Howdy and welcome to the Breakaway podcast. Thanks for listening.

Breakaway is a Bible study recorded on the campus of Texas A&M.

For more information, visit Breakaway Ministries.org.

We hope you enjoy the message.

Well, howdy, this is Timothy Ateek, executive director of breakaway ministries,

and I am sitting today in the breakaway offices, and we want to do a special podcast today to talk about our 2018 Shalom project. And we wanted to do something specifically for our online listeners.

We love the fact that we have people listening in from over 80 different countries at different

points during the semester,

and thousands of you are following along with us,

even though you might not be in Reed Arena on a Tuesday night.

So let me just say thank you so much for being a part of what God is doing all throughout the year.

But what we want to do is we want to take some time to invite you in

to something that has been so special to breakway for 11 years now. And it's the Shalom

project. So in case you're not familiar, the word Shalom, it's the Hebrew word for peace.

But that word peace really doesn't do it justice. The word shalom, it doesn't just

refer to the absence of conflict. It refers to really the presence of flourishing. It refers to

wholeness or completeness or safety soundness. And so we love the idea of leaning in to the, really, the darkest and most broken places of

society in being agents of Shalom in our world.

And so this year we are zeroing in on specifically on

orphan care in the area of adoption. And so today I have the privilege of sitting with our

associate director of strategic partnerships, Rachel Thuete. And so Rachel just tell us a little bit about how we got our Shalom

project for this year. Yeah. So this year, as we were considering different causes as a staff,

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