Christmas Food Court Flash Mob, Hallelujah Chorus - Must See!

This actually made me cry at the end! Hallelujah.

Last Day on Campus in 2010

Students are finishing finals * some of our co-workers have left Milwaukee to get to their families before the snow hits * Ben and I drove in from Downers Grove, IL this morning after visiting my family for the weekend. These are signs of the end of the fall semester, and yet we have made appointments with students on campus today. I'm not going to lie-I was a little unmotivated to drive to the East side today for one appointment, knowing it is supposed to snow around 3pm and I would have to drive home in it. This is the week I get to work from home and don't have to leave my apartment all day for meetings or Bible studies. I can send emails and plan for next semester in my pajamas, while listening to music. Ahhh...

Ben also made an appointment to meet for the first time a guy who had come to our October outreach. It can seem impossible to follow up with students who attend these, especially months later, but even during finals week, this guy responded to Ben's last attempt to get together. I'm at a nearby coffee shop waiting for the girl I am meeting to finish her last final, when Ben excitedly calls to tell me that this guy he met with put his faith in Christ! Our outreach had given him the opportunity to reach out to someone who follows Christ and ask the questions he needed to ask to help bring him to the point of making this decision. I am so glad this is how Ben spent his last hour on campus!!

Though it seemed like coming to campus today was inconvenient and not how we "should" be using our time with just a few planning days left, clearly God had something better that we didn't know about. I can't wait for my appointment in one hour!

Proverbs 19:21 "Many are the plans in a man's heart, but it is the LORD's purpose that prevails."


Us with Jim Monroe, the creative mind behind the MAZE Outreach we had in October. To learn more visit www.whatisthemaze.com.

Men's Conference

A couple of months ago, I (Ben) was humbled when I was asked to emcee the 2010 Upper Midwest Regional Men's Conference for Campus Crusade for Christ...long title I know. The conference happens once every two years, and the focus is on calling men to step out in faith and think about how Jesus can be Lord of their lives now, as well as after college as they consider where He may be leading them.

The only other time I had ever emceed was my junior year at the University of Iowa at the weekly CRU meetings. It was really encouraging hearing Troy Shirley, the conference director, tell me that he asked a number of men who they thought should be emceeing, and my name came up again and again. It was a lot of fun just being myself up there, helping cast vision to men to be "dangerous" for Jesus.

The reality is that a lot of men talk about serving Jesus with their lives. A lot of guys sing songs about investing their lives for God's Kingdom. Tons of guys think about going and bringing the gospel to the world....but the reality is, very few actually "man up" and go. I loved being able to talk about this, as well as other things the speakers touched on.

I would say the highlight of the conference for me was this: Jesse Guerrero, a freshman at UW Parkside, put his faith in Christ earlier this year, and he decided to come! It was awesome seeing Him really think for the first time about how he could live his life sold out for Jesus, and even wrestling with what that really meant. One of the days at the conference (it went Friday to Sunday), all of the guys went out and shared the gospel with neighborhoods in Minneapolis of churches that we had connections with. I was paired up with Jesse, and it was so amazing and humbling to think about the fact that Jesse was already multiplying his life and sharing his new-found faith in Jesus.

I hope this conference was more than just an experience for the 200 men that attended, but that it would part of what God is doing to spur them on to use their lives to invest in the Great Comission.

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: