I want to thank everyone for their gifts of love & support & encouragement! It’s been a rough 2013 – which I’m still claiming for Jesus!

The church has been rocking it out! We have been using a small generator and have a band playing every Sunday with all our instruments! The pews are full. The folks are dancing for Jesus!

While I have had some recent complications with my surgery, I am hoping to be cleared to fly back to Haiti on Saturday.  I am already packed and ready to go. (I think I’m always packed and ready to go.)

If you will bear with me, I do want to update you on our housing needs. Right now, I kind of feel like I’m in that scene from Forest Gump—I just want to be a bird and fly far, far away.  NWHCM has informed us that we will not be able to rent our complex again this May. There simply aren’t enough funds especially with the rise in price by the housing owner.

If we are unable to raise our housing fund needs, we will just have to make the best of the cards we have. This means we will have to move our family along with Miss Beth into the school. It’s hard to imagine living there with 8 kids and sharing the bathrooms/showers with the orphans a block away. It’s one thing to do it for a week – it’s another thing to call it home!

In order to build our home, Miss Beth’s apartment, and our little school we need $30,000. Right now we have $8,000 pledged. As you can imagine, there is much worry. However, I know my God. I know His people. I know He will answer my prayers. I bring this before you that you would draw a circle around our housing need and pray.

As I have been reading Draw the Circle, I do realize that I am being asked by God to do more than pray for deliverance but to pray for endurance. One of the readings has really convicted me to act as if God will indeed bring our home into existence. Seriously after reading this, I’m wondering if I should just start picking out the paint! The reading challenges Christians to be as the Israelites crossing the Jordan… to step into the water before He makes a way. We are challenged as Noah to keep hammering at that ark even though we don’t see a cloud in the sky and to keep marching around Jericho though there is no sign of walls crumbling.

With this new found strength, I am pressing myself to not be a bird and fly far far away but to become a duck and step right into the water with confidence that God will make a way for my family to have a home.

On behalf of my family, I ask for your continued prayers. I ask for your financial help. I ask for you to part the deep water I am treading in.   I put my fleece before you and ask you to help build our home at the Mole. This will be the second home God has allowed us to build through the support of friends and family. We took great pride in having our home in St. Louis. It was a respite for us as well as a place of comfort for weary travelers.  Our goal is that our new home at the Mole will function much the same way—our respite, our comfort, our soul-filling, life renewing –  home.

Quack! Quack!