By Dakota Jackson, Salt Company Resident
April was a crazy, but an incredibly joy-filled month in the life of Salt DSM. April started off with a bang as Easter was the first day of the month. During the Easter service every year at Cottage Grove we scheduled baptisms that we perform in front of the whole congregation as people publicly declare their new life in Jesus Christ. This was such an incredible time for the whole church, and Salt Company as well. We got to see 6 Salt DSM students follow the Lord in obedience by getting baptized on Easter Sunday. There were so many incredible stories out of this but I will take a min to tell about one.
Brad is a graduate student here at Drake University and joined Salt DSM at semester. He has been such a joy all semester long as he has been so faithful in attending both Salt on Thursday nights and his connection group. Brad came up to one of our staff members in between first and second service during Easter and asked if they would baptize him! When asked why he wanted to be baptized Brad said that God had completely changed his life in the last year and he wanted to publicly declare his devotion to following Jesus. What the Lord has done, and is doing in Brad’s life is incredible and we can’t help but pause and praise our savior for his life-changing work!
During March we have new leader applications open for the whole month and that means that during April we sit down with each of these applicants to walk them through what it might look like for them to be on leadership. In this process we have one question that really drives our leadership process, “would being on leadership help this person love Jesus more?” With this question in mind, we had a week full of interviews. Many of these were so encouraging. We can’t believe all the work that God is doing in the lives of the students that he has entrusted us with. We are so overjoyed to be able to witness the incredible power of the Lord.
Now that application and interview season is done we could not be more excited looking forward to the leadership team that he has given to us for next year. We are having 14 students join our leadership team this upcoming year, 10 of which are Drake University students! This has been a constant prayer for us that God would provide student leaders for us on Drake’s campus and he has certainly answered this prayer. To put this in perspective this year we had 2 Drake student leaders, and next year we will have 12! God is on the move in the Des Moines area and on these campuses and we are so excited that he is allowing us to be a part of that work.
