Posted on October 23, 2020 Posted By: Clint Boyd
Categories: Updates
When some of us gathered at the Hilton hotel back in March for the gala, we never could have imagined how fortunate we were just to be together in-person, unmasked. Despite the challenges we have all faced this year, God has still been at work. There is nothing in this world that could change the power of God’s Holy Spirit moving in and through people all across the globe, including right here at the University of Houston. Let me tell you some stories about what that has looked like this semester.
The first two weeks of school every fall, we pack in as many events as possible in order to meet new students. This year, there was a mix of in-person and online events, as we sought to match the school’s enrollment figures (84% online). One of the in-person events was to be a service trip to Impact–at 7:00 a.m. on a Tuesday morning. You might be thinking: what kind of college student wakes up before 7:00 a.m. the first week of school to go serve with complete strangers? Well, Louis, a freshman from Conroe, does! He lives on campus and is absolutely on fire for the Lord; His faith shows through his gentle spirit and kingdom service.
What other kind of young person would wake up so early to go serve? Maria, a recent UH alumnus, would. We met when she was a student in a Religious Studies course of which I was a teaching assistant. Maria now works in a lab at Baylor and is applying for medical school; she brought two of her co-workers to help serve too, one of whom has not been to church in a while (that is changing!), and the other of whom is still “seeking.” Maria wanted to show her friends Christian faith in action. This is how the Gospel is spreading through our efforts on the UH campus and beyond.
Our Bible studies currently are online, and we have about nine students involved, several of whom are new friends to us. Many more are watching us online (via our Instagram stories), which is exactly how we met our new students this year. One new friend of ours, Busola, is a UH student who also goes to Rice for the Navy R.O.T.C. program. This semester, Busola decided to put on the Lord in baptism! As we were reading through Matthew and came to the part where Jesus describes why He should be baptized by John, the word “now” seemed to jump off the page for Busola. “Why haven’t I been baptized?” she said. Baptism was not even the focus of our study that night at all, yet God, by His Spirit, was clearly drawing Busola closer.
Each time someone at The Point makes a faith decision, I am humbled to realize it had little to do with me. God always seems to make that clear. I am grateful for that repeated lesson because it proves to me time and time again that God is always at work and that we are simply His vessels. We are laborers in His field: “So neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God, who gives growth.” (1 Cor. 3:7)
There are many other stories I wish I had space to tell from this semester. The lesson, though, is this: God is always at work, and always on-time. If we will look upward to Him and reach outward to one another, we may just find our faith greatly strengthened–right when we need it the most.
