Thank God for Spring Semesters! I mean that in every sense. God has wowed us with the start of the semester with some fresh faces and a good attendance at our first two Thursday night Bible Studies. Spring semester is already a far cry from this past fall, which started out at a snail’s pace. In September, we generally saw little interest from students in getting back to the swing of things with their classes and with En Vivo activities. This spring is a complete change! We’ve had two great Thursday nights to start out the semester. The first night, the 14th of February, Sophie gave a great talk using Song of Solomon, and our all-student band rocked the house.

This past Thursday, I did my best to follow on my incredibly beautiful, funny, and intelligent wife’s heels with my own talk about love based on 1 Corinthians 13. Chris Beirne and company raised the roof with music, pumping up the volume to new levels, and Pam Torres gave us some much needed bass by offering her services on the drums.

We also kicked off the Proyecto Portugal, En Vivo’s first ever student mission trip to Portugal to build a home with Habitat for Humanity. For this, we unveiled our “Missions Thermometer”, promising to do crazy things if students help us raise the money needed for the trip.

And this past Friday night the ladies kicked off the first women’s ministry event of the semester with a Progressive Dinner. Twenty-five girls went around town to four different apartments, eating “tapas”, or small finger foods, prepared by various staff and students. It was a good night for community building and long conversations. We guys, while not invited, decided to hang out at En Vivo and have a ping-pong and guitar-hero party of our own.

~Jesse Bentley, 02.26.08