opportunity to respond to Jesus' invitation to have a personal relationship with God. That day, she prayed with Ben and Luke and put her faith in Jesus as her Lord and Savior.

After finding that out an hour later, I got Sarah's phone number and sent her a text to invite her to my first Bible study that night. When I arrived ten minutes early, she was there waiting! The past month she has come to every study and we have also been meeting one-on-one in the afternoons to help her gain a foundation to help her grow in her faith. It is awesome to see her reading her Bible for the first time ever, and asking questions about topics all across the board. She is learning a lot and I am excited to see how God will continue changing her has she walks with Him.

Fallen Behind

If you've come here looking to see what the Newtons have been up to, you may have concluded that there is nothing exciting to report, which would be the reason for my absence from blogging. Our lives are boring, and there's just nothing worth writing about. It's just the opposite, and if you're in our line of work you know exactly why!

"The first six weeks" or however long before your fall retreat are the busiest weeks of work. This weekend is our fall retreat, and it has been more than six weeks since school started. Needless to say, we are spent. But there are so many stories I want to share with you. The fact that we are writing our monthly newsletter several weeks late has only given God more time to do sweet things in students' lives! Following are some recent accounts of what God has been doing through or ministries at UW-Milwaukee and UW-Parkside.

"Firefly"

On August 1st we stopped being nomads, and we have been celebrating ever since! We had some great help from our family who traveled from IL to help us load and unload our truck, and had a very successful moving day. That is, until Ben and Bud went to return the 24 ft. rental truck at 6pm. Just a half mile from our apartment is an overpass that is 12 ft. high. The truck we rented was about 13.5 ft. You can see where this is going...

"Like a sardine can" was how Bud described how the top of the truck was ripped off when Ben drove under the bridge. To my surprise, the hit felt to Ben like he was driving over a large pothole. He had no idea what had happened until Bud (who was driving in front of him) pulled over to see if Ben was okay. Thankfully no one was behind Ben when this happened, as the entire top of the now convertible truck flew off into the road. I felt so bad for him because he had done such a great job driving the truck the entire day, which is not an easy feat! While they waited for the police to arrive, passerby's stopped to talk to them and disclosed that this happens about 5 times a year and agreed the signage for the bridge should be more obvious to rookie truck drivers.

The next day played out differently than expected as we spent a good amount of time with our new State Farm agent and on the phone with the rental company. We are praying that we will only have to pay the deductible for our collision insurance. (We bought all of the "insurance" through the rental company, but this is the one thing they don't cover!) Hopefully we will find out soon. The whole event really put our value on finances into perspective: We could freak out that we suddenly had this large sum of money to pay and would have this much less saved up for a home, or be thankful that we have money saved for times like this. We were also reminded that when our value is in God, who is Lord over everything, we won't be shaken during times like this, because our money is not what our hope or value is in. Ben felt this particularly strongly those first 24 hours.

Now that we have been in Wauwatosa for almost two weeks, we can confidently say we love our new place. At first we could only say that about our apartment, but after exploring downtown and running on one of the many amazing parkways our county has, we are excited to be a part of this community. We have already made the 1.5 mile walk to the Farmer's Market, visited an art festival, and played a few games of tennis on some public courts we found. Alterra, Milwaukee's local coffee company, is just 4 buildings down from us, and it doesn't take us long to get to the lake. The town of some 44,000 people is named after the Potawatami word for "firefly."

Here are some pictures:

Of our place:

Love the built in cabinets!

The office:

Jersey Girls! (kind of)

Going into this summer I had hoped for two things: To grow in confidence leading women in Bible study and discipleship, and glean from the people around me. Knowing I would be around 30+CCC staff and 115 students, there would be a lot of wisdom and life experience I could learn from. I highly underestimated how God would use the students to grow me.

Each of the staff were entrusted with a group of students we would meet with individually and as a group for the summer. Above is Meredith, Maggie, Amanda, and Emily. Four girls I knew nothing about May 18th, and who are near and dear to my heart today. I'm really not just saying that. (If you know me, I don't just say stuff like that. In fact I don't really ever say things I don't mean). I love them!

These girls live together in the smallest room of an old boarding house in New Jersey with no air conditioning and 80 other students. They work jobs they might not be working normally, because their purpose for the summer isn't to make money, it's to fall more in love with God and experience healthy community with each other. Now that Ben and I are back in Milwaukee, and all of the other staff have left-the students are in charge of the rest of the summer project. They are leading each other, having big outreaches on the beach, giving weekly talks, and Amanda is cooking for everyone! (With the help of Nick).

The hours I spent with these girls each week made my summer a blast, and taught me about God's grace above all else. God allowed the pressure to be taken off of me to teach them, as I relied on Him to help me plan, and reminded myself that I am just one person coming alongside them in their journey with God.

Having been off campus for 7 months, it was SUCH a joy to meet with them and hear about their passions, how God has loved them each specifically through different seasons of life, and be able to go with them to share with others about the freedom Christ offers to those who believe in Him.

We laughed, sunbathed, painted pottery, ate crepes (and sand) together this summer. They might think our time together was primarily for their benefit, but I want them to know it was for mine just as much!

"Let no one look down on you because of your youth, but set an example for the believers in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, and in purity." 1 Timothy 4:12

Isn't Life Beautiful?

I've been sick since Thursday, and am at the tail end of this nasty cold. It's really hard to be sick on project, because there is so much to do all of the time. We had our staff vs. student softball game Saturday night, which I of course attended but didn't plan to play in. When I saw my name on the batting roster it was hard to resist going up for just a few swings. I struck out :) We beat the students by a ton, which Ben was excited about because he planned the event and had worked hard to make sure the staff would have the victory. That's not even why I'm writing though. I'm writing because on Monday I received a sweet package in the mail. Ben's church he grew up in had a women's supper on Father's Day, and instead of having a speaker they gathered information about their women missionaries and learned about them...and made cards for them! Take a look: They are all so beautiful and unique-they just brightened my day right when I needed to be cheered up! It was such a great idea for a women's conference-and the most meaningful part is that they were all praying for me as I gave my talk at our conference the very next day. Thanks CLCBC ladies!

Lead of Love

I'm in the process of writing a talk to give at our womens' conference tomorrow night, and I came across this picture a friend made for me four years ago. I had sent out an email update for my internship at Iowa and included the lyrics to this song by Caedmon's Call called "Lead of Love", and he responded with this sweet picture of the lyrics. I love the song because it shows the artist's hindsight understanding of God's hand in the things he went through, which were hard to understand at the time.

My aim for tomorrow night is to help the girls I'm speaking to remember how God has worked in their lives in various ways, (and continue to be aware of this), and catch glimpses of how He might want to use their lives. The theme of the night is 'catching a glimpse', and I've had what seems like an impossible time getting my talk nailed down. When I think about the different ways God has brought me out of situations that seemed hopeless, totally changed my defeated mindset, or redeemed dead parts of my heart, I am hopeful that those stories will encourage my listeners and help them believe Him in their own lives.