Entries by James

MISSION: Uganda Blog Update 02-14-2007

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Greetings from St. Louis! I made it back alive to St. Louis from Great Falls, MT. On the day I was supposed to leave (Tuesday), a winter storm moved into the Midwest and began dumping frozen sunshine all over my landing strip. As we're sitting on the tarmac in Salt Lake City, the pilot informs us that there's a 50/50 chance we might have to divert to Kansas City if the visibility doesn't improve en route.  Needless to say, I was on the phone getting some prayer going! God cleared the weather up, however, and I was able to land in St. Louis on time. The only hitch was the backed up line of planes already at the gates, so even though we landed on time, we sat on the runway for another hour waiting for gate access. At any rate, I'm home again, and it's very good to be with my family once more.

MISSION: Uganda Blog Update 02-05-2007

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Greetings, once again! I'm up in Great Falls, MT at the moment. I flew up here last Wednesday for some meetings I had scheduled up this way. Anna and the kids stayed at home and got some much needed rest. Driving up here would have been time, and cost, prohibitive, so flying up for the meetings alone was definitely the way to go. It turned out to be a good decision, because they got sick (not stomach flu) after I left, and it's always easier to recover from sickness in your own home.

My first meeting was in Fairview Baptist Church with Pastor Richard Dion. Dr. Pat Creed, the Caribbean Director for BIMI, was the main speaker. It was a tremendous conference. The messages were encouraging to me, and were beneficial to everyone. Their goal for missions giving this year was $40,000, which they exceeded with $53,000 and some change. This was in spite of losing several giving families in the prior year. Praise the LORD! I know they're excited about what God is going to do in the coming year.

MISSION: Uganda Blog Update 01-28-2007

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Greetings from the East! We've completed a brief tour of the East Coast, and will be heading back to St. Louis on Monday. Last Sunday, we were in Faith Baptist Church in Berlin, MD (Pastor John Abent), and 1st Baptist Church of Seaford, DE (Pastor Michael Hopkins), respectively. The Abents spoiled us with this fabulous room in the big resort Holiday Inn right on the beach in Ocean View, MD. We had an oceanfront room on the eighth floor, with a glorious view of the ocean. Since we had to be up for church bright and early on Sunday anyway, we got to open our curtains and watch the sun rise over the ocean. It was breathtakingly beautiful. Cold, and windy, but beautiful. That morning was a technical morass of unexpected problems. We got ready to get the DVD for Pastor Abent so he could get it to his a/v man and couldn't' find it. So, I went out to the car to burn another one. As I began to do so, the DVD-RW tray almost falls out in my hands. My drive is toast. I can't burn anything to any disc. So, thinking quick, I ran the laptop inside, and we got it hooked up to their system so we could show the video presentation off the laptop. Then, that night, the DVD player they had in Seaford didn't like our disc, and proceeded to insert bad static into the audio. You could still mostly understand, though, and the church was very understanding. The meetings went very well, and God blessed.

MISSION: Uganda Blog Update 01-18-2007

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Greetings! Much has happened since our last email. I had sent out a prayer bulletin last week to let you know about the break-in. Well, when we got home, we discovered that it wasn't nearly as bad as it sounded over the phone. The items they took were small and, well, pointless. Like, for example, they took our change jar, which contained ALL OUR PENNIES! Five dollars in change, gone, just like that!! It's a moral outrage! Yet, the innocuous, cowboy boot piggy bank next to it was stuffed full of quarters, and the braniacs didn't think it was worth having. Dunce They rifled through our drawers, didn't find anything worth snatching at the moment, and, it would seem, got spooked and took off before they could take anything really valuable. The only really upsetting, and rather odd, thing they did was to take an album full of our wedding pictures, and strew them about in the back yard before they hopped the fence and left (The photos were rescued before weather could harm them). Our pastor and family went above and beyond the call of duty. They called the cops, hung around until they had the evidence they needed, replaced our locks front and back, and nailed plywood over the glass on the back door. Anna and I have been fingerprinted now, and the cops are working on nailing the ne'er-do-wells responsible.

Bandits!

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Hello everyone! Things are going well in South Carolina at the moment. However, and the reason for the email update, is that things at home in St. Louis are not. We just found out that our house was broken into sometime in the last 48 hours. At the moment, and we won't know for sure until we get home, it does not appear that they got anything. Other than rifling through our belongings in the bedroom, it does not appear that they took anything. Praise the LORD! The police are taking care of it in our absence (my wife's parents are there to keep an eye on things). Pray that they catch whoever did it before they hit anybody else's house in the neighborhood. Anna's pretty upset about it, understandably, so pray for her peace of mind. One need we do have that you can pray about, which this incident underscores, is a need for new doors. The front and back doors are in terrible shape, and are original to the house. We've been needing to replace them, and the storm doors, for some time, but just haven't had the money to do so. Please pray that God will provide. We have to be gone a lot during the year, and need to know that our house is secure in our absence. Unfortunately, I'm afraid our doors don't provide much impediment to thieves at the moment. It's a legitimate need, and something will have to be done about it soon. The irony is, before we left on this trip, I was having a guy from our church, a contractor, take measurements so I could try to get a feel for what would be needed and how much it would be cost to replace these doors. Please pray about it. We have to do what we're doing if we're ever going to raise our support and get to the field. It would be nice, however, if in our frequent absences, people were not breaking in to our house and making messes for us to clean when we get home.