A Visit From Charles

This weekend we got to enjoy a visit from Tom Parr and Charles Golla, who along with his wife Rohinee, are touring the United States recruiting mission team members for future trips to India. I have great admiration for Charles. He has a contagious enthusiasm for sharing the gospel with unreached people and he is a great student of scripture. His wife is a lovely lady and assists Charles in training missionaries, this in addition to her full-time job as an English teacher for eleventh and twelfth grade Indians.

They arrived just after New Hope's Saturday night service started and, after the sermon, Tom and Charles gave a short presentation on what took place during my visit and what will be happening during the upcoming mission to Assam in June. It was then off to Larry's for a killer dinner of halibut and salmon that Larry brings back from his fishing trip in Alaska every year. Sunday morning Tom and Charles again gave another presentation and then we had lunch with a couple of friends considering the June trip. From here Tom and the Golla's go to North Platte Berean for a mission team focus dinner. Golla's will be in the States for just another week and then head back to India.

A brief re-cap of what happened during my last trip are as follows:

• American team members: 8
• Number of gospel presentations: 773
• Number of professions of faith:123
• Number of house churches planted: 6 (just got word of 6 more so a total of 12!!)
• Number of new leaders trained: 88

The trip this June will include the roll-out of the Audio-bibles that New Hope funded. These Audio-bibles will be pre-loaded with bible stories in the Assames language. The translation of these stories is complete and they are now in post-production to put the final touches on the audio files. Along with this roll-out, team members will have a chance to encourage the house churches started since my visit in January and, of course, be able to share the gospel with non-believers.

The best thing to do is let Charles tell you all about it. I'm going to apologize for the quality of the audio on this video. You can hear and understand him, but I'm the soundguy that's always stuck at the back of the church so that's where my camera was........and it's a 12 year old camera.

The June trip is incredibly important and we need team members badly. I'm asking you to pray about whether you should be a part of this trip. For more information about the trip you can go here: http://www.e3partners.org/tripcalendarbycountry

 

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Brainlag

It's been a bit of a struggle this week. After flight delays in Minneapolis, I finally pulled into my driveway at about 2:15am on Monday morning. I was tired, having only caught maybe 5 hours sleep on airplanes in the previous 48 hours. After heartfelt greetings from Shannon (my long-suffering wife) and Dottie (my four-legged friend) I hit the sack. Unfortunately, I was only able to sleep about 3 hours. The time change of 12.5 hours is just a little too large to recuperate from immediately.

Monday morning I went into my shop and tried to put out a few fires and return a few calls. The crew did a good job while I was away and they even surprised me by giving the service counter area of the shop a much needed paint job. But, by about 11:00 I was wiped. I went home and took a long, hard nap. That night I took a sleeping aid and slept a solid eight hours.

Tuesday morning I had a date with Pastor Eric and we visited about the mission trip and strategies for the future. I serve on the missions committee at New Hope so some of the discussion concerned India, some concerned Poland (our other mission focus area), and some just concerned missions in general. I'll add that although I really like the Indian breakfast of steamed vegetables, dahl, curds, and naan, the bacon (BACON!!!!) and french toast at the sale barn was awfully danged good. Tuesday night I also got another, nice long night of sleep.

Wednesday night wasn't as cooperative. I started to feel a bit of a sore throat coming on at the beginning of the evening (thank you, airplane rides) and although I fell asleep a little after 9:00, it wasn't to last. I was up at 1:45am and unable to get back to sleep. Insomnia is one of those things I struggle with anyway, but insomnia coupled with jetlag and a sore throat just simply isn't any fun.

I spent this morning fighting with my iPad and computer to try and get a short movie I made for my church presentation off of the iPad and into a format that is playable on a the churches PC. After two hours and right at the point that I was beginning to curse Steve Jobs for ever having created the handy little tablet and that confusing torture device that goes by the name of iTunes, I got it figured out. I had to ask for Mr.Jobs' posthumous forgiveness as the solution was all right there, only partly hidden in a sub-menu of a sub-menu deep in the recesses of the iPad's online alleged "help" manual.

Anyway, not much that is really mission related in this post. I just thought I'd give a little recap of some of the things that have been adjustments to getting back to the real world. Here's the little slideshow that I struggled with this morning and will be playing in the background while I tell my congregation a bit about the trip.

 

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