Author Archive for: James

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.

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.