Ask and you shall receive!

I have been overwhelmed (in a good way) lately with opportunities to give to those in need. Recently I have been asking God for ways to be a help to those in need. Boy did He ever answer! Here are a few of the opportunities we have been presented with in the past few weeks:

Church of God Missionary projects
Campus Crudsade for Christ
One of our church families
Long time friend going in to missions

A missionary couple our church supports talked with us last week about what they are doing in the Ivory Coast. One of the things is starting a radio ministry in French. My mother-in-law shared some of her favorite charities with me including an orphanage in India and helping children in Ecuador with schooling. A great friend of mine is on staff with Campus Crusade for Christ, she is the reason that I aske Jesus in to my life in the first place. She sends me a monthly newsletter to keep me up on all her travels and training. Being on their mailing list, I received a letter from their headquarters concerning 41 of their staff memebers who were imprisoned last year in a Christian hostal country. Many of these folks have young children left with out parents! All for the sake of spreading the gospel! They need prayer and financial help! It also came to us that a family in our church has needed some help. It has been a blast working on blessing their socks off! And most recently, the other day I got a phone call from one of my friends that I hadn't talked to in a LONG time. She and her husband are going in to full missions and are taking classes in Texas to be Bible translators! Wow! God is moving and working! The best part is that He gives us a part to play. It is truly better to give than to receive, if you don't believe me, just try it once!I've included these links to my worthy causes in the right hand column. I've posted an excerpt from one of the Campus Crusade newsletters below. The one that I referred to above was removed from their log due to the sensitive nature of it's content.

""Dear partner in reaching the world for Christ,

I originally wrote to you about this particularly urgent situation several months ago-sharing how, despite the strong possibility of persecution, interrogations, and even worse, 67 men and women from extremely sensitive nations were ready to join staff with Campus Crusade for Christ.

Thanks to the generosity of people like you, those men and women are even now in training to become full-time staff members! I wanted to pass along this "from the trenches" report as it shows how your prayers and investment are already bearing fruit. This comes from the genocide-torn nation of Sudan:

"The new staff's lives are in danger physically. Sudan is a cruel, war-torn country. Some of the new staff recruits are going into the toughest parts of Sudan. Several are going into the Darfur region, which is in the news so much for genocide ... They will start five to eight new churches in their first year as new staff in some of the hardest, toughest parts of Sudan ... There is war, guns, fighting. The health care in this area is very difficult, so some new staff get very sick. There is not very much clean water, no medicine, they minister to many people who are displaced by the war.

"[The new staff work in] areas controlled by guerrilla leaders [and others strongly opposed to Christianity]. Some new staff will probably suffer from being persecuted, beaten, and scorpion bites ... They will average exposing six to eight people to Christ each day through personal evangelism. From the people who accept Christ with them, they will start small group Bible studies and eventually challenge some of those believers to go through [further] training ... One new staff and their disciples will train over 14,000 people."

War, guns, beatings, scorpion bites, little clean water ... Hard to imagine, isn't it? But this is what these men and women are willing to endure in order to proclaim Christ to hurting people. Praise God with me for their perseverance and bravery!""

All I can say is, WOW! These are brave people! They surely are storing up their treasures in Heaven!
xoxoxo, Stefani