12/11/06 UPDATE

LOTTIE GETS HER'S TOO!

Well, this is an update to last week's praise. We received another check for $150 - so now the kids get their Christmas and Lottie gets her money too. I hope the last post wasn't misconstued as a plea for more money - that wasn't the intent. It was just significant to me that God provided the boys exactly what they would have had. Anyway, I won't belabor the point, but THANKS!

This last week involved a whole lot of office work for me. I keep getting pushed to plan, plan, plan - which I hate to do. I've been going through a church planting manual and it contained a helpful tidbit for me in this regard. They encouraged an extremely detailed plan for 3 years into the future. That seemed excessive to me, but the rationale made sense. Once you go public with the church, you will be slammed trying to stay on top of things. There will be no time for planning at that point. So, one prayer request is that God will help me focus my thoughts, hear His desires for His church, and be able to articulate all of these things. Oh yeah, and pray that I won't get too frustrated with the process.

My plan is to take the cold months to plan and continue networking. In the spring, we will really start to ramp things up and then kick them into high gear in the summer.

One goal I've got for now is to develop community with those who have expressed an interest in helping. To that end, we had Jeff, Kelly, and Jocelyn over for dinner Saturday night. it was fun. We haven't really been doing much entertaining due to our present living arrangements so it was fun to do it again. It felt like getting ready for small group. it was nice to have a couple over as "friends." Most of our encounters have been more business related. We find ourselves in the situation of trying to break into other people's social networks and such and this is tough. Think about it - you've got your set of friends, so when you have time to do something, you usually call those people. you don't really think, or work to, include others who may not be "in" yet. It's hard to stress too much the importance of intentionally developing friendships with people for the sake of sharing your hope in Christ. I personally believe that building relational bridges with lost people is the most important and effective thing you can do as an ambassador for Christ. Ok, enough preaching.

One last request. We are having the first real struggle since we got up here. In the big picture, it's not that big of a deal, but it does bother both of us. We're entering the Christmas season and don't have any family around. Normally, that wouldn't be that big of a deal because their are friends, church family, etc. to fill in the place. But, we don't really have any of those three options at the moment, so we do feel a bit lonely. Nobody's ready to jump off a building or anything, but we would appreciate your prayers.